by John Popper
I’ve left a harmonica at the Acropolis, Napoleon’s tomb, Louis Armstrong Park, Buddy Holly’s grave, Graceland, and the Pyramids of Giza. I also placed one where I thought Julius Caesar was stabbed on the Senate steps. It turned out it was configured differently back then, so I may have buried it where Caesar walked by or went to the bathroom. But, hey, it’s the spirit that counts.
I placed one in Heroes’ Square in Budapest because that was my homeland and I had returned. I vowed never to return until I had a gig in Budapest. It was a very tiny gig, and the band who was supposed to go on before us conveniently got amnesia and forgot to show up until after we played so they could headline, which is a pretty cool trick, actually. But I was able to place a harmonica where Arpad, the Magyar chieftain, led his little tribe to Budapest and founded Hungary.
I’ve given them to plenty of actual living, breathing people as well. When I lived in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, I kept a basket of harmonicas by the front door to give out as tips or when people would come by and ask for them, which was a bit strange.
I gave one to Bill Clinton. I gave one to George W. Bush, but his people took it away. You’re not allowed to assault the president with a harmonica—apparently I could have stabbed him with it or something.
I gave one to Mitt Romney at one of the Republican conventions. He was the governor of Massachusetts at the time, and none of us knew who he was. He said, “Here’s a band who feels the way I do about the Second Amendment,” and then he looked back and winked at us.
I gave one to Quentin Tarantino, who used it in his acceptance speech at the MTV Movie Awards for Pulp Fiction.
I handed a few to Dave Letterman throughout our career, and he’d play them during commercial breaks. I gave one to Jay Leno. I gave one to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, and he said I was made of harmonicas.
The only man who ever refused to take one from me was Hugh Hefner. I went to the Playboy Mansion, and there was Hef in his robe. I said, “I’m a big fan, so I’d like to give you something,” and he told me, “Oh no, I don’t take those.” I was kind of stunned because no one ever denied a harp from me before—admittedly, that is a little conceited of me—who the hell am I? But the question I had was, who else has offered him a harmonica so that he made this a policy? Did they used to hand them out like candy in the sixties, but he had bad trip with one? Was he going cold turkey after snorting them or ingesting them in some way? And then being Hugh Hefner, you assume he was thinking about doing something dirty with one. Maybe what he was thinking was that it could give him hepatitis or a communicable disease?
Speaking of Playboy, I once had Anna Nicole Smith come up to me after a show. This was the first time I had met her, and I noticed her right away because she was six feet tall and gorgeous in this enormous leopard-print-leotard thing. As she walked up to me, I was trying to intellectualize, I don’t succumb to the charms of women like that. I’m above that. This is what you tell yourself when you’re a fat guy. There’s more to me than just looks. I guess somebody had given her a harmonica I’d signed, and she came up to me, pulled it out of her cleavage, and asked, “Could you sign this for me again—I put it in my boobs and it sweated off.” And I looked at her with everything rational I could muster and said, “Okay!” and greedily signed it like a little boy. We got to hang out a few times afterward, but Anna Nicole completely floored me, and that was a good use of a harmonica.
I gave one to Steve Lemme from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe, who was really excited about it until he found out that I also gave one to Kevin Heffernan from Broken Lizard. Then he was crushed. Apparently he thought he was the only person who ever received a harmonica from me.
I was in LA doing Broken Lizard’s podcast when they were telling this story, and then this drunk guy came up. He didn’t know us; he just started bothering us because we were doing something. So to get rid of him I said, “How would you like a shiny new harmonica?” So I gave him one, and that just destroyed Steve again.
When you throw a harp out in the crowd, that’s its own little adventure. It all started because when harmonicas break, you can’t fix them. Howard Levy, who, in my opinion, is the best player out there on the blues harp, treats the reeds on his Golden Melodies and tries to repair them, but I find that once you bend a reed, you fatigue it to the point at which it will never be the same again.
