Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  Ultimately the live show has been our staple. Throughout the nineties this meant a culmination on New Year’s Eve. After our Madison Square Garden show in 1996–1997 we moved out of New York. By the next year Chan was expecting his baby, and he and his wife, Serena, were living in Florida, so he had to be nearby—I think she delivered on the 24th. So on December 30 and 31 we performed at the Pompano Beach Amphitheatre. Because it was Florida, for the black cat’s death we went with a Miami Vice drug deal gone bad. We hired some Rasta-looking Jamaicans in suits with machine gun pistols firing blanks—one guy was a practicing Rastafarian and did not believe in depicting violence, so we had to talk him into that. Amidst the carnage and bloodshed a briefcase opened and plumes of white powder flew out. We learned to play “Conga,” and that was a lot of fun.

  The cat’s ninth life expired on December 31, 1998, in Chicago at the Aragon Ballroom. We reenacted the Chicago fire, and the cat fell from a balcony. Dave Graham, who was still portraying the cat, had to jump out of a building and fall into some boxes below. He was very excited about that.

  So we made it through all nine lives of the cat and almost immediately began thinking about what we were going to do for the year 2000—maybe the cat was going to return like a phoenix rising. But that never happened because Bobby died that summer. That was the last life of the cat.

  23

  PRETTY ANGRY

  In the spring of 1999 I recorded my Zygote album. Zygote was about me saving my own life. I was 436 pounds and had done nothing but Blues Traveler since high school. The idea was to take six months after the release in September, tour it, and then go back to Blues Traveler.

  I knew that Bobby felt somewhat uneasy about this, but when I told everyone in the band what I had in mind, to his credit, Bobby stood up, looked me in the eye, and said, “I think it’s the right thing to do, and I’m very happy for you.” But I could also tell he was a little scared. I think he sensed the same thing: we were running out of places to go and live our lives the way we were.

  What I was looking to do with that opportunity was to create something un–Blues Traveler with my friend Crugie Riccio from high school. He had this really cool punk feel on the guitar but always in weird time signatures, and I always wanted to work that angle. It was a promise to an old friend that we really have to work together—one of a few I would make over the years to follow.

  It all got off to a strange start, though, even before the first session. I was trying to move into my little room in Hoboken, and Allen Woody, who I knew from the Allman Brothers and Gov’t Mule, was in there, completely drunk, and wouldn’t leave. He was a really sweet soul, and they were trying to get him out of the room to take him to the airport, but he was shitfaced wasted and just kept on saying my name over and over again—“John Popper . . . John Popper. We go back . . . John Popper, you sweet motherfucker . . .” He knew I was trying to get him out, and he did not want to leave. He was packed and everything, but he was just sitting in the kitchen, seriously plowed, and did not want to go. Eventually he did, and that was the last time I saw him alive. It was about a year later when he passed. He and Bobby had some of the same impulses. It was really unfortunate.

  Once we got started, it was Carter Beauford who saved the album. I’ll always love Brendan Hill, and I love Marcus Bleecker, who would be the drummer on the John Popper Project. But Carter is one of the best drummers in the world, hands down.

  A lot of the ideas were very rough, and he made them work. I was trying to use dynamics, where sometimes I would use the drums and sometimes I wouldn’t, and he was great at just floating there. It was a lot of rough ideas, and I was improvising, but time and again Carter would save the song by making a smooth transition. I had an Irish whistle solo and needed some sort of pocket in the back to try all this artistic shit. I had guitar solos over a 1980 beat-box effect that would work if there were a real drummer making it all breathe, but I needed an amazing drummer so that it wouldn’t sound derivative of a thousand other things. He pulled it all out of his pocket as if it were nothing.

  It seemed like Carter was in the middle of six other gigs. He was always on his cell phone. They were taking a picture of us for the album, and he was still on his phone, so I told him I wanted him to stay on his phone for the picture because that’s how I wanted to remember him for the album.

