Suck and Blow

by John Popper

  I felt that as long as I was trying to do the thing that was out of my comfort zone—meeting people, talking to people, and hanging out with people I didn’t know—then I would be better. I think a large part of this is that Bobby was my conduit to the world; he was my social ambassador. I would go out with him for a night on the town, and now I was going out by myself.

  I got the tattoo before the frigging Memento movie, but nobody believes me. I remember my dad said it would be cooler if it read, “I Must Be Brave” or “I Am Brave,” but I think the braver thing is to admit that I need to be brave, that I want to be brave.

  Throughout all of this I still am a fan of appetites. I’m just going from one vice to another instead of just focusing on one. I think that one thing I learned after that weight loss operation is that it doesn’t have it be one thing. Spread it around—have a bad meal and then get a little drunk and then do a little blow—just don’t be cokehead, don’t be an alcoholic, and don’t be four hundred pounds. I’m all for having a vice, but don’t let it be something that destroys you or makes you miss out on doing things. Just be healthy enough to live long enough to do the things you like to do. It sounds simple, but let’s assume that the things you like to do are not that good for you.

  The truth is that life is kind of a crapshoot and you don’t know how long you’re going to live. But to use that as an excuse doesn’t wash. I’m still not a terribly healthy person, but as long as I’m healthier, life will treat me like I’m trying to live.

  It can be a bitch, and I’m not sure what death is like, but this is better than not being allowed to see again or walk again or fuck again or even eat the thing you like again. I know there are some addictions where you can never touch these things anymore, but maybe at that point you can say, “I’ve had enough of them. I’ve already done that.” You can look at it not as a waste but that you’ve had your allotment all at once.

  So you want to have some good things and some bad things. You probably need to do more good things to support the bad things, but when you do the bad things, they should be completely joyful and guilt-free because you’ve earned them. That is what I’m going to go to my grave expounding, at whatever age that may be. But that’s okay because nobody’s really looking to me for health advice.

  25

  THE BRIDGE

  I’m not sure what the appropriate mourning period should have been, but we began talking about bass players within days after Bobby died. It was probably a survival mechanism. It was as though our family was falling apart and the preservation of the band gave us purpose. I know Bobby would have wanted us to keep going, but I still find it bizarre that the way we dealt with our grief was to keep functioning as a band.

  The first thought it my head was Dave Wilder, with whom we went to high school. He was an amazing bass player, so I called him up within a few days of Bobby’s death and he said, “I’ve got this gig with this girl in LA named Macy Gray.” I said, having seen his other bands, which, though good, were really much smaller, “No offense, but this is a good opportunity,” and he said, “No, I think I’m going to stick this one out.” I hung up and thought to myself, Macy Gray, what is he thinking? Then I saw her on television and got it right away.

  I went to Oteil Burbridge at this same time. I might even have gone to him first because he is the absolute best bass player I had ever played with, but he said, “No, I’ve signed on with the Allman Brothers and I’ve got to see it through.”

  Meanwhile Chan was thinking of his little brother. I knew Tad was good and was willing to do what we needed, but what really made it work was that he was different from Bobby. We put him in an audition with three or four bass players. One of them did a good Bobby impression, but that just made us sad because we thought the worst thing we could have done was to try to be what the band was with Bobby in it. It would be us misplacing our reverence for him.

  The other thing that wound up being fairly important is that we’d grown up with Tad. We’d known him since the band started, when he was in the seventh or eighth grade and he had seen all the early days of the band, which really made for a seamless tradition, as he was family.

  As we were doing this, a lot of very good friends couldn’t come anymore. The band with Bobby in it came to mean something very nostalgic to them and reminded them of a time when it felt like their family, so they had to stay away because they missed Bobby. I understood, and there were times I felt that way myself, but we had to be there. And as we decided on Tad we were also auditioning keyboard players. We’d always talked about getting one, and this seemed to be the time. One of the guys was Jason Crosby. I still tease him about this because he wouldn’t have had enough to do, as he plays both violin and keyboard—I would have been endlessly fighting him for solos.

  We hired Ben Wilson in that process. He was the clear early favorite and never stopped being so. By bringing in a keyboard player, we really committed to moving away from our original sound while opening up some new avenues.

  And as it happened, there was still a record we could go make. People were still interested, and we still could tour on it. Within a year I lost a lot of weight, and our story became the story of how we came back from that.

  While we were starting to develop the band and build what became the Bridge album, we also made a wonderful discovery: Austin, Texas. It became the backdrop for our next chapter. At this time I was in Pennsylvania, Chan was in LA, Tad was in Brooklyn, Ben was in Ann Arbor, and Brendan was in Seattle. So we’d all converge on Austin, in the middle of the country, where it was warm and there was a music scene. We never got to do that with Bob, and it’s unfortunate because he would have loved Austin as a place to make albums.

  The first thing the five us worked on together was The Sun and the Storm, a rock opera we had started with Bobby. Ultimately we put together an abbreviated version that had all six band members on it because Tad and Ben had finished what Bobby had started with us.

