Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  So what you’ve got to do, just like in prison, is jump in and take some of that raw feces and start throwing it around the room—bring it with you to the head of the hospital ward and slam it on his desk, maybe rub it on his face and rub it on your face, and say, “Let’s all dance, let’s have a shit party.” That’s kind of what you’ve got to do, and then they start to see you as human, and in that process you start to feel human. There’s something about demanding your dignity that gives you dignity.

  Eventually they let me out, but I was in a wheelchair for two years. I spent the first six months in New Orleans for rehab. I was real messed up because they tried to repair the leg and it wouldn’t heal, so eventually they got me in a wheelchair situation back to Bogalusa to finish the record.

  After my mom left, Gina came down to Algiers, which is a scary place in Louisiana, and was there every day going over stuff with the doctors and really looking out for me. She rented an apartment and spent a good month or two down there while I was rehabbing. It was pretty hard on her, but without Gina, I don’t think I would have made it. For every unpleasant thing I had to go through, at least I had Gina to go through it with. When my mom wasn’t there, Gina was there. She drove me around when I could get out and then handled the millions of little details that made it possible for me to function.

  They put the leg back together in the fall of 1992 with a pin, but there was necrosis, where the bone dies. So to stave off hip replacement, they put in new pins and eventually, from 1997 to 1998, had to replace the entire hip.

  At one point when I was laid up in bed, the doctor noticed I was probably diabetic, and a test confirmed it. This was because I was eating crap and not doing any remedial form of exercise, so I continued to gain weight, pushing north of four hundred pounds. It was very scary—“Isn’t that the disease where your foot gets chopped off before you go blind and die?” And then I ran into truckers who said, “I got that shit, man. It’s fine. Just don’t eat so many Cheetos.” That’s what it is—you just learn to eat a little bit better. Instead of going to potato chips, have some Wheat Thins. That was just good enough to squeak me through the door. I took medicine, Glucophage, and some other drugs, but when I lost the weight and went below 350 pounds, my sugar stayed under 200.

  The other problem with being a big guy—I wasn’t super-obese yet, but I was getting there before the bike wreck—was that every wheelchair had to be super-giant-sized, every walker had to be enormous for tall people. But one of many frustrating things about the process is the doctors kept assuring me I would walk in three months . . . and then another three months . . . and another three months . . . and that meant the entire time we were renting things, not getting the good wheelchair, not getting the good walker. And being tall, let alone being close to 400 pounds at the time meant that those were very flimsy.

  Eventually we put in the money for the big guy wheelchair. It was a bitch to assemble but at least it could hold me. Our accountant had luckily gotten this incredible insurance deal in which we paid maybe 10 percent of it, which felt like winning the lottery. To their credit, A&M wrote us a check for half a million bucks to keep us going, and that was faith.

  Later, when I was in my wheelchair, I would mess with people. We’d be in a tight New York restaurant, and I’d intentionally bump into someone’s table and call out, “Everyone’s looking at me because I’m in a wheelchair!” I’d say it really loud, like I was crying, and nobody would respond. Some people wouldn’t look at me. I really milked that for all it was worth. It was really horrible, but I couldn’t stop doing it because it was too fun. The right response would have been, “Yeah, we’re looking at you because you’re saying stuff.” But political correctness was in the air then. I don’t think I could get away with that anymore. I’m almost game to try, but I prefer walking.

  Meanwhile the band threw the motorcycle into the East River (we call that a band vote), and I never deigned to get on one again. To this day, if a car stops fast, I get a little skittish.

  Over the years, being on the road so much, I’ve wound up being in north of eleven car accidents. And yes, they all suck, but airbag technology is quite superior to motorcycle technology, and I’ve walked away from every single one. But I tell you, I am not a fan of traffic accidents, and I’d like to point out that I was driving in only about three of them.

