by John Popper
Jono taught me how to read a crowd. You can’t ask everybody how they’re doing—there’s that great scene in Buckaroo Banzai when he says, “Wait a minute, somebody’s not having a good time.” It would be great if I could stop and focus in on everybody’s problems, but over time you get good at reading the rumble of the room. We started as a family and we remained a family, and that was also an advantage—we truly could rely on each other in way that was instinctual. When you join a band with other people, they have to think about their interests and you have to think about yours, but we were literally living in the same house. That was a huge advantage when it came to decision making because our interests were aligned.
The first apartment we moved into together as a band was 354 Bergen Street in Brooklyn. We lived there from the early summer of 1988 through 1989. It still says Blues Traveler on the sidewalk where Chan and Brendan wrote it in the cement. We were on the top floor and had a beautiful view—we could see the Twin Towers. We were just a train ride away from lower Manhattan, and the neighborhood wasn’t as dire as our next apartment, where people were smoking crack in the hallways and vestibule. This was an alcohol neighborhood turning into a heroin neighborhood, and the good thing about alcoholics and heroin addicts is that they’re slower and in many ways harmless, whereas the crack guys hit you and run before you even see them.
In our crack neighborhood we would pack our van trailer after doing a gig, and if we didn’t park it in some place that was absolutely secure, people would come and unscrew all the sheet metal from the trailer. Then we’d come outside and find some wheels and screws on the ground. You know it’s a crazy neighborhood when they’re stealing the steel from your trailer.
The other problem with living in a crack neighborhood was that the guys had to try the crack because they’d done all the drugs in Princeton. Crack had been demonized in our suburban mindset, but Chan and Bob seemed pretty fearless about jumping in and trying it. There was a brief point when I went right there with them.
One of the four times I smoked crack led to an incident in which I almost got razored in a crack house in Brooklyn. Crack seems like a social drug, but everyone is actually sitting there silently waiting for their turn to smoke, listening to the clicking sound of the gas stove kicking over because you need that flame to heat up the stem of the crack.
When you smoke crack it feels good, but just as cocaine seduces you into thinking that everything is a brilliant idea, crack makes you think you’re down for anything. I was leaving after our big crack session and wanted to grab a bag of weed for the next day. So I went down to Myrtle Avenue at two in the morning, which, when you’re on crack, seems like standard routine.
Now the thing we all knew about Myrtle Avenue is that if you gave somebody your five bucks, they’d say, “Wait here,” and then you’d never see them again. So up comes this guy who looks like Mike Tyson and asks me what I want. I explain that I want a nickel bag and he says, “Give me the money. I’ll be right back.” I tell him, “I can’t leave the money with you. I’ll go with you.” That’s my solution: I’ll follow him.
So he takes me into this very scary project, which starts looking worse and worse, but I’m not deviating from my plan. When you’re on crack, that’s all you have to worry about: don’t deviate from your plan. We go up to the second floor and he says, “Okay, now you’ve got to give me the money and I’ll get you the weed.” My response is, “No, I won’t part with the money.”
This is how I learned a very valuable lesson. When you’re in a rundown project trying to score some weed from a Mike Tyson guy while you’re on crack, you shouldn’t say the word no. When I did, his face changed from a Mike Tyson face into an angry Mike Tyson face, and he pulled out a six-inch razor blade. Suddenly I’m very aware that the mood has changed and that this is not a cooperative market experience.
He said, “I think you’re going to give me your five dollars—what do you think?” I said, “I think here’s my five dollars.” But that didn’t stop the aggression, because when you’re turned into the victim, you’re encouraging a robbery, so he started patting me down. I remember weakly saying, “What are you doing? Stop it.”
This whole time I was carrying on my shoulder a lunchbox tied together with a bandana, which held my harmonicas and my Shure 58 microphone. When he said, “What’s that?” it snapped me out of my victim mentality. It was clear to me he wanted my five bucks more than I could ever want my five bucks, but it was also clear that I wanted my lunchbox full of my harps more than he could ever want it. That’s when I turned on him—“You’re not going to get it, so walk!”
That actually stopped him, which left me a little stunned, but he said, “You better not be downstairs.” Then he left and I thought, “I’m on the second floor, how can I not go downstairs to leave?” This had me perplexed. I was afraid to leave, but eventually I sucked it up and decided he meant, “Don’t be downstairs hanging around.” When I finally left I could hear him in the background with his friends saying, “Hey man, I got your weed,” and they were all laughing. So I walked out of there with my harmonicas and my life, realizing that crack is a little whack.
I also remember various episodes during this time when people would disappear into the Brooklyn night and then come in at four in the morning kicking me awake for eight dollars. That period lasted for about half a year, from 1988 to 1989.
This was the era that established me as the teetotaler of the band, at least comparatively. Brendan drank a lot with the guys, but he didn’t party the way they did. But I became the sheriff of drug consumption. If something was done in front of me, I would throw a huge tantrum. That being said, I certainly partied with the guys at certain points, just to such a lesser degree that it didn’t really seem to count. However, I was eating constantly, and that really became my drug of choice. Instead of going out, my big party was staying in with food and television.