  Just before I recorded Zygote, as I was getting ready to begin my long-awaited, therapeutic treat for myself, I also received a call from Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks: “Hey man, we’re going to do this jam—you gotta come down to Florida!”

  You can’t say no to Butch; he’s a force of nature. I remember we once had this gig in Vegas where he walked right past security and onto the stage. No one stopped him because he’s Butch—how do you stop the drummer from the Allman Brothers from doing whatever the hell he wants at a rock show? So he came out while I was singing and said, “Hey man, how are you doing?” He was a little lit and was talking to me like he wanted an answer. I was singing, so after I finished a verse, I answered him, “Hey man, I’m good. I’m just doing this thing right now.” So he said, “What are you doing? How long are you here for?” My manager at the time, Scott McGhee, was there and stepped over to talk to him, and I don’t know what he said, but Butch’s vibe was, I will fucking kill you if you get between me and my friend here. And that’s Butch. You can’t stop him—least I don’t think I can—and none of my crew was going to try. So I went to Florida to join the Frogwings project.

  Frogwings was all monsters. You had Butch and Marc Quinones—when you bring the drumming artillery like that, it’s hard for it to be a bad show. Then on guitars it was Derek Trucks and Jimmy Herring. Oteil Burbridge was on bass, and there’s something about a great bassist and the harp because one’s so low and one’s so shrill. They always end up dancing around each other.

  This time away from Blues Traveler had been my big chance to settle down and focus on making an album, and then all of a sudden, “Oh yeah, let’s write some songs and make a whole other album while we’re waiting.” But there was no saying no to Butch, and there was no saying no to Derek and Oteil and Jimmy—those guys are monsters (and I mean that as players because they’re three of the sweetest guys). The logistics of that now would never allow such an album to occur. There are too many motherfuckers, and they each have their own plans. I was really spoiled in that all these motherfuckers were hanging around where I could get at them and whip up a project with them.

  We went and rehearsed for five days. There were tons of great riffs, and I put words to some of them. One of these was a riff Oteil had written for Blues Traveler years back. I also recall at one point my amp feedbacked right into Oteil’s ear, and I said, “Oh my God, I’m sorry.” He looked up like he didn’t notice and said, “I work for Dickey Betts” and went back to reading his paper.

  So we rehearsed, did seven gigs in the Northeast, and recorded a live album, which came out around the time of my Zygote album. At the time I wondered whether it was going to be a problem, but they were so different. One is pure musicianship, and one is song concepts. I love how I made two albums. The Frogwings’ album has some cult status, and I’m grateful it didn’t disappear. That was one of those albums that made me feel like I earned my stripes.

  We finished up Zygote in May, and a few weeks later I took a little trip to Hawaii with a girlfriend. We were in the hot tub, fooling around, and I started feeling chest pains. I didn’t know at the time, but hot tubs are really bad for your circulation. I said, “I’ve got to go to a doctor and check this out because this just isn’t normal.”

  There had been some time before that when I would be whacking off to porn and suddenly I’d get chest pains and not feel so good. Before it would calm down I would get this shivery feeling and my teeth would start chattering. I’d stop what I was doing and that would calm down and I’d start to feel better, but the porn was still going. So I’d get horny and start up again, and the same thing would happen. This went
on for hours; it was almost tantric. It was annoying.

  We had some shows coming up, including Red Rocks, so after a Rainforest Action Network benefit at the Warfield, in which Phil Lesh sat in with us, I figured I’d swoop down to LA from San Francisco to check in with my doctor about the chest pains and then head off to Colorado. I visited the doctor, thinking it would be a formality: he’d give me a new pill or something. Instead, he told me I was 95 percent blocked in every artery and had to get into bed immediately. You don’t quite believe it when they tell you that, and it turned out there was no way in hell I could make Red Rocks.