  I could no longer live in my fourth-floor apartment in Brooklyn, so I had to move to Jersey and back in with my parents. Just being cooped up with your parents as an adult is no kind of fun. But I was in my wheelchair, my dad had a heart condition, we’re both Hungarians . . . my poor mom. He and I would get into fights in which I’d try to walk out of the house on my broken leg and he’d scream at me because it was no good for his heart.

  I still needed their help, though, so the solution was for me to get a studio apartment above the Laura Ashley in downtown Princeton. For the first six months every song I tried to write started with the word fuck, but eventually being in that little apartment while my friends, the Spin Doctors, were on MTV getting huge put me in a mood to write.

  There was a leaky faucet in the bathroom of that apartment, and one day, while I was on the toilet, I hummed “Pachelbel’s Canon” to it, using the leaky faucet as a backbeat. I thought, This could be a cool song. It became “Hook.” I was trying to accomplish a task my brother Bob had set for me when he said I put too many words into a verse. So I wrote the first two verses the way he wanted me to write them, very sparsely, and then the third verse I crammed in as many words as I could, and that would up being the fast part of “Hook.”

  That’s also where I wrote “Run-Around” and pretty much all of our four album. I wrote “Run-Around” in a much slower tempo on the guitar. It was for Felicia, and it was supposed to be a love letter of acceptance about some fight we had, and I remember it made her cry when she heard it. It wasn’t until much later when we put a backbeat to it that it got to be more of the song that it is now and a much more fun song.

  That was my last apartment after Brooklyn. In early 1996 I moved into my first house in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

  At one point, though, I needed to have one more look at my room back in Brooklyn. I hadn’t been there for over a year, and it had been cleared out already, but I wanted to ensure there was nothing left. The problem was that I was still in my wheelchair, and our landlord was obsessed with us not marking up the wonderful inlaid wood. We were on the fourth floor, and there was no elevator, so the only way we could think to get up there was having Chan tie a rope around my chair with me in it and another around his neck and, with the help of our landlord, who was freaking out about the metal, we went up one stair at a time—“On, you huskies!” I would yell. Then I got up there, looked around, and shrugged, “Okay, I guess you guys got everything. I can go.” But I had to visually inspect it for myself.

  When we ended up touring—and we needed to start touring to pay the bills—we put a mattress in a van because I couldn’t get on the bus. Then after the show I would get carted up on this mattress in the van, with no windows for some reason (perhaps just to add irony), where I was then driven to the next city by several lunatics looking for work. One of them ran guns for the Hells Angels and one was a former guitarist for 4 Non Blondes, and whenever their song was on the radio she would say, “That’s my guitar part, I wrote that.” And after hearing the guitar part for the first time, let alone the hundredth, it was hard to believe that somebody would brag about writing that. It was two lines, and I have the guitar part memorized because every time the song was playing, I got to hear about that guitar part. I had to learn it for my own survival.

  I was sort of at the mercy of people I didn’t really know, flopping around. As soon as the show was over I would get crated up in the van while everyone else got to go have fun.

  I couldn’t even take a shit unless I had a plastic donut to sit on. I remember one time the plastic donut got sent to the gig rather than the hotel. So everyone was waiting for me at t
he show while someone ran with the donut back to the hotel. Imagine shitting under that kind of pressure.

  Instead of a nurse, we just got a roadie to be a caregiver—poor Grant. He’d been in our crew, and we gave him the nickname Soggy Hoagies. We called him that because tragedy would often befall him, but he’d try to make up for it by bringing us a peace offering of sorts, in case we were hungry. A typical Grant story would involve us telling him to park the cube truck, and he would say, “Sure!” He’d be very chipper about it and drive off, and then you wouldn’t see him for five hours, when he’d come back covered in soot with his shirt ripped, maybe a gash in his arm, and mud all over him, holding two soggy hoagies, or maybe four, two under each arm. You’d ask him what happened, and he’d explain, “Okay, I went to park the truck, and I found myself in a mudslide because it stated raining, so I slid down a ravine, and the truck started rolling. So I put it in reverse and tried to back out, but that only made it roll even further down the ravine, and I ended up in a lake. So I tried paddling the truck upside down, and in the process I accidentally dislodged a lighter, and that caught fire on some newspapers that were on the ceiling of the truck because, remember, we’re upside down. Then the truck caught fire, and I started rowing really fast because I wanted to get to shore before the truck exploded so I wouldn’t have to swim in that lake since there could be sharks in there. I made it just in time, and just as I climbed out, the truck exploded. I couldn’t save any of the gear, but I figured you guys might be hungry, so I got some hoagies.”