Still, the drugs were a fun part of that time, and I heartily recommend them except for all the damage they do.
That second Blues Traveler apartment was at 282 Washington Avenue near Bed-Stuy. It was a former convent with beautiful inlaid wood. Brendan called it a place we could grow into, although shortly after we moved in, he moved to Park Slope with his girlfriend, so this place to grow in was him depositing us into a nice arrangement. But by then we were touring, so we’d be there less and less often.
This was where Dave Precheur, our tour manager, lived with us. Once a week we received a per diem. He would place a twenty-dollar bill in each of our folders in his filing cabinet. His room was his office, so we’d all barge in there. It was a fucked-up Partridge Family.
Cockroaches chased us out of our first place. It was as if one day the roaches came to us and said, “Look, you guys have been really nice, but you’ve got to find somewhere else to live.” I always carried an air pistol when I went to the bathroom because there were huge roaches everywhere. I remember naming one roach in the bathroom Blue Thunder because he looked like the helicopter in that film and was so magnificent. He was too tough for the air pistol, but finally we got him. New York back then was just a thin layer of crust on top of a seething civilization of roaches.
It didn’t help matters that nobody ever threw anything away. Chris Barron moved in with us and said he used to live off the Cheez Doodles he found lying around my room. So along with the cockroaches, we eventually got mice.
One time I was on my way out to a gig and was walking through the kitchen when I heard some scratching. It was a mouse, stuck in the lone garbage can that did not have trash in it—that garbage can was probably the only place in the whole apartment that wasn’t covered with trash. The mouse was climbing on the garage around it and fell into an empty garbage can. Now I had to dispatch this mouse, so I loaded my air pistol with actual pellets, not just air for dispatching roaches when I was crapping. I calmly shot the mouse, who ran around in circles and then died. I started to walk away when I again heard scratching and thought, “
Oh my God, it’s not dead.” I came back, and there was another mouse over the dead mouse’s body. Clearly it was his girlfriend.
So I shot the second mouse and winged it, but my air pistol was now out of CO2, so I had to go find another cartridge while this thing was screeching eep eep eeep and running around in circles.
I loaded up and killed that mouse. By now I was getting late for a gig, but I heard more scratching, so I went back and there were two more mice. Apparently it was a double-date.
What Chan likes to point out is: “Yeah, it’s great, you killed them, but I had to carry them out to the trash.” Well, as far as I’m concerned, I’d done my part.
From Bergen Street we went to Washington Street, and from there we’d eventually each find our own places. By the mid-nineties Bobby was in Manhattan, where he lived on the same penthouse floor as Tom Cruise on Astor Place. Bobby thought he had tried to be nice but Tom Cruise had shunned him: Oooh, get away from me, you creepy-looking hippie. So Bobby liked to fuck with him whenever he could—“Oooh, you’re Tom Cruise, Mr. Days of Thunder.” They were separated by a wall, and before we would go on tour for three months, Bobby would do things like throw his trash over the other side. Then he’d say, “Wait a minute,” and would turn the volume up to ten on his stereo and direct it at Tom Cruise’s place. So he terrorized Tom Cruise for while, but I never got in on that.
Back when we were still living together we maintained a communal approach to our funds. Through the New School I’d already met enough people so I could get a job playing a harmonica on commercial jingles. I think my first was a Volvo commercial where I did half a bar of down-home harmonica. What they learned was that I couldn’t read music but that I had a good ear and could figure it out. So they learned to point at me, I’d play half a second of a harmonica fill, and then I’d get five hundred bucks. The money would go into a shoebox that the band would save for recording—unless somebody got wasted and spent it on drugs or booze, and then I got some serious moral vindication, at least.
At that time we were really communist about everything because if one of us couldn’t afford the rent, there was no band. So all of our money went into a pot, and then we would get what we needed out of it because generally we were all earning the same. The guys would do that too—if they would do a gig moving furniture or something, the money would go to that.
Having said that, I am prepared to admit that there was one night at Nightingale’s, back when harmonicas cost ten or twenty bucks, when this old guy came up to me and said, “I’ll give you fifty bucks for one of those.” I looked around, made sure my band guys weren’t looking, and put that cash right into my back pocket.
The decision to pool our funds also applied to our publishing money, which we decided to split. I suppose I was the major decision maker there because I was writing a lot of the material, but Chan wrote as well. Bobby and Brendan also wrote a little bit. To be fair, the whole band wrote parts of many more songs than what appeared on the writing credits.
Still, at some point it became a factory in which I was the guy who would write stuff and then we all would split the money. That started to annoy me, but back then we were an impoverished family. Brendan wouldn’t have been able to eat, and we wouldn’t otherwise have had a band in which I could experiment. I wasn’t a professional writer where I could say, “Okay, I’ve got your stuff.” It would be this long, agonizing process, and they would put up with me. Eventually we sold the publishing, and now we don’t share because I’m only doing that once.
I did it with these guys then because this was our big dream company and we were living together, so it seemed like a tribal-family thing. I wanted it to stop when we had kids, but after Bobby died and amidst all of the hullabaloo, it seemed simpler to keep sharing the publishing. But by 2003 we started changing it. I’d always wanted people to know who wrote which song but I also think maybe it’s good to be paid that way.