  The starting point was that Aesop’s Fable in which the sun and the north wind are having an argument over who’s more powerful, so they make a bet about which of them can make a man take his coat off. The north wind blows as hard as he can and the man holds his coat even tighter, and the sun gets warmer and warmer until the man takes his coat off. That’s the moral of the story: you catch more flies with warm sunshine.

  In my story they up the ante. The storm says, “I’ll take the form of his desires, dreams, and aspirations, and the sun will take the form of true love.” So he’s battling for true love, and this was a reflection of how I was looking for a balance between an interior life and my dreams of conquest and plunder.

  We released it online during the fall of 2000, just before we began our first tour together in October. It was a brutal time because we felt we had to demonstrate to everyone that we were still a live force, which we were, while I was still on the path to recovery from the bypass and at times would be throwing up and feeling ill.

  We actually had our first gig in New Orleans two weeks after the surgery. I was on a strict liquid diet of smoothies, and Susan Bank, our manager, accidentally brought me a smoothie with sugar in it, and I shit the bed. That caused me to be so dehydrated that I had to go to the emergency room and get rehydrated intravenously. It was a challenge finding someone to get me to the hospital because everybody was drunk at this bar—I remember Chan was passed out on the pool table.

  While we were developing the new five piece I wanted to make some changes in the way the band operated. I didn’t want the guys to receive the same dictatorial edicts from me, and for two reasons. First, I didn’t think it was the best use of musicians who were really good. And second, it was taking a horrible, terrible toll on me. When somebody on your team dies because of the way you’re doing your business, it’s a chance to ask yourself what else is going on with your life and really embrace that and deal with it.

  Part of that decision was to have Tad and Ben come right in and take a hand in the set lists. For
many years this had been Bobby’s role, and it could be a rather thankless role, particularly when he had to sit through the complaints of the three other guys who hadn’t put in the effort. Still, we had felt that we were in a rut of playing the same set over and over, so we agreed to divide it up. We came up with an anagram: Big Cock Blow Job for Brendan Chan Bobby John.

  Everybody had their favorite songs. You can always spot mine because I go for the schmaltzier stuff, which they call my vagina songs, like “Sweet Pain” or “Alone”—they were always in my sets. Chan always wanted a rocking set, whereas Brendan wanted something with lots of power, like “Crash Burn” or “Fallible.” And Bobby wanted something as Grateful Deady as he could get it.

  I’d come after Bob. He’d always start things off with “Ivory Tusk.” That was one of his trademarks because he always felt it was a good first song. Brendan would come after my set, and he’d react by writing the metaliest set he could.

  The other thing I did—and this really drove the band crazy—is that I wanted to see how many segues we could do. So I would write a fourteen-song segue and what Brendan pointed out to us is that I would exhaust the band. But what I also noticed is that they’d complain less about a seven-song segue, so pretty soon we were doing five-song segues without any problem, and initially that had been a problem.

  So as we began ramping up the live show once again, we decided to throw Tad and Ben into the mix. It wasn’t exactly trial by fire like the old days, but I think they felt enough internal pressure to keep them honest. Of course we needed a snappy acronym, and after cogitating on that one for a little while, we came up with Big Cock Tiny Blow Job (Brendan, Chan, Tad, Ben, John). Blues Traveler was back in business.

  Patrick Clifford, the guy who originally signed us to A&M (he was the one who came out to the Buddy Miles extravaganza at Wetlands) and certainly was familiar with the original quartet, saw the new five-piece and told me, “I see what you’ve done—you’ve become a jazz band.” I sort of understand what he meant: we take extended solos rather than jamming like a Grateful Dead thing. I think Bobby was a sloppier bass player; he was more about feel than precision, so that enabled us to do really cool personalized feels. But at times he limited us to two chords when we were rehearsing and writing. So we were a band of really great feels and not much harmonic texture.

  Bridge came out in May 2001. On that album we were wrestling with the issues after Bobby’s death while we were also trying to have some cohesion. It was the bridge to the next thing. We were taking different steps and cautious steps, but earnest steps. That’s what I really liked about Bridge. Then Truth Be Told was us being the band that we are, and ¡Bastardos! was us trying to grow.

  It all started with Bridge, which is also where it ended with A&M. Actually Straight on till Morning was our final record with A&M because 1998 was the year of the big Seagram’s buyout of A&M’s parent label Polygram, in which hundreds of acts were dropped. We made it through, but Bridge came out on Interscope.

  The label president was Tom Whalley, who killed my Zygote record and then told me how he would have fixed it, had he cared. He invited Blues Traveler to his mansion, where his servants brought out the heads of his former musicians to dine as he spoke in dulcet tones about what he had in mind for us.

  What did he have in mind for us? The privilege of spending $20,000 for two seconds worth of tiger. The “Girl Inside My Head” video from Bridge cost us over $200,000 because the deal was that the band would split expenses with the label. We ended up with a half-million-dollar video, and he paid half of it, including $40,000 for the rental of a Bengal tiger that barely appears.

