by John Popper
Eventually we went back to Woody Harrelson’s room at the Four Seasons. I was with DJ Logic, and Bill dropped us off at the hotel. Logic had this cast on because he had broken his ankle or something. So Bill sat in the trunk of the SUV—it was just so awesome. I took a picture of it and told people that we’d kidnapped him, locked the car, and gone skinny dipping, but when we came back, there was broken glass and the car was gone, so I just went to my hotel, packed, and got the hell out of there. But all that really happened was that he gave us this cool ride.
There were a few of us in the room, and we were probably making a racket because at some point we heard Boom! Boom! Boom! on the door. The musician’s rule in this situation is to do any line that might be on the table and then leave because security’s here and you’re being thrown out. It was then that I learned about movie-star power because Matthew went to the door and took charge: “Good, I’m glad you guys are here. I’m going to need you to stand point—it’s going to be about two more hours.” And sure enough, I heard, “Oh right away, Mr. McConaughey.” So we got to party two more hours with a guard.
We then took the party over to C3’s management offices because Mat Whittington and Dave Geller were still trying to impress me and didn’t understand that their boss, Charles Attal, would have murdered them had he known that John Popper was bringing a bunch of movie stars and other people over to their offices to have a party. But seeing as the C3 offices were right next to the Four Seasons at that time, the convenience was undebatable. I remember seeing this punk-rock chick, who was operating the elevator and working for C3 in some capacity, acting very unimpressed until Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson stood on either side of her. Then she turned to royal jelly. When I finally left, I may have seen various people snuggling on rugs and other folks doing various things on executive desks that I still cannot fully attest to as fact. Suffice it to say, Dave Geller and Mat Whittington were in some trouble the next day.
At the end of the night I headed over to the Radisson, and Matthew had to catch a cab, so we walked out together. I had handed him a harmonica earlier, and he asked, “You’re giving me this, aren’t you?” When I answered yes, he smiled and said, “Well, all right, all right, all right . . .”
Although SXSW was fun, it was more about meeting Geller and Whittington, and it wasn’t long before they had some interest from Stu Fine at 429 Records. Stu was a longtime Blues Traveler fan and Jono Manson fan going back to the Nightingale’s days, and he wanted to us to do exactly what we wanted to do, which was a rare situation.
Drawing in part on the confidence I gained from my conversation with Bill and my experience with Jono and the group as a whole, I took the Duskray idea to Blues Traveler and said, “We’ve got to do this with our band.” I imagined that they would enjoy it as much as I did because they were on the same hamster wheel as me, in which it had become an assembly line and we were writing the same songs.
The band at first was reticent because they had not tried this idea, and I should have taken that into account because when I started the idea, I was a little reticent as well. But I knew they would come to love it. The Blues Traveler idea would be a variation on the Duskray idea. Instead of going to friends of mine who were songwriters, we would find professional songwriters we had not worked with before. But I still believed that the theory would hold strong and get us out of our assembly-line approach.
So to C3’s credit, Mat Whittington went out and found writers who we’d never worked with, like Ron Sexsmith and Alejandro Escovedo. I saw Carrie Rodriguez on the Austin music channel, made a call, and we found her. We also had Aaron Beavers from the band Shurman who was also part of the Duskray Troubadours project. We even squeezed a few friends like Chris Barron and Jono Manson into this roster of cowriters. We would go into a room and collaborate on songs. Everybody in Blues Traveler is such a hit man on their instrument, and I think that took us in a cool new direction on what would become Suzie Cracks the Whip.
Sure enough, the second this process started, the band took to it instantly without being told what to do, bringing many of the ideas further than I could have taken them. That was the difference between Suzie Cracks the Whip and the right process and North Hollywood Shootout and the wrong process. I wasn’t in charge of coming up with every idea. The band intuitively took ideas far beyond any expectation I could have, and it made for a happier feel and a more natural feel on the album. Something fresh had been restored, and that was the triumph of that album.