  Grant had to empty my urine bottles, deal with all my wheelchair equipment, and ensure that my drivers actually brought me from point A to point B. There was one time Grant couldn’t make a hotel key work. I was trapped in the room in my chair, and we were about an hour late for the show. I was feeling all this pressure about being late and making everybody late yet again. So when he finally came in, without even thinking, I threw a bottle of urine, and it hit him square in the face. It exploded all over him. He looked at me for a second and just left. I love this man, we’re friends now, but he said he had to leave because he was going to kill me. And looking back, I would have killed me too.

  14

  H.O.R.D.E TO HANDLE

  The idea for H.O.R.D.E. came from my Penguin Historical Atlas. In the Penguin Atlas you see the people of central Europe being plagued by the Vandals from the south and the Huns from the east and the Visigoths from the west and the Vikings from the north. So I had the idea of Phish fans coming to a particular town from the north and Widespread Panic fans coming from the south and Blues Traveler fans coming from the west. The idea is that the town is being assaulted on all sides by this throng of people, by a hippie gang, if you will.

  The thing is that bands never come from different directions; usually everyone’s following each other, but I had this great fantasy of everyone converging on the same spot. All of the food in the area gets eaten up by these people. I wanted there to be an air of pillage, so I thought it should sound like some sort of Mongol horde. I figured an anagram is probably the best way to go. Originally it was Horizons of Rock Developing East coast because all these bands we were talking about were from the East Coast, and to me that seemed to be an identification of a scene, because we were definitely not from Haight-Ashbury. But Eric Schenkman wisely said it should be Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere. And sure enough, the next year we started using bands like Big Head Todd & the Monsters and the Samples from Colorado.

  We also saw the success of Lollapalooza. The brilliant idea was that you could get a lot of little club bands out at an amphitheater by combining their draws. So we wanted to see whether we could do that. We’d done a lot of shows with Phish and Widespread Panic, and Spin Doctors grew up with us.

  Bill Graham did Lollapalooza that first year, so we got a sneak peek into it. The Graham organization embraced the idea of taking a bunch of small bands and creating a festival that was bigger than any of the individual bands. Then the name Lollapalooza becomes stronger than Jane’s Addiction or any of the bands involved. Bill Graham said that to me about the Fillmore—one of the best moments he ever had was when he was in the bathroom and heard two kids come in and one of them said, “Who’s playing tonight?” And the other one said, “Who cares? It’s the Fillmore.” And that kind of identification with a name can be done for a tour when there’s not a huge band running it, and that was the idea we wanted to seize on with our scene.

  Around this time a few people were floating the idea of possibly joining forces, but because we toured the farthest, we knew everybody. Widespread was still fairly regional to the south and would make occasional forays to the west, the Spin Doctors were a New York band who hadn’t toured much, and Phish basically stuck to New England at that time, although they had made some inroads into other regions. But, again, because of my Penguin Historical Atlas, we were pushing into every state so I could fill in my map. As a result we had relationships with all of these bands.

  So in March 1992 we decided to hold a meeting with just band members, no managers. We had all of Blues Traveler, Eric and Chris from the Spin Doctors, all of Phish (who happened to be in town), members of Widespread Panic, and Colonel Bruce, who was there representing Aquarium Rescue Unit.

  We all met in a room in Bill Graham’s office in New York. If you’ve ever been in Bill Graham’s anything there’s a certain rock-and-roll reverence there—“Oh, look, that’s Janis Joplin’s tambourine.”

