Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  Unless I was wearing purple. In 1995 we hosted the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. We got the show because Prince canceled, so I wore a purple shirt in his honor (along with his symbol on my harp belt). I wore the same damn shirt at Woodstock ’94, and what I later came to realize is that if you’re a really obese man, you should never wear purple. People just instinctively think of Barney the Dinosaur when you’re giant and purple. So unless you’re really terrifying, little kids want to run up and hug you and sing the “I love you, you love me” song. It was just very bad on so many levels.

  I recently saw the Roseanne episode I was on, and it is amazing what they would allow me to wear on a TV show. Or in Blues Brothers 2000, where I brought my clothes, but what other clothes did they have in 6X? So I pretty much wore whatever smock or muumuu I could squeeze into, and everyone just figured, “Yeah, that’s what he wears.” But maybe they should have suggested something that was a different color or with buttons on it instead of just a tent cover. And my hair. . . . The things I would appear in when I was really overweight—they would let me do whatever I wanted: “Have it stuck to the side of your head. It doesn’t matter—you’re gigantic.” It was a weird double standard.

  After I lost the weight people told me, “You know, maybe you should try some mousse or something.” I’ll never wear mousse because the fun part of being a dude is that you roll out of bed and you’re ready to go. I don’t need to fuss and preen my hair, but it’s nice to have that as something to worry about, to look at your face and ask yourself, Should I shave? When you’re obese, who cares if you shave? You’re 436 pounds—is it going to help? You’re so strange-looking anyway, just go with it. I could have literally painted my head bright blue, and people would have said, “Yeah, he’s probably doing a thing.”

  In those days my clothes just screamed, “Help me! I’m clueless!” And I was the lead singer in the band. I’ve told Brendan and Chan, “You guys should have dressed me better. I needed help, and I was your lead singer.” But to them, I think, it was part of the charm—“Come see the weird crazy man play the harmonica.” I think that was sort of the attraction, and I really did live it.

  I had an old girlfriend who said, “Back in those days you didn’t care about anything.” And she said it with such admiration.

  I’m kind of a lunatic. I’m a much more sociable lunatic now, but back then my lunacy made me sociable. There was a point when that sociable lunacy became more of a mania, in which I literally couldn’t drive past a fast-food place without ordering something.

  If I have a drug of choice, it’s probably McDonald’s. You have to bear in mind that this is one of the addictions your parents and grand-parents teach you to enjoy, so you associate it with very fun times in your life. In my family every Sunday we would all go to McDonald’s, and it was a big treat we’d all look forward to. McDonald’s has this culinary expertise of infusing meat and sugar at every point. It’s the sauce on the McRib or the sweet-and-sour sauce with the McNuggets or, the most famous example, the special sauce on the Big Mac. It’s just a lot of sugar on everything, and they slather it very close to or on some meat. It’s an artistic achievement really. They talk about the bliss factor in Doritos, but McDonald’s discovered this years ago.

  I would say that by the mid-nineties I turned this into a thing. Everyone else said, “It’s just fast food. I don’t eat fast food anymore.” So I became a champion of fast food. Back then I might smoke pot occasionally, but I was not drinking at all. Really the only thing I would do to mindlessly destroy myself and feel this euphoric rush was go to McDonald’s or Burger King or Taco Bell and eat a big meal. Wendy’s would suffice, I guess, but it had those baked potatoes, which countered the whole point of fast food. They had actual pieces of broccoli, and that’s just wrong.

  One time I went to a McDonald’s drive-thru and then right to a Burger King drive-thru to combine the two, and that made me really ill. Somehow the grease in each restaurant counteracts the other and creates a deadly poison, much like the Japanese blowfish. So do not cross your fast foods. Just a tip there, kids.

  I would see a McDonald’s and would get scared—“Can I drive past this thing? Maybe I’ll just have a cheeseburger”—and the concept that I couldn’t drive past one was really crazy. I’d drive by one, and to reward myself later I’d go to McDonald’s.

