by John Popper
Our last holdouts in the continental United States were the Dakotas. We got Alaska before we hit them, and then Hawaii was right after that. This was all in 1995. Hawaii was such a party because at that point, everyone in the crew was excited to get all fifty states. I don’t think many bands try to tour all over, so there were a lot of firsts for the guys on the crew.
It all seemed not only normal but also logical to me: if there’s a spot where we’ve never played, why wouldn’t we want to play there?
Perhaps it was fitting, but in Rapid Cities, South Dakota, there was a stage rush. In one spontaneous moment the entire front half of the house decided to come on stage. I was hanging onto the microphone and getting bashed in the face with it. Chan and Bobby had guitars and were holding them like hockey sticks to hip check the masses. That was both flattering and scary because we were being physically mobbed by a sea of people. That would be the last time we went out without security for fifteen years.
My other story involving audience participation took place in Le Locle, Switzerland. We went to the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1991, and their idea of rock and roll was Toto, who we opened for. They were used to Chuck Berry, and we were much louder—we hadn’t quite reined in our sound—so they looked at us like, “What the fuck is this?”
On the way home we booked this little festival in Le Locle on the border of Italy, France, and Switzerland. It was a real local village, where they boarded up everything because it had rained. During that day they fed us—that was part of the gig—and while we were eating we noticed this bagpipe fife and drum corps from Brittany. There were a dozen of them, and they were there for a friend’s wedding. They all had sailor suits on and spoke Gaelic French, which none of us—or in fact anybody—understood. I managed to figure out that bagpipes drone in the key of B-flat. So I figured I’d get one of them to come up with us and play in B-flat during our set—how hard could it be? And bagpipes are cool. Through broken sign language and semaphore we came to an understanding that one of them would join us during our performance.
Later that evening we were getting ready to go on, and the band before us was doing classic rock covers in French. The place was rocking, and as soon as they were done, a deluge of rain drove everyone into their houses. When we came out for our set, we were playing to a mostly empty town square. I don’t know what happened to Europe in 1972, but the Grateful Dead did not resonate. We were being very psychedelic, real reefer rock that they just didn’t get in the Alps.
So I figured it couldn’t get any worse, so, what the hell, let’s bring out the bagpipe guy in the sailor suit. Except there was a miscommunication, and all twelve of them were there, nervous because they’ve never been on a stage before. At that point Bobby, Chan, and Brendan were looking at me like, “What did you do to us?” So I called out “Hit it!” They began playing, and I figured we needed some words, so I started singing, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip . . .” and people started coming out of their houses. The whole place turned into Woodstock. They were doing a soccer chant and there was a conga line around the square. It was absolute pandemonium.
We rocked the town with the theme to Gilligan’s Island.
What occurred to me was they needed a reference to some recognizable style. After the bagpipes, then every song we did was a hit. I learned an important lesson that day: if you’re in a place where you’re feeling estranged from your audience, try to bring in some locals to make a connection. If you’re in Botswana, bring in a Botswanan band. Even if you bring in a local musician just playing saxophone, his experience somehow translates to the audience. It’s a cool trick and one that was born in survival.
Later on I was trying to sleep because we had to catch a plane in the morning, and I could hear all these drunken bagpipers, sounding like they were demonstrating the Doppler effect.
We tried to recreate this at the Jones Beach H.O.R.D.E. the next summer with the help of the New York Ancients Fife & Drum Society. It turned out their name couldn’t be more accurate because they sent us a couple of eighty-year-old guys. They were supposed to lead this procession all around Jones Beach, but we had to cut it short because it looked like they were going to pass out.
Then I bought my own bagpipes because we had a band budget for instruments. It seemed pretty easy; after all, it’s a diatonic instrument, right in my wheelhouse. First off, assembling the thing was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Second, it is not a rock-and-roll, stage-friendly instrument; it is very fragile, and you have to be careful with how you position the reeds and the drones. It also takes steady pressure when you’re working the bag—you have to be constantly filling it with air while you squeeze its bladder.
It all really sounds testicular when you talk about bagpipe technology. While you’re working the shaft, you squeeze the bladder with your elbow as you hang onto the bag. And of course, within months, pieces of the bagpipes had gone missing—where did that reed go?—and it’s all handmade.
The bagpipes made it to a few rehearsals, but nobody ever said, “Hey John, don’t forget the bagpipes.” They’d put a pin in it until we got too busy. I love that they bought it for me, though—“We’ll buy you the bagpipes as long you don’t play them.”
13
SAVE MY SOUL
I could never drive a clutch on a car or a motorcycle, so when I learned of Honda’s automatic transmission motorcycle, the Hondamatic, I thought, This was made for me.
Brendan was always into motorcycles and still is, but he has the right temperament for it, because I stop paying attention at a certain point.