When I first brought the song “Cara Let the Moon” to the band, I told them I didn’t want a drumbeat behind it. I had written it while on tour with the Duskrays, hearing a piano and nothing else. The song was about a conversation I had with a bartender outside the Brooklyn Bowl, who was nineteen (I don’t know why she was able to be a bartender). I found her attractive but realized she was a fan and her father was even a bigger fan and she was in Brooklyn because she wanted to get into the music business, the same way that we’d come to New York and wound up in Brooklyn. I felt a kindred spirit with her, and it struck me that her at nineteen and me at forty-three could reach such a similar feeling when we think about music and Brooklyn and that scene. I wanted the song to be an Irish dirge that you could imagine someone singing at the turn of the twentieth century in a Brooklyn bar. That was the premise of the song.
They fought me on my idea for the song’s arrangement, but I didn’t want it to become this midtempo ballad to make it “fit” with the album. I’ve had songs in the past get to that place, where I’d fought alone and the song became ruined. This time our producer, Sam Hollander, backed me: “John’s 100 percent right.” As soon as he said it, the band started to give it a chance, and it got on the record that way. Sam, by the way, went all the way back to Nightingale’s as a fan, where he also was a big booster of Jaik Miller (Xanax 25), who got him to come see us and who passed away while we were making the record.
When we play “Cara Let the Moon” live, it’s supposed to move on its own, like I’m singing intimately with a piano in a bar. When we pull that off in a huge crowd and I get to thunder my voice and then get super-tiny, we take the crowd with us—it’s a new dynamic level we can hit. I like it in the set because it allows me to get powerful without yelling over some drums and convey this ability that I think I’m good at. It’s just another set of legs to stand on, something else in the arsenal. The key is having that sonic break from the drums, which allows me to take the tempo anywhere I want, including really long pauses like they would do on Broadway, and it’s a very useful tactic.
Suzie Cracks the Whip was about taking us out of our comfort zone so that we could become comfortable with some new approaches. It all began when I took a drive and made the album with Jono and collaborative writing got my full attention. Then in 2014 we took that concept even further.
Suzie Cracks the Whip was the prelude to Blow Up the Moon, where we not only cowrote but also recorded with other musicians. I think most humans don’t have the ability to see what’s great about themselves. The process of collaborating fully with all of these people allowed us to see something new about ourselves.
I also owe credit for Blow Up the Moon to our new management, UD Factory. When Scott McGhee took over as our manager in 2001, I remember thinking, Blues Traveler goes to Hollywood, because he had an arrangement with Mike Ovitz, where Ovitz was creating a mega-super-entertainment megalopolis, and it all fell apart just as we signed. So now Scott, who had promised us all this access to media, was in the lifeboat with us. He did a great job getting us out of our record deal with all that money unrecouped, and I credit him for our Thinnest of Air Red Rocks DVD and our Behind the Music appearance, but after that it was time for a manager who really knew about touring.
That’s what we found with Charles Attal and his outfit C3, because this was just as he was getting the Austin City Limits festival going and was in process of acquiring Lollapalooza. That was a really exciting relationship from 2006 to 2008.
/> In 2010 we discovered that our accountant, who had signed on with us around 2006, had been propping up loans to support other loans, so we were in the hole for a huge chunk of money. We owed money on loans we had taken out to support our touring machine. We were earning enough to pay it all back, but we kept taking out loans for convenience, to time a tour, and then that money would get spent on the next tour. To make up for this, we started playing a large number of casinos. That’s okay, but when all you’re doing is casinos, you should start worrying. It was an attempt to keep us running as a truly nomadic band, but I think we took a lot of gigs that were high in volume but didn’t add up over time.