  So I’d eat the food, and for about ten to twenty minutes I would feel this euphoric rush of flavor, which is the meat and sugar and the association of all the other times I had this feeling. Then about a half hour later I would feel sick, and maybe three hours later I would want more McDonald’s.

  It was part of a daily staple—twice a day some days. It wasn’t that way all the time because there was room service, but many, many times it was.

  Back then I could eat a dozen donuts by myself, which is horrifying. Who does that? Although a lot of people do that who shouldn’t, at the time I was proud of that, like it was an accomplishment, which is even kind of scarier still.

  I remember we were sitting in a van somewhere, and I was eating a donut. Brendan said, “John, that’s just a fat pill.” But I knew how to expertly use the guilt he felt in saying that to me—I could turn it around and get to eat the donut. That’s what I was great at. I knew about people, and really, all I wanted was the donut.

  During this time I moved to the fast-food capital per square mile in the entire country, which was Quakertown, Pennsylvania. I like to say that was an accident, but I also like to say magic is just being super-observant. I think on some guttural, subliminal level, my nose just knew I should live there.

  You can start to feel it in the wind—“Wait a minute, there’s an Arby’s coming.” I developed a skill, and when I’m eating a lot of fast food, I can still do it; I can tell by the grease in the air what kind of fast food it is, and I’m uncanny. It’s like I feel it on my skin. I can tell you when there’s a Burger King within half mile of me.

  Even today, if I’m not careful, I can eat at McDonald’s every day. I have to tell myself there will be another McDonald’s up the road. To this day I look at any time I pass up McDonald’s as one in my column because I’ll always wind up eating at McDonald’s.

  Always look for the McRib if you can. I know it’s made out of yoga mats, but it’s the best damn yoga mat you ever had. What it’s taught me is that you can literally put the right kind of barbeque sauce and onions and pickles on a yoga mat, and I will eat it.

  Here’s what I won’t do. I’ll eat good things, but I won’t pretend that the green drink I have to take in order to live is somehow better than McDonald’s, because it’s not. It’s healthier than McDonald’s, it’s better for me than McDonald’s, but to say some leafy thing is going to replace meat and sugar is insane.

  I’ve always said that the purpose of life is ice cream. You should try and consume as much ice cream as you physically can. Now, if you go to an ice cream factory and eat a metric ton of ice cream in a month, you won’t live very long. But if you eat as much ice cream as you can while staying healthy enough to support the digestive system needed to eat that ice cream, then you’re gonna get a metric ton in. My rule is you gotta drink the green drink to eat the fun stuff.

  But back then, there were no green drinks unless they were Shamrock Shakes.

  16

  ODE TO THE LATE-NIGHT SPONGE

  The advantage we had with Letterman and, later, Stern is that we were fans first. When people were getting on Letterman, particularly during those first few years at NBC, they might have thought of it as just another booking—“I’m used to being on Carson and now I’m learning this new show.” But to us Letterman and Stern were our Carson. I think there was this evolution in which I got Letterman’s humor more than most people who were getting on that show, and I think most people in my generation did.

  He once sent me a note congratulating us on our first gold record, and I have it framed on my wall. I really felt he was rooting for us. I think he felt we were so
mething new, and we felt he was something new, and I wanted to be a comedian, so his show was really important to me.

  The first time we were on, in early 1991, they made it very clear that only Chan and I could play. I remember Brendan and Bobby really objected to it—“We’re a band and we only go on as a band.” But Chan and I were like, “We see your point, but we really should just take any offer they give. But it really does suck.” Chan and I weren’t overplaying our hand, but we thought, “Let’s do what they’ve asked us to do and then try to get the whole band on the show that way.” Our manager agreed, and I’ll never forget, Chan and I quietly left the room and then started dancing around and high fiving.

  All of my Letterman prep work really paid off, though. It was really my kind of humor, and being on that show felt natural to me. I knew how sometimes they would cut to Biff Henderson to watch his reaction for comedic effect. In fact, everyone on Letterman’s staff knew they might be on the show if they were on the set and had a stupid expression on their face. When I first went on, I sat in with the band as well, and while I was listening to Paul, I was trying to pay attention to the conversation, trying to have a stupid face ready to go. And because I was a weird-looking guy with crazy hair and knew how to mug for the camera, they cut to me a few times. And getting a laugh from just having a silly look on my face was my favorite moment on that show, more so than doing the song.