We ended running up a huge debt and had an issue with an accountant, who unbeknownst to us, had run up a huge debt. In order to pay the debt, selling the publishing worked really nicely. As it turned out, Chan and I, who wrote a lot of the material, wound up running up the biggest debt, so it kind of evened out. Nothing really evens things out like going into debt together.
About ten years ago I ran into Chico Hamilton, who was one of my teachers at the New School, and he said, “How’s that communal thing going where you split all the money?” He then explained, “When there’s a communal system, one guy does all the work.”
I asked him, “Where the fuck was that advice ten years ago when I could have used it?”
8
SWEATGLANDS
It was an exciting, Wild West kind of time.
It was also a pretty smelly time—we didn’t shower a lot.
We were a cool underground thing for a while. Looking back, it didn’t take long for that next step, but I remember thinking, God, when is it going to happen?
One thing that New York really showed us in the late eighties is you have to have a mission when you’re there. You have to be working for something. It’s very hard to live in New York and just kick it, sort of relax, and do nothing—that takes a special breed called an actual New Yorker. Just about everybody else who comes to New York is there because that’s the place where you can launch your band or your fashion line or your magazine, and once you’ve done that, you have to leave because there’s a whole line of hungry people behind you.
I remember when I first came to New York, I went to Washington Square Park and was convinced that somehow Bob Dylan would be there because that’s what he likes to do—just go play for people because that’s what he did once a thousand years ago and that’s his natural state, right? And then I realized that, no, people have lives and the reason you play in a park is that nobody else will hear you—you don’t have a venue to play in.
Early on, I lived in my head quite a bit.
When I was going to the New School and discovering New York City, Amadeus had just come out, and I felt like a young Mozart in Vienna. When I was wearing a hat and learning about the dark art of harmonies from some great beboppers, I felt like a young sorcerer’s apprentice learning a form of alchemy. When we’d be playing in Nightingale’s to six people, I’d be a young Charlie Parker playing to nobody in Harlem. A little while later, when we were in our first van, it was like we were in a B-17 on a bomber run or—I was big on my history—a band of barbarians like the Huns.
I was also trying to be Batman with my cool harmonica belt. I built my first version in 1989, and then when I came home to Princeton, which shuts down at night, I would walk the streets alone with my belt. I guess in my mind I was looking for jam sessions in case there would be someone out there with a guitar. I don’t quite know what I was thinking.
Originally I would carry my harmonicas around in this groovy Partridge Family lunch box. It was the one I had on me when I walked into that building on Myrtle Avenue. I think my sister actually used it in the sixties when she went to elementary school. I put a little skull and crossbones on it, and it would hold my harmonicas and a Shure 58 microphone. I would tie it together with a bandana because the buckles broke, and then I’d put a little strap on it so I could wear it like it was my weapon or my horn or something, and I got known for that. But then I wanted to get something in which I could pull out the harps a little faster, and I was a big believer in building my own things—because the way I was playing the harmonica was so innovative, I wanted to keep building weird devices to accentuate that. And, also, Batman did that.
My first harmonica belt was a 1950s Korean War M1 cartridge belt with two buck-knife holders on the end as sort of epaulets. I discovered that an M1 belt has ten pouches, and I needed twelve harmonicas, so on top of those I added these #110 buck-knife sheaths for the folding lock blades like the Dukes of Hazzard would wear, and I added one on each side so they looked like epaulets.
I filled the belt with harmonicas and memorized which key was
where so I could switch harps really easily; it was like fast drawing. And I would certainly milk that and make the most of it on stage, and then extra gear would accumulate on it to make it that much more special and unique.
When my brother was overseas in Budapest he got me a Soviet telescope with a little case, so I attached that to the side of the harmonica belt. I was reading these mercenary magazines and saw this grappling hook in the back ads, so I bought one. It was a terrible grappling hook, essentially a spring-loaded baton with a grappling hook you wedged on the end—it was a real challenge to compress the spring—but eventually and with a lot of effort I did, and then I hit the little button and it would go thunk and shoot three feet. But it had around sixty feet of test line, so I thought screw the little spring part and the baton part and just took the line and put it in the telescope case with the grappling hook and figured that if there were ever a real emergency, I could give the grappling hook to someone who was in shape and they could repel to safety and get help. I also carried an actual telescope, but not in that case, that was for the grappling hook. The telescope was much more compact because it was one of those old collapsing pirate telescopes, which I thought was very important because piracy was also in my menu.
I even had some Blues Traveler patches that I glued onto the buck-knife sheaths. Around that time we made too many Blues Traveler patches—so many that I still have some. Our idea was to sell them, I guess but they never caught on. So I cut out the cat heads and glued them onto the harp belt so it looked something like Batman’s. (The great thing about Batman is that he advertises as he fights crime. That’s really important as a crime fighter—to have your logo present at all the important points.) There was a sense of craftsmanship to it because I couldn’t use too much glue or else it would soak through and turn the thing sort of gray. I’d then wear it on the subway and people would think, Who’s that crazy dude with all those grenades?
