by John Popper
The New School steered me toward the idea that you should know what’s out there so you can react to it and rail against it if you must. But it seemed to me that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can remain more innocent. The result is that a lot of your songs stay in one or two chords for a little longer, but there was something pure about it that people responded to.
Nightingale’s didn’t belong to us—it’s what we belonged to. If it belonged to anybody, it was Jono’s place. Nightingale’s was a place where we lived by our wits as a band; it was a proving ground. But the Wetlands took us in, and because they encouraged us to do precisely what we happened to be doing at the time, we got to feel exactly like we did a few years earlier when we were rehearsing or playing somebody’s keg party.
They would close the place down sometimes and we’d play an extra hour. It felt like a slumber party—“Hey, let’s stay up and tell ghost stories!” We didn’t feel like we had to be as professional as much as we got to have fun playing.
I don’t think we could even do that today because nobody would let us. But even if we suddenly wanted to go an hour past curfew, now we’d have to think about union costs, we’d have to get to the next gig and unload, the crew’s tired, and we’d need to pay everybody. Back then those thoughts weren’t really on our mind. It was more like, “This is fun and the crowd’s raging—this is what we’re here for.” Sooner or later, in order to function, you’ve got to become a business, and Wetlands was the last place we got to be innocent. After that it wasn’t worse; it just became efficient.
The first time we played with Bruce Willis was at Wetlands. It was the standard harmonica thing, where we always want to duel, so the first thing I did was rip him a new one. I wanted to punish him because I was angry at all harmonica players, really, but the thing is, he was such a fun guy. Then at set break he was like, “Yeah, you’re fast, but can you play slow?” (As if to say, “Do you have soul?”) So the next set I took it real easy on him and traded, and it was an instant mutual love affair after that.
He invited me to Idaho to sit in with his band. He plays harp and dresses up his other harmonica player in a Krispy Kreme donuts uniform and says he’s the billionaire founder of Krispy Kreme donuts who just goes out on a lark to play with him. So with me, they had three harp players.
I remember he handed me this wooden duck decoy. Apparently he was at some hotel in New Hampshire or Vermont where these ducks were in every room, and he got drunk and collected them all. At first he told me that he had carved it himself, that he was in therapy and his therapist told him he needed to work with his hands. But later he acknowledged that he just said that to people and then handed them ducks.
My other memory of that time is that he was married to Demi Moore, but I kept calling her Diane because this was before Ghost and I didn’t know who she was. She looked at me dead in the eye as if to punch me and said, “Hey, it’s Demi.” By the time I visited them in Idaho a decade afterward, it became a funny story, at least to me.
I later invited Bruce to record with us on our 2008 album, North Hollywood Shootout. I just wanted him to do some beat poetry. I asked him to write something with a pocket behind it, and he got hold of it, gripped it and ripped it.
As for Wetlands, we would come back and play for Larry long after we were too big to play there anymore. I think I did two solo Wetlands shows where it was just me emptying my stockpile of every song I had written since high school. “Run-Around” was in that batch, unveiled that way. I debuted the original, slower version there, and it was a magical evening for me. Somebody recently sent me the tape, and I just love that it’s out there. When you’re doing shows like that, you have fantasies in your head that someday someone will remember this, and it feels great to know they really did. Plus, in this case the advantage is that there are so many songs I had forgotten about that I can learn to play again or at least can strip for parts. Thank you, social media.
Wetlands was on Hudson Street in Tribeca on the other side of the Holland tunnel. The area felt very different from how it feels today. It wasn’t treacherous, although the rats were big; it was mostly abandoned warehouses.
My mom remembers New York in the fifties when it was exciting to her and jazz was there and the streets seemed so clean. And I tell her, yes, that’s because all the homeless people were locked up in giant prisons that were basically snake pits—it’s not like they were getting treatment; they were put into holes so no one had to see them.
And in my New York, which I guess was from the late 1970s through 2000, the homeless people were on the streets, so it made for an exciting though really disgusting ongoing saga of the mental health of the entire city. Giuliani did what he could to get them out, but they were still around—you couldn’t just sweep them under the rug—and there were lots of crack addicts and junkies. That was our exciting New York time.
And right before us, in the sixties and seventies, it was much more violent. We missed that little party. I remember going into New York then—it was a scary place. And then in the eighties crack was going on, but you knew how to deal with it: you stayed away from certain parts of New York or, if you were some of my friends, you just jumped right in with both feet. It was our scary.
I think what happens is that everyone from their generation has their New York. And they’re always remembering it fondly, even though there’s plenty of fucked-up shit about that New York, present New York, and future New York.
For me, when the Virgin Megastore showed up, that was kind of the end of my New York.
I like to think that people from the suburbs are my people, that that’s where I come from. I’m Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip and Weaver Chicken Roll and Kraft Singles—that to me is cuisine. Those are my people; that’s what I’m made of. I don’t stop eating that stuff, because I’m afraid if I don’t re-up the Styrofoam that’s in my body, I’ll start to delaminate and then I’ll rot and die.