  They had to give me an angioplasty. They kept me awake, and as they put that steel wire in my heart, it felt as if they were blowing warm air into my innards. It was a very creepy feeling. At that moment the idea of ever having a cigarette again became abhorrent to me. I felt that if I had one more cigarette, I would die.

  Red Rocks is a tradition we continue—really the only tradition from the early days of the band—and that’s the only time we missed it. People thought I’d died—a rumor spread that I’d had a heart attack. But I didn’t have an actual heart attack because they put a stent in my heart and cleared me. A heart attack means that the actual heart muscle is damaged. Because they fixed the blockage before I had any damage done to my heart, I did not have a true heart attack. This might be lost on some people, but the important thing is I still have 100 percent function in my heart, which is what’s essential when you’re talking about heart disease. They then told me I had to lose weight or else I would have a 25 percent chance of imminent death. It’s a weird thing when you’re told there’s only a 75 percent change of living if you do nothing, and that was a rather scary statistic.

  Then the band held an intervention, appearing in my hospital room to tell me, “John, you need to change your life.” Chan and Brendan showed up, but Bobby wasn’t there. My intervention became the two of them saying, “John, we’re really worried about Bobby.” He showed up a couple of hours after everybody left and looked purple. His speech was kind of slurred as he told me I needed to get my act together, and that was the last time I ever saw him alive.

  I was with my Zygote band, preparing for a tour to support this new record when our crew guy Bob Mahoney came in crying and told me Bobby had died. I immediately got in my car, and it became a week of being on call for everybody. They all wanted a hug, and I wanted to hug everyone as much as they wanted to hug me. That’s what funerals are like—you’ve got to howl at the moon with everyone else.

  After the funeral we just started hugging everybody—friends, friends of friends, fans. It became a hug off. I was really hugged out and burnt by the end of it. It became too much. That was a really tough day, tough month, tough year. It was brutal.

  I just wanted to be useful to people. At the wake Bobby’s old girlfriend wanted me to put something in his pocket, which I agreed to do. His brother asked me if I could remove the custom Blues Traveler ring that someone had made for each of us. I did that as well. I was in a daze, and the whole situation was heartbreaking.

  Bobby and I were addicts. My addiction was food, and his were a lot of other things—I won’t go into specifics because his mom got upset when I tried to talk about his addictions on the air once, and she’s his mom—but his addictions killed him and mine almost killed me.

  When someone you love dies so suddenly and you see in retrospect how it was leading to that, you want to blame yourself. But those were choices he made just as I was making choices that weren’t really good for me that led my band to get me help. We tried getting Bobby help, but that didn’t work. We tried to be there for him, but we failed horribly and the reason for that failure is an addict has to do the work himself.

  This is where I sometimes feel bad because I knew for a fact that if I didn’t get off the road and do something for myself, which became the Zygote record, I was going to die. I felt it coming. But I also had a really strong suspicion that if I took that structure away from Bobby, if I stopped our endless touring, he would die.

  At some point I chose me. And as soon as the doctor told me I had a 25 percent chance of dying, I knew I had made the correct decision. I recognized, Oh my God, that decision was real. It wasn’t a paranoid choice in my head; it was a real choice I had to make.

  I was going to a shrink who told me I should be trying to do something for me because then you can take that satisfaction and return it to the work. It doesn’t mean I didn’t love doing Blues Traveler, but at that point it was all I was doing. And I was dying. I was getting fatter and fatter; it was just the way it worked. I hid out a lot and just ate while he just partied. He did all the social butterflying, and I did none of it. We were such extremists in that regard.

  We were like Alexander’s army—we were looking for more objectives. But we didn’t know how to function without constantly being on a war footing and constantly touring.

  Brendan and Chan had enough sense of self-worth that they were able to start families for themselves. Bobby and I did not know how to do that, but I knew I wanted it. Bobby knew he wasn’t happy, but he was at the beginning of the place where he could start to deal with it. I think he was almost there. It’s a function of growing up, and Bobby and I were children as long as we could be.

