Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  With H.O.R.D.E. there always would be the money side of things and the artistic side of things, and we tried to make them balance. One of the ways we did that was to make sure we put Aquarium Rescue Unit on the bill. That felt right to us. H.O.R.D.E. was laden with mitzvahs, and you got them done back to you. So I guess we were kind of spoiled because we got to do what we wanted and treat that as normal.

  Although we had an agreement in place with the Spin Doctors, a week before the first show, their agent wanted an additional $10,000 and the band’s split of any profits to double. What eventually happened is that both Blues Traveler and Widespread Panic gave back $2,000 apiece, but we kept their profit percentage as is. Not that it mattered, because although that first year was creatively satisfying, it was not quite profitable. I think the tour lost $7,000 that year and then made $8,000 in 1993 before things started to pick up in 1994.

  When we showed up for that very first show at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Maine on July 9, I just marveled, Wow, this is really happening. I didn’t have too much time to soak it all in, though, because almost immediately people started coming up to me, asking, “What do we do about this?” That’s when I realized they thought I was in charge. And that’s when I realized that I was in charge. I was big and I had the hat on, so you could find me from far away. It was like being a general on the battlefield: “Go to the guy in the hat and ask him what’s up.”

  It got to the point over the years where I’d find a room on site and hide so no one could talk to me. But then when they did, they would be escorted in three at a time like I was Paulie from Goodfellas. Some of these things I had never dealt with before and didn’t know much about—we needed more insurance at the Garden State Arts Center, for instance, and Jones Beach wouldn’t allow tabling by Planned Parenthood, NOW, or NORML—but we did the best we could and figured it out along the way. I discovered that the key to being a musician and promoter was that you wanted everyone to continue not knowing exactly what you knew. It made you an unpredictable quantity, and then you could be useful if there were a real problem.

  The first show in Portland was a complete success in terms of the music and camaraderie. We drew over five thousand people, which was a solid start. However, my recollection is that in Syracuse or maybe Oak Mountain Amphitheatre in Pelham, Alabama, on the second leg, our concourse felt a bit more desolate than we had hoped. It reminded me of an emaciated third-world ghetto when the crops went bad, with a beggar trying to shield his face from the dust storms blowing by while a coyote howled. Still, we sold out the Garden State Arts Center and Jones Beach and drew over eleven thousand people to the Carowinds Paladium Amphitheater in Charlotte. The concept had been proven.

  Aquarium Rescue Unit had the reverence of all the musicians, and during their sets all the bands would stop what they were doing to watch them. They were an empire within an empire.

  Bela Fleck and the Flecktones were a real revelation to me. Their harmonica player, Howard Levy, was just a freak. I think he’s the best harmonica player on Earth on the blues harp. I saw him do something that I never saw anyone else do on a harmonica—he can play the way someone does on a piano, where a left hand and a right hand are independent of each other. We did a jam together in which I went rhythmically and he was doing a melodic thing, and we each went places the other guy couldn’t go. It was a great little dance back and forth.

  I sat in with all of the bands over the course of those shows, which was a goal and a highlight and something I would continue to do over the years. Well, I didn’t quite sit in with Phish. At the Garden State Arts Center show they brought out trampolines for their routine during “You Enjoy Myself”—Mike and Trey would play while they were jumping. They also brought out one for me, but mine was rigged to break. So on my first jump, I broke right through it and walked off stage all dejected. We planned that as a gag. But everyone thought I had really broken it and tried to cheer me up—“Don’t worry, John, not everybody can do a trampoline.” I kept trying to tell them it was rigged to break, but nobody believed me. And that would lead to something the following year, when we one-upped it, because now I had something to prove.

  Given my original inspiration from the Mongol hordes, it also seemed to me that we needed to have ceremonial swords. So I found a sword maker who had the time and wherewithal to follow through on the concept.

  We made a H.O.R.D.E. sword for every band. Each band only received one because we weren’t made of money, and we didn’t want to arm all the musicians because that only lends itself to sword fights, which would not be a good recipe with that much booze lying around.