  During our previous video for “Carolina Blues” I had to stand outside in the rain alone on a giant steel bridge in the middle of a Louisiana lightning storm. Not only was I on this steel bridge, but it was an aerial lift bridge, and they raised it up even further so they could film me against the sky. I was on it lip synching for five hours while the band looked on from a nice dry window. “Girl Inside My Head” was going to be my payback. I played a hip-hop mogul, and they gave me a bald wig and a gold chain. I got to be in bed with Playboy bunnies in lacy underwear (them, not me, and not real Bunnies, but close enough, including Chan’s wife) having a money fight with piles of cash while a machine blew feathers on us. I remember seeing Brendan pulling up a chair and watching, and that almost made it weird.

  In the middle of this there was a Bengal tiger gathered around the pool at my fancy party. They brought the tiger out, and it growled like, Mmm . . . delicious! When I heard the rumble in its belly, it sounded like it was right above me, and then I learned it could leap across the pool like it was nothing. Everyone on the shoot figured out pretty quickly that this tiger could easily get to any of us who were within fifty feet. Then I realized they weren’t telling the tiger what to do; they were asking it. We were supposed to be cavorting like it was a party with beach balls flying and splashing, and the handler said, “Don’t make any sudden movements—it upsets the tiger.” So what you have is the most timid and tentative cavorting and partying during that scene because we didn’t want to piss off the tiger. It cost $40,000 for that tiger, so that was $20,000 to us, and when the video aired, the camera passed by the tiger for less than two seconds.

  So that’s what Tom Whalley did: he helped us spend some money and killed my solo album. Oh, he also gave the guy from Limp Bizkit an office—he named Fred Durst senior vice president of the label. So there you have it, Tom Whalley. Ladies and gentlemen, the man is a mogul, who can touch him, what a genius.

  He left Interscope at the end of the year for Warner Bros. Records. We lasted about a year longer, at which point we owed $4 million to the label. Thankfully they let us go with that money unrecouped. Scott McGhee took over for Dave Frey as our manager in 2001, and getting us out of that debt was one of the best things he did. Imagine owing them $4 million. Dear Lord.

  26

  HOWARD’S TURN

  The first time I heard Howard Stern was on NBC radio. I was used to Imus in the Morning, so his rhythm seemed off, and I had never heard radio like that.

  Gradually, as I moved to New York and we would be going to bed in the morning after doing gigs all night, he was the cherry at the end of my day. We became huge Stern fans, just like most people in our generation.

  Then one day while I was listening Stern mentioned our “Run-Around” video. He was saying, “Imagine you’re the manager of that band and you have to tell them they’re not attractive enough to be in the video.” The thing that galled me was that it was our idea. The whole premise of the video was that other people would shoot it and we would be behind the curtain—the attraction was that we only had to be there for two hours.

  The stupidest thing you ever do is your video, and to avoid actually working on this video seemed ahead of the curve to us. A normal video requires about twelve hours of filming a day, and to get that down to two was just brilliant. I wanted to call him and gloat over the fact that “Hey, we knew we were too ugly to be in the video. That was our idea.”

  It got me so worked up that I actually called in, and as it happened his producer, Gary Dell’Abate, knew Susan Bank, who was one of our managers—they’d gone to school together or something. So Gary quizzed me, “Who is your manager?” And then they he got me on the air and Howard soon realized that I was willing to talk about anything.

  The only issue was that he was always trying to turn my volume down because I grew up with seven kids and I had to shout over everybody.

  I was so happy to be there because I would always fall asleep to Howard Stern, so I’d have the same dream over and over again that Howard and Robin and I were having a conversation but they wouldn’t respond to me. So we were having this great conversation, but whatever I interjected they ignored. This was a recurring dream, so whenever they would talk to me, I was so excited that I conditioned my brain: You want to cram as much as you can into a session.

  I’ve had a ball every time I’ve
gone on there. My mom worked in the same building but didn’t want him to know because she was afraid he would send someone over to her law firm to harass her. So she made me promise never to tell him.

  I met his wife, Beth Ostrosky, before people knew they were dating. We were doing Letterman, they hired her to be a chorus girl, and she told me, “I want you to know I’m secretly Howard’s girlfriend, but we’re not supposed to tell anybody.” She said that because she knew me from the show; I was very flattered about that, but I was also thinking that a lot of people probably believe they are secretly Howard Stern’s girlfriend. So I said, “That’s great,” but in my head I thought, Perhaps she only thinks she is. As it turned out, she really was.

  They invited me to this wonderful New Year’s party at his apartment one year, and my fiancé at the time got completely drunk and I had to carry her out of there, so I missed the magician. Marilyn Manson was there. Kevin Smith was there, and my then-fiancée had some sort of sexual confrontation with his wife in the bathroom. Artie Lang and I took over Howard’s bedroom, and it became the smoking room.

  I wrote “Fallible” as an observation on the Stern show. I tried to explain that to him once, but he didn’t see it. It’s very metaphorical, but if you look at the lyrics, it’s about the Stern show’s process, in which they’re so honest, sort of like group therapy on the radio. It’s about tearing down the veneer of that painted porcelain face. It still stands on its own, though, for someone who doesn’t know anything about Stern.