  I nearly ended up in a Miloš Forman movie because of that first appearance. Miloš saw me on that show and shortly afterward called our management to say, “We want to hire John to star in a move. It’s about an American sumo wrestler who wants to become a full-blooded sumo wrestler and compete in the sacred Japanese competition.” I agonized for weeks: Do I want to be in a movie in a giant diaper? Is that who am I? Have I worked that hard at music to be in a movie wearing a diaper? And there’s something about being performer and you say, “Of course, that’s what music is for, to dress up in a diaper and parade around in a diaper and wrestle other guys in diapers. That’s a great honor.” And then I began to think about the money; anything at that time would have seemed like a lot.

  Miloš wanted me to come in to audition. So I went into the place and there was some other fat guy coming out, looking all nervous. I don’t think anybody was very excited about this movie—“Oh my God, I’m trying out for a movie to be in a diaper.” I walked in there, and Miloš was very nice to me and asked me to read some lines. They hadn’t sent me any sides to read in advance, and I’m terrible reader—to read something naturally off the page was the worst thing for me. So I had the shittiest audition ever, and he said, “Thank you.” I left. That was the last I ever heard of the movie. I found out later it was never made because the Japanese Sumo Association didn’t approve of the script.

  I was on Letterman twenty times. Each time I watched the show afterward, and it became a torture test of, Will they cut to me? One time I had a conversation with Dave, and they bleeped out the word tracheotomy. He said to me, “How do you play the harmonica so fast—do you play two at a time?” I said, ‘No, you need a tracheotomy for that,” and when it aired, they bleeped out “tracheotomy.” I couldn’t figure out why. My best theories are that they wanted it to sound dirty or thought I was saying something worse.

  I always had a special relationship with the show, at least in my mind, because of my initial connection from high school. In 1983 or 1984 my friend Tom Brown took me to Rockefeller Center and we got tickets to see Letterman. Then we waited outside afterward to meet Dave, and he gave us an autographed picture and sent us a Late Night with David Letterman sponge. I couldn’t believe that a person on TV actually existed. And the sponge was something I saw on TV every night; the sponge was famous to me. It would be thin when he gave it you, but after you added water, it would swell into a proper sponge. Eventually, I think ten years later, I finally did wet it to make a full-size sponge, and that was the beginning of its end—it started pilling and falling apart.

  I also got an autograph from Steve Jordan, who was in the Late Night with David Letterman band because he played with the Blues Brothers. Then I saw Paul, and my first question for him was, “How come you weren’t in the Blues Brothers move?” Paul was in the Blues Brothers band, and once you’ve done that, you could do no wrong in my eyes, but I never understood why he wasn’t in the movie. So Paul explained to me that he was committed to Gilda Live! on Broadway, which is why Murphy Dunne is in the film. It’s too bad he wasn’t able to be in the film, because over the years I’ve heard Dan Aykroyd talk about that blues bar he had with John Belushi, and Paul was very much part of that scene.

  If I had a real book or fake book, it was the Blues Brothers movie that led me to all this other music. I made cassette tapes of those songs and learned them religiously. Through his work with the Blues Brothers on Saturday Night Live and on tour, Paul was part of reawakening the old blues music, and for me that was a great way to get into the Stax sound. I was an ignorant kid in the suburbs and had no desire to learn the Stax history. I just thought, Wow, that really sounds good—it’s that Saturday Night Live sound. I was proudly ignorant. It was terrible and wonderful. If I had homework to learn about Stax, I wouldn’t have done it, but because it was on TV, that was my world. It allowed me to treat it with the reverence needed for me to get good at it. I really think it would have fucked me if I knew about things. That’s why Arnie Lawrence called us the Dummies because our ignorance was bliss.

