In 2006, Blues Traveler singer and harmonica master John Popper played Warren Haynes’ Christmas Jam in Asheville, NC. Ivan Neville was the musical director, and two other harmonica players, Mickey Raphael from Willie Nelson’s band and Taylor Hicks from “American Idol,” were there as well.
Neville suggested Popper and Raphael do a harmonica jam with Hicks, but with a particular look in his eye.
“As he said the name ‘Taylor Hicks,’ ” writes Popper in his off-beat, hilarious new memoir, “Suck and Blow,” “he gave me a look like, ‘You know what to do, John.’ ” So Popper pulled Raphael aside and told him, “Our job, which we will deny, is to hurt [Hicks]. We’re going to do a three-way trade-off. Play as hard and as elaborately as you can.
“Poor Taylor did not know what hit him. It was a Taylor Hicks torture session. He was trapped and could not get out of it.”
This mischievous, sadistic (but just mildly so) attitude is echoed throughout this book, essentially the tale of a food-addicted social misfit who, in his high-school years in Connecticut and New Jersey, showered once a week and ate pencils for money — the key is to “bite the erasers off first” — and was fortunate enough to be brilliant at playing the harmonica, which allowed him access to a magical world he had no natural place in.
Popper learned he had perfect pitch while singing in church, and despite being handed a tuba by his parents — “that’s a classic,” he writes, “give the fat kid a tuba” — Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues persona from “The Blues Brothers” drove him toward the harmonica. (The “Traveler” in Blues Traveler was taken from a line in the Aykroyd film “Ghostbusters”: “The Traveler has come!”)
His high-school band teacher was Anthony Biancosino, the inspiration for J.K. Simmons’ Oscar-winning character in “Whiplash.”
“Mr. Biancosino did a lot of good things for people,” he writes, “[but] he would kick someone off the drum kit and put him on this really bad, out-of-tune conga drum. He would put a drummer on, kick a drummer off, put a drummer on. At some point he’d get so frustrated that he’d play the drums himself, and he was terrible at it.”
Playing the New York club scene, Popper found that harmonica players were a conservative lot, musically worshipping James Cotton, who had played with Muddy Waters, and believing the instrument should not evolve beyond his style.
One established classical player called Popper’s parents, telling them, “People will try to stop him.”
“I thought he was nuts,” Popper writes, “but he actually kind of called it.”
The player invited him to a meeting of the Harmonica Club, which would meet on Wednesdays.
“[They would] talk about ‘harmonica issues’ and ‘harmonica rights,’ and I noticed that he would twitch a little whenever he said harmonica. I just knew, ‘Don’t ever go to this place. Whatever you do, never go there.’ I sensed rituals involving a paddle and hood.”
Later on, he was invited to speak to the club, but “sent them a stripper instead.”
Blues Traveler built a scene around a bar called Nightingale’s in the East Village, drawing a crowd by handing out fliers promising “free nitrous, mushroom tea and joints.”
The band lived in Boerum Hill and Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and — this being the late ’80s — there were brief dalliances with crack. Popper, who writes that he smoked it four times, notes that for about six months, “people would disappear into the Brooklyn night and then come in at 4 in the morning kicking me awake for eight dollars.” When Spin Doctors singer and good friend Chris Barron moved in for awhile, he “used to live off the Cheez Doodles he found lying around the room.”
The band signed with rock impresario Bill Graham. The first gig he got for them was a Housing Now March in Washington, DC, which, with stars like the Grateful Dead and Joan Baez in attendance, saw brawls between New York homeless people and DC homeless people over food.
“We were about to go on when I looked at the front row and Bill Graham was tangled in a brawl,” Popper writes. “His foot was reaching out this way and his arm out another way while he wrestled with…eight or nine different deranged homeless men and women. I saw that and thought, ‘I love my job.’ ”
Later, he was invited to a party at Graham’s place where it “became apparent pretty quickly that everyone was starting to get naked and make out with each other.
When Trey Anastasio of Phish had his first child Popper sent him “every diaper he’d ever need, literally,” sending a semi-trailer filled with them.
“I felt like, ‘I’m in the hippie capital,’ ” he writes. “ ‘I can’t really object to this, but I’m sorry — I’m from New York. I’m neurotic.’ ” He did make out with one woman but demurred when her husband began caressing his arm.
He also, at another event, came close to getting into a threesome with porn star Ron Jeremy, but “when I saw the thing he pulled out, I was traumatized. I lost my erection for the next month.”
Popper came to befriend the stars of the jam-band scene. He calls Phish’s Trey Anastasio “our Mozart” for the band’s ability to command audience attention with complex arrangements, and joined Phish in several pranks.