  I received them just before the end of the first leg of the tour. These were fully functioning broad swords with 36-inch blades. They were really heavy, the same weight that knights used with a fairly strong hilt. Each had a claw holding a green orb, which I think was a nod to the movie Heavy Metal. On each blade it said mota et volute, which means rock and roll in Latin, and on the other end it said modulare et vincere, which means jam and conquer. Then the other side of blade had each band’s logo (Phish, Widespread Panic, Aquarium Rescue Unit, Spin Doctors, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, and Blues Traveler).

  They were wicked sharp and really heavy, and we wanted to see how they would work. So we put a peach on top of a bucket on top of a road case, thinking this would be a safe way to see how much damage one of these swords could do to a peach pit when we cut through a peach. Trey took a big swing straight down, a good cut, and it went through the peach, through the pit, through the bucket, and through the road case. With no damage to the sword. We were very impressed.

  Still, my favorite moment from that first year is a weird one. After the show at Lakewood Amphitheater in Georgia, the end of the whole tour, we were leaving and I was hungry—I hadn’t eaten yet. So we hit a Burger King on the way out of town and they were out of food. That to me was one of the best moments of H.O.R.D.E. We came into a town and emptied their fast food joints. That was as close as reality and imagination came together in my bizarre Attila the Hun fantasy: the Burger King in Georgia.

  By the end of the tour people were talking about next year, and in 1993 the same problem existed: we wanted to get out of clubs and into sheds. The Spin Doctors were off doing their own thing, so we couldn’t count on them, and Phish had made the decision not to commit to a multiband festival. But we found other bands: Big Head Todd & the Monsters, the Samples, and the Dave Matthews Band on a few dates. Rather than eight shows, we did twenty-six, opening with two nights at Red Rocks on July 2 and 3. All in all it was a solid showing, with the exception of two dates we had to cancel due to low ticket sales in Darien Center, New York, and Syracuse (no doubt the coyotes would have been howling again had we returned).

  By the second year Dave Frey said, “We’re doing the all the work. This is our tour—we should incorporate.” There was an extraction on Dave’s end from Bill Graham Presents because they had funded the first year, at least on paper. So BGP would get a disappearing annual percentage, and eventually Dave and I would own it, fifty-fifty.

  Dave did the vast majority of the logistical work, and I was the figurehead. I would call people and find out what our party position was, what we needed to talk them into, and try to sell it. Then I would try to find out what they needed. I saw my job as attempting to accommodate everybody. Eventually, though, there was this point when everybody wanted to be accommodated in ways that were impossible, and by 1998 we were fed up.

  That first year, in order to appease the guys in my band, I had given them each 5 percent of our promoter’s funds. Of course on top of that, they also were paid to be on the tour. Rich Vink, our sound guy, had been spouting off this idea, had spiritually been talking about this, so it seemed wrong not to cut him in for something. So he got 2.5 percent. And Dave Precheur, our trusty road manager who was with us since high school, got 2.5 percent as well. That left 40 percent each for Dave and me.

  There certainly was some amount of resentment fr
om the band over the years, but they had to begrudgingly acknowledge that I was earning it. If need be, I reminded Bobby of the Spin Doctors’ call from 1992. A few years later it was reinforced via this band Red Thunder. They were a Native American group but were sort of manufactured: one guy was Apache, another was Shawnee, and one claimed to be Aztec (which is almost indiscernible from being Mexican), but they had formed a native supergroup, and they’d do new age music with a tribal influence. They tried, and I thought they were okay, but none of us thought they were a great band. The reason they were on the tour is that they were opening for one of the other acts, who had said that they would only appear on H.O.R.D.E. if we could find a slot for Red Thunder on the bill (which also demonstrates how things had changed since year one and also how the live touring business often works). The day before the tour started Chan went on a drunken tirade in front of everyone in the commissary—the room had to clear out—screaming at me because Red Thunder was on right before us. I had to sit there and listen to him yell for what seemed like hours, and he was like Frank Sinatra on a bender. I was the one who was sober back then, and I just filed it away thinking, Someday you’re really going to regret that you did this. Well, here’s that day Chan—enjoy the book.