  And when I made my final appearance on the Letterman show during its last weeks, after I played some riff, Paul leaned over and said, “Arnie Lawrence would be proud.” I thought that was pretty cool.

  Actually the second time I met Paul after the time I got an autograph outside Rockefeller Center was through the New School. We had a field trip to a studio where we got to watch a session and meet Paul. He introduced himself and said, “Hi, I’m . . . Paul.”

  Then the third time was a few years later when I was on the show. He had heard that Bill Graham was managing us and was very deferential. For me it was mark of coming up in the word, how Paul Shaffer reacted to us.

  Over the years, when I was on Letterman, Paul would usually give me a call earlier in the week. Then on the night of the show I’d have about forty minutes before the show, if that, to work out the songs we were going to do, and the band had already done their homework (the real homework was that they were so generally prepared and such solid musicians that it was pretty easy for them; they would decide songs on the fly quite often). The way Paul worked with me as an improvising musician was to say, “I’ll cue you, you blow for a while, and we’ll throw it back to a melody, the head. Then just keep your eye on me, and we’ll stop when the commercial comes in.” Bernie Worrell was in his band for a while, but he had to leave because he wouldn’t stop for the commercial breaks; he would keep on playing.

  The whole time I was on Letterman Paul would be telling me stuff in my ear—“We’re going to do ‘Low Rider’ next in the key of G—be ready.” Or, ‘We’re doing to do this Animals tune,” and he’d name it. I’d say, “I don’t know how that goes,” and he’d sing me the melody because I am not an encyclopedia and he knew how to handle that.

  When Blues Traveler got bumped the first time, I was sitting in with Paul’s band, so I didn’t know about it. He was the one who told me, “We ran out of time; you’re getting bumped. You can’t play because we’re mean, horrible people.” But I felt like it was all part of a rich tradition; it felt like a great show-business moment—“I’m being bumped, how professional.”

  What’s ironic about being bumped is that we were bumped for Bill Murray—that was the first time we ever met Bill Murray—and the cool part is we were all in first class, flying out to play Letterman, and he got bumped out of first class because we took all of the first-class seats. So it was kind of a mutual bumping.

  In 1993 Paul hired me for his World’s Most Dangerous Party record. He later played on four, he did something on “Stand” and he’s
in our “Hook” video. On the Party record I did a session with Dana Carvey and Mike Myers. The two of them were trying to talk to me, and I kept forgetting to respond to them because I was used to just looking at them on TV—“Oh, you’re talking to me.” You forget that. It’s not like you’re an imbecile; it’s more like you’re hypnotized.

  Another important thing I have to say about Letterman, though, is that one of the first times I did it Julia Roberts walked out and kissed me square on the lips. It was like she had a thing she wanted to do, and then she sat down to talk to Dave. It was so surreal, I couldn’t believe it. I knew I was on TV, so I was respectful, but the whole time my lips were tingling. I remember thinking, Wow, the sexiest woman alive just kissed me full on the lips. And that woman’s got some lips.

  In January 2015 I was playing in a brewery in Taos, New Mexico, with Scott Rednor’s band, Brothers Keeper, and I’m not much of a beer drinker, so I mentioned that I’d like someone to get me something other than a beer. And this woman wearing glasses kept coming up throughout the night to bring me vodka. When I thanked her I realized it was Julia Roberts. She had her glasses on and was dolled up, but she was regular dolled up—she didn’t have her TV hair on. She had her regular going-out–to-have-fun hair. At one point I told her, “I loved it when you kissed me on David Letterman in front of America.” She said “I can’t believe you remember that!” At first Jordan, my then girlfriend, now wife, was a little jealous, but then she realized who it was, and her friend said, “If she makes $20 million per film and her husband’s there, I don’t think you can get jealous.”

  Speaking of January, Letterman always liked the studio really cold. Your average air conditioner gets to 55 degrees if you really crank it but he put in a special air conditioner to get it to 45 degrees because he figured that, with the lights, that kept it below 60. It’s true, and I always found his stage quite refreshing. It’s eccentric, but I could see the methods.