For me it was an eye-opening thing. I remember getting my bike in Nevada before I even had a license. We finished our spring tour 1992 in Vegas with two nights at Bally’s, and the next day Brendan and I drove our bikes to the Hoover Dam. We went somewhere we weren’t supposed to go and a cop stopped us. Then someone came by and mentioned that he had tickets to our Vegas shows, so the cop asked us who we were and joked that he could write tickets. Not only did I not have a license, but the motorcycle was untitled and unregistered. It ended pretty well, though—we took a photo in which he pretended to cuff me on the back of his car. He didn’t give me a ticket, though; I just had to put the bike on the back of a semi and send it home.
So I had it hauled out to Princeton, New Jersey. I was living in New York, but I was home in Princeton a lot. I remember riding to and from New York through the Holland Tunnel on that motorcycle. I would occasionally ding a taxicab with my shin, but nothing too bad.
It was definitely too small a bike for me because it would take an extra ten feet for me to stop. What I eventually learned when I got my motorcycle license is that that’s why they have those stop tests.
We went off to Louisiana to make our third record, Save His Soul, and by that time, I’d had the motorcycle for about six months. It was October 20, 1992, and I was late for work getting from the house to the studio. It was a long drive through these snaky hills and winding roads in gorgeous, rural Louisiana, and I was booking.
I always had been afraid of going fast. I remember a time as a kid when I was on an alpine slide, gripping the break all the way down. People were unhappy with me, and my dad was behind me, shouting, “Don’t you listen to those people yelling at you! You go as slow as you want to, Johnny.” And that just made it worse. I went back to an alpine slide in my thirties to make up for it and I still went slow. I just couldn’t do it.
But on the motorcycle, you get used to going fast. So it wasn’t long before I was cruising at seventy or eighty miles per hour, no problem, like I knew what I was doing. So I was late for work on these winding roads where logging trucks were zooming by just as fast as I was going.
I came upon this stretch of road, and there was a blue Chevy Nova just sitting there. I couldn’t pass on the right where I would normally pass because there was a ditch and no downshifting on this bike. (Remember, it’s automatic only.) That was the problem. I started to rea
lize then that the reason gears are good on bikes is that the gear ratio can slow you down a lot faster than brakes can. So I tried passing the car on the left, but then the car turned left. So I slammed on the brakes and almost sped up into the car. In a moment of herculean stupidity I tried getting between my trusty steed and the Chevy Nova, almost to protect it. They say that probably saved my life because I would have gone head first over the car, but instead I impacted flush with my knee into its back door and bounced backward. I rolled for a while with my broken leg wrapped around my good leg and then landed face down.
A few years earlier I had crashed on a moped and cracked a rib. I remember waking up and getting put in an ambulance, and I was fine. They call that traumatic amnesia, but in this case my brain said, John, you’re going to feel this. I tried moving my leg and had the creepy feeling of moving a broken bone and the shudder of nerve endings. If I listen carefully, I can still hear the screaming.
People came running from their houses. I didn’t know anybody was there; I thought it was an abandoned road. But they said, “We’re not going to move you because you’re an accident victim.” So I flipped myself over, and that’s when I heard the Nestlé Crunch sound when you turn bones into peanut brittle. I started screaming and screaming, and then an ambulance came.
I remember a traffic cop was there, leaned over, and he had the typical traffic cop look—with the sunglasses and Smokey the Bear hat—and he said, “You know this is a no-passing zone, right son?” and he put a ticket on me.
Then they loaded me onto the ambulance and there was a lady there—she was the only angel I saw that day, and that might have been her name, even. She said, “John, we can’t give you painkillers for six hours because we don’t know if there’s internal bleeding.” That at least let me pace my screaming.
We made it to this hospital in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and I noticed my bandmates were looking all pale because one foot was at one angle and one foot was coming in sideways. Then the hospital staff tried to put the catheter in, and when they drove that guitar string home, I didn’t feel my leg at all.
The thing about a catheter is that they always want to remove it so you can pee. It was this torture test of them yanking out the little guitar string for two minutes for me to pee and then putting back in. It was horrible.
I used to tell my manager, “I got into a car accident—I can’t make the gig,” just to freak him out. Then I’d say, “No, just kidding.” So when I called him from the hospital that day, he didn’t believe me at first.
We had a Halloween gig scheduled for a week and a half later, and I thought I’d be ready for it—just a quick trip to the hospital to get some surgery and I’d be right as rain. As wracked with pain as I was, I told myself that I’d never missed a gig. Someone had to explain to me the extent of my injuries, and even then I said, “Yeah, sure.” But then reality started to sink in. It was like being in jail because my body wanted to go do something, but I was detained by my own frailty. It was a rough thing.
They had me airlifted to New Orleans, and my feet were sticking out of the helicopter because I was too tall. This is when I built up my tolerance for withstanding surgery, which would help me later with my heart and weight-loss surgeries.
I remember waking up in the hospital bed, and the shin that had crashed into the car was nothing but exposed nerve and welts. Imagine a shin being smashed into a car at eighty miles per hour—that’s what it was. The open air hurt. Bits of hair would tickle that spot and there would be shooting pain. When I came to, someone had left the TV on, and there was Jean-Claude Van Damme in some movie where he was chopping down a palm tree with his shin. That was the image I woke up to, and they elaborated the noise. The whole thing freaked me out, made me shudder, and I couldn’t reach the remote to change it. There was this whapping noise over and over again, and he was yelling while he repeatedly struck the palm tree with his shin before he took it down.