  H.O.R.D.E. was like a real job. It wasn’t songwriting or playing; it was more about planning and negotiating. I was willing to do it, but I’m a musician; we cater a little more to imagination than reality, and that’s really a better job for me. That’s when I think I gained a lot of weight. I had to be the guy who explained to James Brown’s manager why he wasn’t worth fifty grand in New York City in 1993. Try living with that karmically. Go on, I dare you.

  Who decided that James Brown wasn’t worth fifty grand? It wasn’t me; it was the local promoter, who during that time in New York would have been Delsener/Slater. They have numbers that are facts, and you cannot escape these facts. They saw what James Brown pulled in the last few times he appeared in the area and then deduced mathematically how much he’s worth as a draw. Then they have some sort of algorithm to decide what James Brown would be worth on a festival, and that number becomes what it is. There’s no getting around that number, no matter how creative or artistic you are—you’re stuck in that number. So really I was just relaying to the musicians the bad news the promoters gave to me, and it just felt like I was on the wrong side of that.

  Phish met the tour for two shows, and I was able to follow up on the previous year’s trampoline gag. (I feel you out there reading this, not believing it was a gag, but dammit I am going to prove to you retroactively along with everyone who was there, that this time it was a gag.) I was still in my wheelchair that summer, and we got another wheelchair and a dummy dressed exactly like me, playing the harmonica, and dangled it above the stage. Then at the end of the show there was a big jam session, and in the middle of that jam, with no explanation to the crowd, the crew brought out a giant yard trampoline, as Phish jumped on their regular tiny trampolines. Then the audience could see what they thought was me dangling from the top of the stage in my wheelchair over this giant yard trampoline. Surely the giant yard trampoline could hold me, right?

  I was offstage on a wireless mic, playing, and at the very end they dropped me right through a giant yard lawn trampoline, which was also rigged to break (I swear to God) while I was offstage, saying, “I’m okay, oww . . . I’m all right” The cool part was we ran so long that as soon as I fell through, the lights had to come up due to the union guys, so some people thought I was really hurt, and it looked as though something really wrong had happened. For the following several years I had people say to me, “I was at the Richmond show—are you okay? What happened?” It was the only time I ever made milk come out of Trey’s nose from laughing, and that to me was my proudest moment (it might have been beer, but I’m still proud).

  The next year we had the Allman Brothers Band as the headliner. I always enjoyed playing with them, and they had appeared on a couple of 1993 H.O.R.D.E. dates as well. The most memorable of those in 1993 was in Stowe, Vermont. Apparently Dickey had a physical altercation with a police officer the previous evening and got arrested. He couldn’t make it to the show, so Jimmy Herring from Aquarium Rescue Unit played guitar with them. He would do it again during the summer of 2000 after Dickey left for good, but that night in Vermont was huge for him. I was still in my wheelchair, and I sat in for about half the set. Jimmy and I were on cloud nine, and I remember looking over at him, and we both couldn’t believe where we found ourselves. “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” was really the moment for both of us, and I kind of owe it to Dickey for punching out a cop.

  The main stage opener for most of the 1994 H.O.R.D.E. tour was Sheryl Crow. We also ended up touring with her that fall, which was a lot of fun. She was opening up for us, but we all knew she and her band were a big deal because her song “All I Wanna Do” was all over the radio. I got to play on it with them every other night, and I remember one time our tour manager said, “That’s the number-one song in the country you just played on.”

  There was one night at the end of the tour with Sheryl when we harassed James Taylor. We had a big dinner with both bands and everybody’s crew at this sushi restaurant in Atlanta. We were all on A&M, so Al Marks, our A&R guy was throwing us a dinner. While we were waiting for our table, Tad, Sheryl’s bass player spotted James Taylor. He was in this private little booth. We wanted him to come out, so Tad and I started singing:

  You just call out my name

  and you know wherever I am

  And nothing happened.