So we came up with this ritual where we’d throw old ones into the crowd. It’s like when baseball players have got a bum ball and toss it into the stands. So by and large we throw them out there and then I sign them.
Here’s the bitch. Harmonicas started out at $10, and I signed a 50 percent endorsement deal, which is the best Hohner offers. You could be Moses and they would not let you have any more than a 50 percent deal. Eventually it crept up in price to $40, and I was Hohner’s biggest customer by far. I would buy more harmonicas than any six music stores in the country. They had my picture all over the thing, so I was paying twice as much money for the privilege of a package with my face on it. The picture should have just had me giving myself the finger.
The band pays for them collectively. So there have been nights when the sound is bad and I’ll throw a whole set into the crowd to punish us—there’s 250 bucks we’ll never see again.
This seems like a fine moment for some brief harmonica theory, with the core idea being that, as a diatonic player, I require twelve harps for a complete set. Diatonics are built around chords. When you exhale on a C diatonic harp, you get a C major chord; when you inhale, you get a G dominant chord (which is major except the seventh is flattened). What we blues-style players tend to do is use that G dominant as the root chord and the C as the “four” chord in relation to the tonic (G), so we’ll use a C harp to play songs in the key of G. This simple transposition makes a lot of traditional blues riffing possible and is commonly referred to as crossharp. The diatonic approach requires twelve different harps, one for each key. Every bluesy harp player and folk player from Little Walter to Dan Aykroyd to Bob Dylan or Neil Young uses them.
Chromatic harmonicas are almost an entirely different instrument. They are not built around chords but rather to have all notes available as would any other instrument. They achieve this with a button that shifts air access to equivalently arranged scales a semitone higher to cover all the notes in the Western twelve-tone scale. Concert greats like Toots Thielemans and Stevie Wonder favor this instrument, as do most symphonic harmonica players (it’s probably best not to incorporate the slang term “harp” when discussing symphonies, as they have actual harps in their arsenals). Robert Bonfiglio comes to mind, or Blackie Schackner, who made every harmonica sound you’ve heard in the Brady Bunch or late-sixties television.
Anyhow, after decades of buying harmonicas only to literally throw them away, things finally changed in 2015 when Fender debuted my signature model. They got together with the Seydel company from Germany, which is an even older harmonica company than Hohner. They’re laminated brass, and I’ve been able to give my input all along the way because I’m the one who’s going to be using them. It’s pretty cool. Rather than paying 50 percent, I actually get a small percentage of sales. These harmonicas aren’t disposable; they have replaceable reeds, which come with a low price, but it feels free compared to what I was used to.
Now we may have to get cheaper ones to throw to the crowd, and I’ll feel like an asshole doing that because what was fun was the purity of taking the harmonica I just played and then tossing them out there.
There are perils to throwing harmonicas from the stage. You have to gently lob them because they can be like throwing knives. They have weight in the center, so if you really whip them, there’s a spinning aspect.
In the old days we used to really try to get distance. And I don’t have good arm, so I’d give them to Chan. He could hit the end of a really large room any day of the week. But that changed one night in Boston when someone threw it back at him and hit him in the mouth. He left the stage bleeding, and I reall
y milked it: “Maybe we can get him back out to play,” and eventually he did.
After that we tried to throw them lightly, but invariably we’ll hit somebody in the head. That happens from time to time when they take a weird hop. Lawyers get involved.
One night at a H.O.R.D.E. concert this guy ran up to me with this bloody impression of a harmonica on his forehead and said, “Dude, I totally caught one of your harmonicas!” He clearly hadn’t seen a mirror, so I signed that thing right away before he could sue us.
The hot girl in the crowd wants one—I don’t know what she’s saying, but she seems really smart—but invariably that girl is terrible at fielding the harmonica. Everyone around her snatches it, so it takes four or five to get to her. And if you finally get it to the hot girl, she immediately gives it to her boyfriend—“Look at what I got you, honey!”