But that was one thing the suburban people had—the convenience of a mall. And New Yorkers who want everything wanted that. They wanted the comfort and ease of getting their coffee where they also bought their CDs while also doing other shopping. So the Virgin Megastore was the beginning of the end for me. Then there was a Disney store, and anything you could get in a mall you could find in New York City. For me, that was a small victory for the suburban culture. We finally came up with something that New Yorkers envied, and it wound up being the very poison that transformed it away from the city of adventure that anyone would hope it would be.
That being said, I’m just comparing this to my New York because I guarantee there are adventures going on in New York today. I just don’t know where they are like I used to. Someone else’s New York will be this incredible wild savage time, and then when they get older they’ll look back and say, “Man, I remember that New York.” And that’s what New York is supposed to do—it’s supposed to be a place where you go face your dreams and try to execute them and either realize them or fail and then get the hell out of the way for the next bunch of kids coming in. That’s what I really love about New York. To me, that’s the New York we can all share.
New York City’s very nature is to be co-opted by everyone else in the world who will say that’s my city. That is what New York does for everyone, and it still continues to do that—it’s just that I won’t recognize it and my mom won’t recognize her New York in it. And on and on it goes, back to Damon Runyon and P. T. Barnum and all the way back to Amsterdam.
The fuel of New York is that everyone goes through it. I was but a gasoline burp in the engine of New York City, if I was even that loud. It’s kind of cool.
As grimy as it is, New York is constantly rewashing itself and endlessly redefining what it means, and a new group of people will discover that. I just love the crap out of that. The key to New York is that you don’t fall in love with your New York—just be sure to get out of the way and watch what’s coming because that’s a good way to get hit by a bicycle cab
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9
THE GRAHAM DYNASTY
By the summer of 1989 we’d been in the city for about two years and had created a buzz, first at Nightingale’s, then Mondo Cane and Mondo Perso, and finally at Wetlands, which soaked us up and saw us as the perfect house band. We’d also made a demo tape, and people started coming around and approaching us about management, acting like we might be the next big thing.
There was this guy Jose who had lots of cocaine and paid our electric bill one month. He showed up in late 1988 and kept saying that he was going to sign us and that he had connections to Columbia Records. The word Columbia—or maybe it was Colombia—kept coming up, and he had incredible amounts of drugs. We’d go to his house, sit around, smoke cocaine—it wasn’t crack, I think it was freebasing, as if there’s a meaningful difference—and talk about what we were going to do. The more drugs we did with him, the more we would think, This guy sure makes a lot of sense.
I remember on New Year’s Eve 1988–89 we were there, and when the band was getting ready to leave, I told them, “I’m just going to stick around.” After Chan heard that, he grabbed me and dragged me out of the apartment. It was like the blind leading the blind, and I think that was the last time we saw Jose.
I would say Jose’s time with the band lasted four or five weeks. At first he seemed like a white knight who was going to come in and finance us, and then it just seemed like he really needed people to party with.
After Chan pulled me out of there that night he proceeded to lecture me the entire train ride back to Princeton and, in the process, lost his giant white Stratocaster. He left it on the train and never recovered it. If you’ve ever lost a white Stratocaster, you’ll know what that was like for him. It was the one that got away.
The first professional approach was from Josh Warner, a roadie for Anderson Bruford Wakeman and Howe, who told us he was starting his own management company. He began talking to us about how he could get us on tour with Anderson Bruford Wakeman and Howe—“They used to be Yes, you know.”
We also started hanging out with Dave Graham, Bill Graham’s son, who’d seen us at a Barnard gig. He’d been working with this band Dreamspeak, who were friends of his at Columbia University. Dave heard that we were getting offers and wanted his dad to manage us and he would be the point man because he was graduating.
I remember Dave said that his dad had brought our demo tape to Jerry Garcia, who said, “Nice harp.” I dined on that for a long time.
Then we received a letter from Bill Graham himself:
August 16, 1989
Dear John, Bob, Chan, Brendan, and Dave,
Hello,
All this is a bit strange for us and, I feel, all of you, we’re sure, because we haven’t yet had an opportunity to sit down together. We normally would like to meet and establish a personal relationship before speaking about your business, but your talent has obviously heated up the pace of your career. Both of us listen to and love your music, particularly the Greene Street demo tape, and thus are very much interested in working with you. Your music is simply wailing, and we would like to be responsible for helping to turn the world on to this band. Because David Graham will not be back in New York until September fifth, there’s no way to solidify any exact agreements, but please understand that we wish to manage Blues Traveler and would deliver the appropriate contracts after we collectively decide the most agreeable course of action. Of course we also would like to see you perform live before signing papers, but David’s reports and the review we expect from Kevin Burns should speed up the process. I, Bill, will be in New York in September and anticipate seeing you and talking with you. We understand that you don’t want to burn any bridges, but we feel we can deliver more than any other offer. We’re not asking you to cut your other connections, but we wish to come to you before September fifth if you feel overly pressured by other forces. I would be willing to reschedule my time in order to come and see you earlier. If you have any questions, please feel free to call us. We’ll be in touch with you today or tomorrow.