Our accountant declared bankruptcy, and we had to get a new accountant. We didn’t realize how much trouble we were in for a year or two, and the climbing back to make it right was daunting. The key was to not lose our heads, and gradually we climbed out of that hole. It would take a lot to make us tour efficiently and also to pay down the debt we had accrued. This all came as a shock to us, so around 2010 to 2011 we began a big housecleaning. Charles Attal stuck through 2012 to 2013, when we finally went to UD Factory and Seth Yudof. They seemed to know a lot about records but were definitely green about live touring bands. That’s where Lani Sarem took the idea of a collaborative record that initially started with the Duskray Troubadours album and then added her own twist to the sessions.
The brilliance of her idea was in pairing Blues Traveler with bands that you would not likely associate us with, like 3OH!3, Dirty Heads, or Thompson Square. We’ve spent so much time establishing who we are, so what can we do with that? We have a sound people can recognize, and now we can flip it on its ear and put it next to some other sounds. Hopefully that all merges, offers a nice contrast, and yields something worth hearing. So we can try something country with Thompson Square, do a reggae or ska thing with Dirty Heads, or some electronic music with 3OH!3. It all expands on Suzie Cracks the Whip, where we were writing outside of our comfort zone.
The old Blues Traveler is still there in our live show. But this is about writing in a way that keeps it new. This new writing does translate live, and the melding is interesting.
In 2014 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers sued Pandora over online royalties, and I went on CNBC to talk about it. My position was that it’s always been about a gig. John Philip Sousa refused to record, and his point was that if someone can buy a record, they won’t need to hire a seventy-piece orchestra to play their birthday party. But the fact of the matter is that you still want John Philip Sousa’s band because it’s so much fun and you want to hear whether John Philip Sousa can sound like he did on the album. And that provides enough work for John Philip Sousa, who couldn’t possibly be in the home of everyone who wants to hear John Philip Sousa.
So streaming music makes everyone aware of us, and if we’re any good, it makes them want to hear us live. Then if we have a strong live show, they’ll hire us back, and that’s always been the business.
We were able to participate in a wonderful, magical time when making a record actually earned us money. We got to taste a little bit of it, but most of our career wasn’t that, so when the record business shrank, we were already expecting it to shrink for us.
If you look at any generation, any time period, there are people who want to see concerts. Music just matters that much to people, and I’m very grateful for that.
The Duskray Troubadours album, Suzie Cracks the Whip, and Blow Up the Moon are nothing like each other. Yet they offer a formula to prevent us from falling into a rut—I think that’s the biggest problem when you’re in an old band and want to continue to take people on a journey. For me the more opportunities to get weirder, the better. That’s what I’m after—on Blow Up the Moon we wrote “totes amazeballs” into a song lyric.
When you make your first album, you think you’ve done it, but what you learn is how to really make an album. Then you build on that with each album.
The professional gig of making an album is living with the difference between the perfection in your head and the reality down here on Earth. While we’re making an album, I always imagine up. I never think, This album is going to be terrible. I always think, This album is going to be perfect. Then we do the album as perfectly as we can in the time given, the situation, and the context we’re in.
The important thing, though, is that we keep hearing the possibilities and still carry that hope of perfection.
30
CORPIES, STEROIDS, AND CONS
Blues Traveler is like a baseball team. We have to be sharp, and the only way to be sharp is by playing with each other and getting sharp, and there’s this crazy arc that happens every year.
We need to be slightly weathered so we can read each other’s minds but remain into it and excited about the new things we discover while we’re playing. Eventually, when we’re tired and it starts to feel like Vietnam, that’s when the season’s over and we need a vacation. Like a baseball team, we’ve got to be playing and intuitive, and knowing what the other person’s going to do only comes from having tons and tons of gigs. It can’t happen any other way, at least not for a band like us.
Some bands approach it like studio guys, where they can just step into it. I’ve done situations like that, and it can work. But for the band who we happen to be, with guys who met in high school in New Jersey, it really requires a little blood on the field. We became a formidable live experience, and that only comes through formidable live experiences.