  I’ll come running

  to see you again.

  Still nothing.

  Winter, spring, summer, or fall

  all you have to do is call

  And finally he came out—“Would you stop that?” It was hysterical. I think he recognized Sheryl because at the end of the dinner he came over to say hi, which blew us all away.

  Sheryl and her band were always up for that kind of thing. Brendan’s rule (which continues to this day) is that when someone had been touring with us, it was our job to prank them. It was usually silly string, and I always prided myself on being the godfather about it and not ever being there when it went down. But in this case we went all out and silly stringed the shit out of them one night when they were onstage. We just nuked them with silly string. So they decided to prank us back. They ran out while we were playing and started mopping up. Then Sheryl came out with a little waitress apron, brought us drinks, and danced off. I thought that was really cool of them.

  Back to H.O.R.D.E. By 1994 we had expanded to two stages, the Gonzo and Mondo stages. In fact, Sheryl was originally scheduled for the second stage, the Gonzo stage, but after her album took off, she moved to the opening slot on the main stage for most of the shows.

  Eventually we would have three performance spots. I was particularly proud of the workshop stage. Someone had carved a life-sized blue whale out of one piece of a redwood tree, and we brought that around with us as the workshop stage. This was where someone from one band could perform with someone from another band. We had a lot of good jams over the years with Taj Mahal, Dave Matthews, and Sheryl. I was involved with quite a few of them, including one with Warren Haynes, Allen Woody, Jaimoe, and LeRoi Moore. Of course, Warren was in with plenty himself, including a spontaneous performance by Warren and the other members of Gov’t Mule joined by Ben Harper and Chris Barron. Another one that people still talk about was a bass jam with Les Claypool and Marc Sandman from Morphine.

  The year 1995 was big for H.O.R.D.E. because that was the first time we outdrew Lollapalooza. The combination of us, the Black Crowes, and Ziggy Marley made for a really nice package.

  The Crowes were very determined to have something that was not corporate. They thought we were too corporate and didn’t want to play with a beer banner behind them. To our minds, H.O.R.D.E. had grown organically to the point at which we could sell beer.

  This was a time when it seemed everyone was
turning against sponsorship. But the fact is we were being paid a million dollars, and most of it we were paying to the Black Crowes. We figured out another sponsorship that made everybody happy, but ever since the Andrews Sisters in the 1940s, beer companies have been paying bands to play, and I never saw a problem with it. It would be one thing if a beer company was promoting death to puppies as a political practice, but they just wanted people to drink a beer that a lot of people tended to drink anyway. If that’s not your brand of beer, I guess that really matters to you, but if it essentially comes down to brand loyalty, I think that’s silly. I would go with the beer company that pays the most money, although admittedly I’m not much of a beer drinker. So am I betraying my art for trying to make a living? I don’t think so. There was no other way we’d get the Black Crowes on the bill. So I’m glad we had sponsors pony up the cash—it allowed people to have a lot of fun.

  We really tried to make the Crowes as happy as we could. They liked the medicine show idea, so we took that angle of a weird carnival and just ran with it.

  Ziggy Marley had the best pot ever, and they gave everybody a jar of the finest ganja we could remember—if we could remember. Their drummer, Squidly, was on our bus every day, and we took pride in the fact that we were the only band on the tour besides his own whose weed he respected.

  Here’s a related Marley story Dave Frey tells from that tour: “We were playing the Waterloo Village, in Stanhope, New Jersey, and there were a lot of traffic problems because it’s a field out in the forest, with a two-lane road coming in and out. They were stuck out there, but their tour manager had one of the first cell phones. So we called him and explained that we’d send a state trooper to lead them in. And there was this profound silence on the other side because we realized what we’d asked them to do—because usually the state trooper would be leading them somewhere else.”