My initial surgery took place at Tulane Medical Center, where my mom flew down to see me. At some point afterward they needed me to drop a deuce in a bedpan. I’d never gone in a bedpan, so they brought me the bedpan and balanced me, with a broken hip, on it. They put an enema in me, and the nurses were all my mom’s age—so there were four sixty-year-old women gathering around while I tried to poop. For some reason they were astonished I couldn’t seem to go. They were scratching their heads and trying to figure out what happened. I sensed their frustration and was feeling my own, so they put another enema in me but none of them understood that the fundamental issue was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom with my mom and these three other women staring at me.
They meant well, but they were giving me too much attention. Increasingly they got upset with each other and started arguing with one another because they really wanted me to go. Finally I yelled, “Could everyone leave the room?!” Then as soon as they left I not only filled that bedpan, but I overfilled it, destroying the bed and everything in it. They had to take me out and clean me up. There had been this assumption that because my body wouldn’t defecate on its own, my brain had gone with it. And that’s what people sometimes forget: no matter what has happened to the patient, there’s someone in there.
When you’re stuck in the hospital like that, it’s like being in prison. Someone has to wipe your butt, and you have to eat the food they want you to eat. Bedpans and catheters are awkward and unpleasant, but the only way out is to fight.
You have to fight to heal and you have to fight for your rehab, but it’s also very important that it’s for you, not for them. So you have to take any chance you can to be subversive, to break a rule, to sneak a cigarette, to smuggle in some real food—have your friends mail you barbeque ribs as Col. Bruce Hampton did (FedEx did not really make a good barbeque-containing cardboard box, but it came close). You have to fight every time they tell you that you have to do something, and you have to claw your way out because this is the entire process and physiology of what healing is.
Healing is not a natural, calm, soothing experience; healing is a violent, savage, groaning experience that takes tiny little incremental steps and makes you endlessly impatient and frustrated. Each day you feel exhausted, as though I’ve only gone the same three feet. But what you don’t notice is that yesterday it took three people to help you go those three feet, and today you’re doing it by yourself. But that’s imperceptible to you at the time.
There’s a feeling I still remember clearly. I felt that I was at the end of my rope and that if one more thing would happen, I would be completely lost and give up and there would be nothing left of me. But I learned that there was far more rope than I realized and that my capacity for suffering was so much more than I imagined. Your brain will never let you know the true end of your limit. The key to healing is to fight and fight and fight. So that’s what I did.
From the hospital I moved to a rehab center, and at one point I had a roommate who was this tough dock loader. He fell off a barge on the Mississippi River, broke his back, and finished out his work day. He went to bed that night, tried to get up for work the next day, and couldn’t move because it turned out he had broken his back. He finished out his workday with a broken back, and that’s the kind of man he was. He was not very articulate, but he was a very sweet man. It became clear to me that no one had listened to him his entire life.
One time I woke up in the middle of the night, and all I wanted was for someone to empty my urine bottle. It was full and I was trying to pinch a little where I could. So I woke up to two things: an incredible stench of human feces and the man next to me, who was never upset about anything, was crying. He had shit himself and what happened was that the nurse would come in and take a whiff and leave it there because there are two kinds of nurses: the professional nurse who cares and the nurse who took the gig because the post office wasn’t hiring that week. We had gotten that second kind of nurse.
Part of my instinct is to fight whenever something like that would happen. I would go off beca
use, unlike my roommate, I was very articulate and had learned from Bill Graham how to scream at the top of my lungs and formulate a coherent argument. So I screamed out, “At least open up a fucking window, you heartless fascist!” I made such a stink, if you’ll excuse the pun, that they called in the head of nursing. Eventually they cleaned up the poor man, but they came in to talk to me about my attitude.
The head of nursing told me how her grandfather was in a wheelchair, so she understood. I told her how her grandfather would be ashamed, and if he wasn’t with us anymore, he would be rolling in his grave with regret and would look down on her with disdain and disgust. And as I’m yelling, I realized that the guy’s wife had come in to visit him and that both of them were looking at me with such astonishment because no one had ever spoken up for them before. I wasn’t really fighting for them—I just wanted a guaranteed urine bottle that I could pee in—but it really set me off, the indignity that he and I had to suffer because someone had taken the job who couldn’t deal with the fact that somebody had pooped themselves. By the time I was done, the head of nursing was in tears and that never happened to us again.
The thing is, you want to be appreciative of somebody wiping your ass because that’s no kind of fun for nobody, but when you have to coerce somebody to do it, then you don’t know where your next shit is going to land and how long it’s going to be with you. It’s not a matter of Please help me; it’s a matter of If you don’t help me, I’m going to walk out of here on my broken leg, find a two-by-four, and pummel you with it. And that’s really how you feel. It’s a very dehumanizing experience.