The discipline in my particular job is to accept mistakes and incorporate them. Improvising musicians make mistakes all the time, and the challenge and the glory is setting those mistakes on their way to being the right thing. If you fuck up a note, you do it again only with a relative change in the chord progression, responding to the chords that are happening but making the same mistake, and suddenly you’ve started a pattern and it’s a melody. Mistakes are wonderful.
In my natural state, when we’re on a bus, it’s three gigs on, day off, two gigs on, day off. So we’re working five gigs a week, and if I do that, I can do it indefinitely. If we do more than that, if I do four in a row, then suddenly my voice starts going. Five gigs a week is a good maximum clip, but throw in a TV show, throw in some promotional thing on the radio, and it all gets hinky and I have to start hitting the steroids.
I think it was in 1989 when a doctor first told me that I needed steroids. My response to him was “Isn’t that bad for you? Won’t it give me superhuman strength and make my balls shrink?” And he said, “No, those are anabolic steroids and these are anti-inflammatories, which are very benign steroids. You only use them when you need them, and you get a six-day dose pack.”
It’s actually very common to take prednisone when your vocal cords get swollen. Before the first time I went to a doctor for my voice, it got to the point where I started coughing up a little blood. I remember when that first happened; I didn’t flush the toilet so people could see that I coughed up blood because I’m such a hypochondriac that they’ve learned not to listen to me. So I went to a doctor, and he said, “Oh yeah, you’re straining your voice. Eventually you’ll get a polyp or a node.” They can laser them off now, but you can’t make a sound for ten days, and back when I was first singing, it was a new science.
The prednisone shrinks the tissue but it also makes it hard to fight off infection. You also can’t forget that there’s a reason your vocal cords want to swell up—it’s for their protection. So if you go too far, you’ll tear your vocal cords into spaghetti. But if you keep it on a ten-day regimen, and then you stay off of it for ten days, it works like a charm.
As we’ve changed management I’ve had occasional bouts in which I’ve been singing for too many gigs in a row. But as long as I adhere to my schedule of five gigs a week, with a day off in the middle, I’m fine, as long as I get eight hours of sleep. The secret to keeping your voice is your ability to sleep.
I’ve also learned to say no. There’s alw
ays a great gig to take you out of your vacation or take you beyond your line of safety. It’s always something cool, and it’s always a shit-ton of money. Saying no is always the hardest thing, and I’ve learned to do it begrudgingly because I want to play all the gigs. But it’s also necessary or else I’ll do some damage and end up on the sidelines.
These days I break the year down into three seasons: spring, summer, and fall. In the spring you’re raring to go; you’re like a grizzly bear who woke up out of hibernation, and playing is food. All you want to do is play. Then you get together, and you’re so rusty and sloppy. Everybody’s making rookie mistakes. The guys aren’t syncing up. Everybody’s winded because they’re not used to exerting themselves this way. But what you have is plenty of enthusiasm.
And over time you start to iron out the mistakes. Muscle memory returns—the longer you’ve been doing it, the muscle memory is there, even if the actual memory is not. It’s a weird contrast.
So by midspring you still have the enthusiasm but you’re starting to settle in, starting to get good. By late spring you’re starting to push it further, but you get a little tired because summer’s coming.
You’ve armed up in the spring, so by summer there’s a little rustiness, but you get sharp really quickly. That’s the best time because you’ve got the maximum enthusiasm and maximum sharpness and weatheredness, and you’re like a finely humming machine that rolls through August.
Somewhere around the end of August you’re starting to get a little tired; you’re pushing it. You need a break because you’ve been on since April. Everyone gets tired and start missing home—the food on the road is bad, the drugs are boring, the conversation is repetitive, and you’ve seen every show on television on that stupid satellite that keeps freezing in the middle of the punch line. You start wanting to slow down, but then it becomes a test of your courage and fortitude. Then a great second wind comes in and you start to use war metaphors a lot more—“The campaign is almost over, we’ve got to push on through. . . . We’ve got to break them before they break us.”