Cheers,
Bill Graham
I was twenty-two and getting a letter from Bill Graham—that was something. So, of course, we waited.
This other guy took us to an Anderson Bruford Wakeman and Howe show, and we saw him getting towels for the band. He was a good guy, but he just didn’t have the clout he said he did. It was really a no-brainer for us: anybody else or Bill Graham Presents managing us.
So we waited until September when the Jerry Garcia Band was in town and Bill invited us there. We saw Jerry pass by, and our eyes were popping out of our heads. We were in this dressing room, and Bill came in through this crowd of people and made a beeline for me. It blew me away, just the way he walked up—it was like the seas parted. It was really eerie. Then he said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time. You are very talented.”
And that’s surreal. Whenever I start seeing people I’ve seen in books and TV, my first instinct is to not completely believe it. But I realized I had to impress this guy, so I told him my Indian boil sucker joke. It’s set in a medieval Indian village, where, alongside the barrel maker and the tent maker, there’s the boil sucker who sucks the pus out of people’s boils. A fat lady comes into his tent after a long day of boil sucking, with a rather large boil to suck on the inside of her ass. It’s closing time, but he figures, “I might as well—she’s in pain.” So he has her stand on a stool, hoists up her frock, and there, on the inside of her right butt check, pulsing like a living map of Eurasia, is a giant boil, and he says, “Oh, this is going to be a long one.” So he gets under there and gnarls his teeth into the tough hide of this elderly woman. Eventually his teeth break the skin, and the first bursts of hot pus go shooting up his nose and all over his face. There’s a lot of flesh in there—it’s like a slightly rotted peach—but it just never ends. So he keeps sucking and sucking, and when he’s about halfway through, she lets out this giant wet fart, knocking him over and covering him in this brown sauce. He gets up, looks her in the eye, and says, “Lady, you’re the kind of person who makes this job disgusting.”
So I delivered that punch line, and everyone’s horrified, but Bill looked at me and said, “You’re going to go very far in this business.”
Then Bill needed to see us play officially, so we took him down to Mondo Perso. Everyone there was abuzz—“Bill Graham’s coming!”—and he saw us and liked us.
Bill taught us so much during the time he worked with us before he died in that helicopter crash on October 25, 1991. I think most importantly he emphasized that the two things you want to do as a musician are to make a living and to express yourself. Everything still breaks down to that.
The first gig Bill got us was playing the Housing Now March in DC. We’d gone from gigs of a few hundred people to 250,000. It was a homeless rally, and the homeless from New York had walked to DC because someone told them there would be food there, but there wasn’t any food there. Eventually the New York homeless started beating up the DC homeless and tried to take their food. It was like, “We’ve encouraged some transients to come and kick the shit out of some other transients.”
Members of the Grateful Dead were there, and I met Joan Baez. Bill was now our manager, and we had been talking to him in a little room, but now he was running this thing and we were very impressed with that. He could see that this rift between the New York homeless and the DC homeless had created angry homeless people everywhere; a number of them were in the front row.
We were about to go on when I looked down at the front row and Bill Graham was tangled in a brawl. His foot was reaching out this way and his arm out another way while he wrestled with homeless people. The king of the world, Bill Graham, was now grappling with eight or nine different deranged homeless men and women and was trying to kick at them.
I saw that, and the first thing I thought was I love my job. And then we started playing.
I remember at first it was amazing th
at this guy who was so legendary would even talk to us. But later, when he yelled at us, we had gotten to this place where we felt familiar enough that we didn’t crumble—because you haven’t lived until Bill Graham has yelled at you.
Bill was the only one I know who could throw an eloquent tantrum. He taught me a very important lesson that I used until I couldn’t scream that loud anymore: if you have a strong argument and you yell it at the top of your lungs, then you’re overloading someone because they’re hearing your argument and getting screamed at, and they don’t know which to respond to first. They want to yell back at you, “Stop yelling like a lunatic!” But you’re not yelling like a lunatic; you’re yelling sane, salient points, and it’s very effective, especially if you’re the boss guy. It worked well for years. The problem is that you have to throw a bigger and bigger tantrum every time, and after a while, I’m a musician, I’m not that angry.
There was one night at the Capitol Theatre when Bill just lit into us, and when he was on a tear, he really was the scariest motherfucker you’re ever gonna meet. Bill had to get involved because of a power struggle involving Dave Graham and Dave Precheur, our tour manager, who had been with us since Princeton.
I had learned from my Hungarian dad that you just don’t want to be the one yelled at—you have to yell something back. Luckily I had something to say to Bill, which was that his underlings kept taking me aside and telling me I needed to fire Chan and Bobby. Maybe Brendan could stay. They told me this was the industry standard. I saved up this information, and when Bill confronted us with the impasse that Dave Precheur and Dave Graham were at, I confronted him with the confusion and lack of cohesion his people created.
Standing up to Bill was a legendary moment for me because I was getting the full force of a Bill Graham tirade. I was able to tirade back a little bit and dilute his argument that “I am of one mind and this is one focused entity.” And Bill wasn’t prepared to have his underlings undermine his belief in the band.