  I think everybody in “normal existence” eventually is confronted with the reality that they can’t go on living completely for the moment or for themselves. But for Bobby and me, the band functioned as a place where we could continue to live in that moment. We viewed it as something beyond us, and I don’t think either of us ever worked out what to do if our dreams for the band came true.

  By 1996 it was clear that the dream had come true, and we couldn’t figure out what to do next. From 1996 to 1999 we were trying to have that life, which meant buying a home and being financially stable. And we were dating, trying to have a significant other, but I had no interior life and neither did Bobby. It was something we were both trying to figure out, but while we were doing that, we were busy destroying ourselves.

  It’s very incremental. You think, I did this yesterday, so why can’t I keep doing it today? and gradually you get more and more isolated. I knew I didn’t want to be isolated. I knew there was something I could do about it, but I wasn’t sure what that was. Lord knows I wasn’t losing weight. That was something I couldn’t do; that I was something I was powerless to fix.

  When it came to food or my appetite, it was always, “What can I do given that I have these appetites?” That’s something I still wrestle with today. I don’t think appetites are bad; it’s acknowledging them that’s the important part.

  Bobby and I knew no other way as adults, and that manic behavior of ours made the band great. But we were built for wartime, and then when there was no war, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.

  It’s kind of trite to say, but I think Bobby’s passing saved my life in a shortcut kind of way. When you lose somebody, you always want their passing to mean something, but really his death was an accident. He did something dumb. He had sleep apnea, so he could choke in his sleep really easily.

  I think I would have been much more into drugs had I not taken an antidrug stance. I was worried about Bobby, but I was also worried about the business. I figured that if it’s away from me and I’m where the business is, then it won’t be around in the business.

  I knew that you could never stop cocaine from being on the road because too many people have it (and I came to enjoy it later in life). So I said, “If I see any crack around me, I’m going home.”

  Two things happened as a result. One, I never saw any crack being smoked on the road. Two, any cocaine use on the road was kept away from me. What that did was to start the lie: “No, I’m not doing any drugs at all.” When he would do drugs, I wouldn’t know about it. His priority wasn’t, “Let’s get clean.” His priority was, “Let’s keep it away from John.”

  At that time I was considered the teetotaler. I partied and I’d drink and s
moke weed but nowhere on the order of my bandmates, so I was still considered the straight one. So any attempt to get Bobby to stop doing drugs just drove him away from our circle, where he would find friends to do drugs with. That’s how drugs work. It was a dangerous thing because if you’re really trying to help somebody, you have to keep some communication going.

  So I became the cop. Chan didn’t have a leg to stand on because he wasn’t sober, which left me as the sheriff of drugs. This wasn’t fair because I did drugs, just not with the regularity that became the norm out there.

  Brendan was incredibly disciplined and very loving to his girlfriend, who became his wife. He always emphasized that he had a work life and a private life. His one thing was that he loved to drink, and on occasion he would get crazy and it was pretty fun. Sometimes, just to mess with him, I’d give him the nickname Brendan “Blackout Alcoholic” Hill. But he wound up taking that very seriously, and if there were an episode where that happened, he’d stop and check himself. And Chan would do that too. He’d party really hard, but he also took care of his body, so he’d say, “I don’t feel right. I’m going to stop for two weeks.” He’d do that periodically and monitor himself.

  Then when Chan got married and had a kid, he changed. Chan always said that Bobby felt like he’d lost his running buddy, and that was Chan’s guilty issue. My guilty issue is that I made it so Bobby couldn’t talk about it, which in a way drove him further into it.

  Bobby and I did not know how to grow from the places we had been for a decade. Brendan and Chan were starting families, while Bobby and I had failed miserably at even considering some sort of a life at home. I had bought a house, and he had just bought a house, but he bought a house in New Orleans, which was a very dangerous place for him to be.