What I hate is when one lands right in the hands of the little hippie chick and then two frat guys’ elbows pincer her on each side of her head. Then she gets that blank look in her eyes and goes down into the crowd. The scary part is that you never see her again. There isn’t a bloody stain; you don’t see a body—she’s just gone. Where does she go? I never know where they go. I’m worried they’ll be waiting for me on the other side.
These days people are bringing their kids to shows, and you’ll get one to that little kid and then you’ll see his sister, all horrified: “He got one!” So then you throw her one. Then you realize this is a Mormon family and they’ve got fifteen kids, so the parents give you a look like, I’m sorry. We know we have too many children, but you have to equip us. I actually feel sorry for them because I’m giving them harmonicas in different keys, so the ride home sounds like traffic in Hong Kong. Have fun with that, Mom and Dad.
As I’ve said for nearly thirty years now, the harmonica is like life: sometimes you suck and sometimes you blow.
21
BANNER YEARS (OR TOOTIE GOES SHOOTIE)
I’ve played the “Star-Spangled Banner” quite a few times in my career, but my two most memorable “Banners” are the one that was postponed and the one that I missed.
It all goes back to high school. I’d go to gym assemblies and play my harmonica to advertise an upcoming Blues Band gig. The first time I did it, I just walked up to the mic, played a solo and then said “Come see our band!” From that point on everyone knew who I was and I started to begin feeling famous. People would pass me in the halls and call out, “Hey, Harmonica Guy!”
Pretty soon every time there was an assembly, people would start chanting for it. It became a thing. I always had a harmonica on me—that’s the great the thing about the instrument—it’s so portable. I’d play, and the whole place would go crazy. The vice principal would put up with it because everybody liked it.
There was this big kid who was upset because I would play the same thing over and over again because I was a crowd pleaser. One time he yelled out, right before I started, “Do something different this time!” He was that one asshole.
So I was determined to have something up my sleeve at the next school assembly. This was when I was worshipping Jimi Hendrix. I had watched his “Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock so many times that I decided to work on my own “Star-Spangled Banner.”
So when my moment arrived at the next assembly, I stepped up and played it. That first time it was closer to the normal kind of blues shuffle. Later on I’d learn how to feedback my amp, so I did that, and everybody was looking at me weird, like, What the hell was that? Then there was a murmur and I heard booing, which confused me. It turned out the vice principal was behind me, kicking me off because he recognized it was the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and apparently that was disrespectful.
Over the years I would drop it in here and there, mostly in tribute to Jimi, and then finally, in August of 1992, I played it at my first Major League Baseball game. This was during the southern leg of the initial H.O.R.D.E. tour. I played it before a Baltimore Orioles day game, during the first season at their new park. What you have to keep in mind at a baseball game is that it’s not rock and roll; it’s baseball—what they want is more melody with no feedback in it, so you need more rudiments.
My next big “Banner” was at Woodstock ’94. I had mono, but there was no way I was going to miss that gig. (I would miss Wood-stock ’99 because I was recovering from heart surgery.) So I came out there wearing my regrettable purple shirt (Barney again!), and I knew I was going to do my version. When I started I could hear the roar of two hundred thousand people, and that’s when I got a little scared, like the ghost of Jimi Hendrix was going to get me. But the New York Times commented on it, and I felt fancy. When I read the critique that Hendrix’s “Banner” was about the war and now it was about chops, I thought, Yeah, that’s fair. I just knew that someone was going to play it, and because we appeared on Friday, I was the first guy able to do so.
I think Game Four of the 1996 World Series in Atlanta was the biggest one. By then I had done the Orioles and the Colorado Rockies along with some hockey games and some basketball, but when you go to the stadium for the World Series, it’s crazy because it’s an international event. That was probably the largest coverage of me doing it because of the television broadcast.