  Phish drummer Jon Fishman wanted to stage a little skit, so he told us, “Okay, I’m going to run out screaming, and you guys drag me back into the room and everybody will wonder, ‘What the hell are they doing in there?”’ He got really into it, and while he was yelling, “No, no, don’t take me back!” he ripped the door off the hinge. I heard later that people got pissed because of that.

  We were trying to figure this all out, and then Trey Anastasio stood up and said, “Why don’t we just make it something where the bands get equal billing and equal money everywhere?” So we were fired up—“Yes, let’s do this!” Then, and I’m pretty sure this was Mike Gordon’s idea, we sealed the deal by shaking hands after we dipped them into a jar of Vaseline that was on the table. I still have that jar of Vaseline.

  Working on H.O.R.D.E. that year was kind of like getting stuck between reality and imagination. In your imagination it’s world conquest. You’re thinking, We’re gonna fill up Shea Stadium! And then you’re disappointed when it’s anything less. Then there’s the reality that you’re amazed you got more than one band to agree to show up anywhere at the same time.

  The next day Trey called me and explained, “I talked to my manager, and we just can’t do that,” meaning the equal billing and money. And that’s the reality. I understood why they couldn’t. They had to eat, and they had people to pay—Phish had a huge overhead. So my next call was to Widespread Panic’s John Bell, and he said, “I understand, but then we have to do the same thing down south.” So suddenly everybody was going to their corners. Each band as an entity, including ours, was good at protecting itself, which is what you do as a band, and the hardest thing about a festival, especially a grassroots one, is you have to get all these entities working toward the same goal.

  We decided on eight dates, four in the northeast in July and four in the southeast in August. Then Phish said they couldn’t do the second half, so we found Bela Fleck and the Flecktones for the August shows. Really, from day one it was quite a mess.

  Although Phish was only doing four of the gigs, they wanted us to reconsider the name. They were at some airport where they read these facts about a pilot, and instead of H.O.R.D.E., they wanted us to name it the Clifford Ball and have that be the entire theme of the tour. I have to hand it to them for being abstract. And eventually they did use that four years later for their first major festival at a former Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New York. I guess there’s something special about the Clifford Ball that put the hook in them.

  As July approached, the
Spin Doctors record started happening, and they wanted a different treatment even though they hadn’t been touring like the other bands. It all became a feeding frenzy with managers involved and me in the middle.

  That’s really how I came to run the H.O.R.D.E.; I just knew everybody. They weren’t as familiar with each other as they were with us, so I became the go-between. I remember trying to work out an issue with the Docs, who wanted top billing in New York. I was in Princeton with Chris Barron, and he didn’t want to talk about H.O.R.D.E at all. He said, “Look man, this is your tour.” He made it clear that he had no obligation to deal with this, and I was kind of shaken and wounded when I left there. But eventually I understood.

  I became the only one in the band who had the patience to deal with everything, which generally involved lots of phone calls with various entities, each of whom would tell me what they wanted and then I had to go accommodate them while also accommodating the other people. I got Bobby on a phone call in which the Spin Doctors’ manager is yelling, and Bobby said, “Uhh, I got to go.” He didn’t last forty seconds, and I said to him later, whenever he had any complaints about how I came to own H.O.R.D.E. along with Dave Frey, “That’s what I do all the time!” After the relative honeymoon of the first year, it became nine months of grisly, ugly work. I’d have to sit there, let people yell, and then pick my opportunity when I got to yell.

  Still, it was no picnic in 1992 when we were figuring out how to do this. The Spin Doctors’ booking agent pushed really hard, first for the highest billing in New York, which he didn’t get, then he made it clear he thought the Aquarium Rescue Unit was overpaid, that they had no national draw—he essentially wanted to push them out. We were not going to stand for that because they represented the spirit of H.O.R.D.E. to us. They did have the smallest draw, but as a group, they probably had the best players. They were sort of our rallying flag.