In 1993, when Popper was in a wheelchair after an accident, Phish invited him to sit in for a song. Popper took the stage before the show started and “insisted on being covered with a tarp the entire show so people wouldn’t know what I was.” He sat completely still throughout their three-hour show, only to be unveiled at the end to play.
When Anastasio had his first child several years later, Popper sent him “every diaper he’d ever need, literally,” calculating how many diapers a child uses throughout her childhood and sending a semi-trailer filled with them.
“He sent me a picture of his little one on top of these boxes,” Popper writes, “with a caption, ‘Let the sh—ing begin.’”
Popper would later attempt a unique, playful way of screwing the band over. To play Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve, a band needs to reserve the arena over a year in advance. By mid-summer of 1997, Phish already had MSG locked down for New Year’s Eve 1998, but Popper wanted the slot for Blues Traveler.
“They had what’s known as a ‘first hold,’ and we had decided to challenge them for it,” he writes. “We put up half the money — it was over a half-million bucks — and they had 48 hours to respond, when they had to put all their money down.”
So Popper sought a two day window when the band would be “without resources or the ability to respond.”
He chose a time when Phish was in Scotland and officially issued the challenge at 2 a.m. (This being the 1990s, cellphones and the Internet were still in their infancy for popular usage.) The only Phish representative in America was the band’s accountant, so Popper “sent a stripper every 15 minutes for eight hours to his office to read from Sammy Davis Jr.’s ‘Yes I Can.’ ” While the accountant grew increasingly baffled about who was sending the women, Phish’s manager, “using a borrowed telephone and wire transfers,” got nearly $600,000 to Madison Square Garden with two hours to spare. (According to Popper, Phish never knew any of this. If they’re reading this, now they know.)
Other times, Popper was on the receiving end of rock-star weirdness. Gregg Allman — whom Popper characterized as having a Jekyll & Hyde personality, depending on his quantity of drink — showed up to play a song on one of the band’s records “three sheets to the wind,” and tried to play piano but “his hands were shaking.” After finally getting through the recording, Popper writes, a drunk Allman took him aside and demanded 10% of the money from the album. He increased his demand to 20% the following night, only to be dissuaded when Popper said to him, “You’re breaking my heart.” Allman agreed to work for free.
Running the multi-band H.O.R.D.E. tour gave Popper a closer look at rock-star idiosyncrasies. Despite 105-degree heat, Lenny Kravitz refused to perform in anything but his trademark leather pants and wound up fainting on stage. He also wanted it to “seem as though he had driven his motorcycles into a given town,” but he really had them trucked in, boarding them just before he entered the tour city.
The weirdness wasn’t reserved for rock stars. Popper appeared on David Letterman’s show 20 times. During one visit, Julia Roberts, without warning and for no discernible reason, came out, kissed Popper square on the mouth, then took her seat on the couch next to Letterman.
As Blues Traveler became better known, Popper, ever the weirdo outsider, took pleasure in playing that role to the hilt. For a meeting at his label, A&M Records, he “walked in dressed in a bathrobe and Buffalo Bill-fringe gloves and carrying a saber. I plopped my saber on the table, pulled a Diet Coke from my pocket, and said, ‘Let’s talk.’ ”
Popper had a knack for these strange moments, although they didn’t always translate. When Blues Traveler opened for the Rolling Stones, he brought Keith Richards “some moss from my yard and put it in a Tiffany box because I heard that apparently they don’t gather any.” Richards responded by patting him on the head.
Moving in celebrity circles, he saw the power of A-list fame. One night at SXSW, he found himself hanging out with Bill Murray — who talked him down from a desired coke binge by exhorting him to appreciate his surroundings instead — along with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Partying loudly in Harrelson’s hotel room, security knocked on the door, presumably to tell them to pipe down, but McConaughey took charge. He told the guards, “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.” Just like that, the guards who came to chastise them became their personal security.
If the book has a central theme, it’s that no matter how much success Popper had, there was always something or someone to remind him he was just a socially awkward guy out of place in the celebrity world.
In 1996, when the band’s “Run-Around” became a massive hit, A&M offered them a new contract on the morning of the Grammy Awards, giving each band member $1 million. That night, the song won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance, beating out friend and expected winner Dave Matthews.
Thinking life couldn’t be better, Popper was walking outside just after the ceremony when a little girl approached him and asked, “Weren’t you in that movie ‘Tommy Boy?’ ”
Having been mistaken for fellow big guy Chris Farley, Popper, despite — or perhaps because of — having the best day of his life, felt the need to be recognized for who he was, and began singing “Run-Around” for the girl. “She said, ‘Nope, never heard it,’ ” he writes. “And there’s the reality of it.”