I was supposed to do Game One at Yankee Stadium, but George Steinbrenner bagged me for Robert Merrill and the Yankees took a twelve-to-one pasting. At the game I did do, the Yankees came from six runs behind to win—the biggest comeback in World Series history since 1929—and then they won ten straight Series games. I like to take credit for that, although I’m not sure I can.
When I hit the high note and the crowd went nuts, I left my body for a second. Later, when I heard what the TV announcer said, I knew I had hit a good one. To me it always felt like hitting a ball—do you hit it far or do you hit a grounder? And that one was out of the park.
After they bumped me I made a big enough stink with MLB that they offered me Game Four, and the Braves said it was fine with them. I was allowed to bring a friend, so I brought Col. Bruce Hampton, a big Braves fan who was putting as much mojo on the Braves as I was putting on the Yanks. That was quite a game.
Asides from the Yankees comeback, the other surprise came when I was on the pitcher’s mound about to do the anthem and realized I was carrying a Glock in my fanny pack. I was used to doing gigs out on the road where the places we played could be dicey, so it was a thing I’d tuck away and never think about. This was pre-9/11, and I was licensed to carry in Georgia. They had waved me through security, and I had forgotten all about it until I was on the mound. Then I had nowhere else to put it, so I just kept it there.
After I finished the “Banner,” I went to my seat and was next to Tootie from Facts of Life (Kim Fields) and right behind the president of Panama. I was thinking I could have assassinated the president of Panama and thrown the gun into Tootie’s hands. I was imagining the stories that would run the next day—“Tootie runs amok at World Series, blames it on Blues Traveler guy, nobody believes her—Tootie Goes Shootie.” How fun would that be? I mean it would be really horrible, but just for the headline.
There are places you shouldn’t have guns, and I think airplanes and sporting events are two good ones, especially when you’re behind a world leader. Try not to be armed when you’re behind a world leader unless your job is to protect the guy. And I would like to state for the record, to all mental health officials, that I do indeed recognize my job was not to protect the president of Panama. It’s very important when you’re dealing with real bullets to know real things.
The next time I was really excited about performing a “Banner” was before Michael Jordan’s final home game with the Chicago Bulls at Game Five of the NBA finals. I was a big Bulls fan and a friend of Dennis Rodman, who by then was allowing me to use his box seats.
Eddie Vedder was another major Bulls fan. I first met Eddie while playing with Neil Young in Ontario during the summer of 1993 back while I was still in the wheelchair. Five years later, at
one of the Bulls’ parties, I remember Eddie was trying to explain to me his views about the world while I was going to take a leak. There was only one toilet in the bathroom of this little club, there were no stalls or urinals, and I was standing there for a while as he wouldn’t stop talking because he was so excited. I finally said to him, “I can’t go while you’re standing here.” And he apologized, but instead of leaving, he turned his back to me and turned on the faucet. So then I felt like the guy who couldn’t pee because he turned the faucet on and became the guy who couldn’t pee in front of Eddie Vedder.
I was really looking forward to this “Banner” at Jordan’s last home game in Chicago. The only complication was that I was in DC getting ready for the Tibetan Freedom Concert at RFK Stadium, which took place the next day. As it turned out, there was a problem with my flight. We had to land in Peoria and then I had to catch another flight to the game. Meanwhile Eddie, who was also playing at the concert, was able to get on an earlier flight. When the Bulls found out I wasn’t going to make it and that Eddie was already there, they made him sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
I finally arrived toward the end of the second quarter and was so bummed I had missed my chance. So I walked in, and Eddie Vedder came up to me, gave me the finger, and walked away. He thought I was doing some sort of diva thing. I guess because of the night we bonded in the bathroom, he felt comfortable enough to give me the finger when he thought I was pulling some prima donna shit.
Later on he apologized after he found out about my plane. We flew back to DC on the same flight, and he was trying to be incognito, with his hat pulled down over his face, while I was signing every autograph that came my way. He was probably nervous that I was going to point him out to people.
