Suck and Blow (25 page)

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.

I also wrote a song for him called “Howard's Turn.” I ran it by him on the air, but he didn't get it at all. I wish he had.

Still, he invited me to appear in his film
Private Parts.
I had been going on the show quite a bit, and despite the fact that I was yelling a lot, he really enjoyed having me on. I appear in the beginning in a scene that takes place at the MTV Movie Awards. I was standing next to Ted Nugent, and we were talking about guns, of course, and we jammed as well.

At one point Howard called out to the audience who was there for the scene, “Do you guys wanna hear John Popper play the harmonica?” People cheered, so I went out and played, and by his look I could tell he knew how moved I was to be in the movie. I'd put that reaction up there with Dan Aykroyd beaming with pride at what he helped create.

I could also see that Howard really had the presence of mind to think,
Wow, I can't believe we're actually making a movie.
And for someone who was so gigantic in my eyes and in the eyes of so many to be aware of how lucky he was, that's the thing that makes him unique. I've always felt that way, and to have Howard think that way as well really struck me.

When the film finally premiered I was on his show with Conan O'Brien, and Howard did something really sweet for us off the air that I'd finally like to share.

It's important to remember that in the late-night wars of the nineties you were either Letterman or Leno. We were Letterman, but Leno was certainly an opportunity you didn't want to sneeze at, so we'd do our best to walk the line. Everybody on both sides would tell us there was no late-night war, but there was. And we knew they were going to tell us there was no late-night war, and we knew we still had to walk that line. If pushed, we were always David Letterman people, but there was a time when Jay Leno was the bigger rating, and the record company wanted us to go on there as well.

Throughout all of this there was always Conan O'Brien. We liked Conan, and he wanted us on his show, but because he was NBC, that
would ruin our Leno play, and because he was based in New York, that would ruin our Letterman play, so we'd always avoid going on his show. He kept getting screwed, but the way I dealt with it, because he was a nice guy, was I would accuse him of not letting us on his show. I'd write him letters: “Dear Conan, why won't you let us on your show?” Once I also sent an entire box of cupcakes to his crew, daring them to eat the cupcakes, attesting that I had not tainted them with some sort of virulent strain of stomach flu, and everyone loved the cupcakes.

The first time I actually met Conan is when we were on
Saturday Night Live.
I had a giant security guy named Raul who was this six-foot-nine biker-looking guy with a huge ponytail. He looked very intimidating and called me boss all the time. I was with my friends at the after-party and said to him half-seriously, “Raul, go out and bring me somebody famous.” He came back dragging Conan O'Brien, who was in a tuxedo and looked very confused. I said, “Why won't you let me on your show?” It became a thing.

Later, when I was at Howard's movie premiere after-party, Howard called me up to talk on the air. Conan was sitting there too, so I asked him, “Conan, why won't you let me on your show—is it because of my political ideas?” I began accusing him of towing the NBC company line and suggesting that he wouldn't let me on because I was a Communist. I was just riffing; it was all nonsensical.

Eventually A&M said we could do the
Conan
show, which we had wanted to do, but because of politics, we had put off. I think the late-night war had cooled. So Conan came up to me and said, “You know the funniest thing about that is that as soon as you left, Howard took me aside and said, ‘Why the fuck won't you let Blues Traveler on your show? They're nice guys, they try really hard.'” Apparently Howard delivered a lecture on our behalf to get us on Conan's show.

Howard doesn't know that I know this, and it was the nicest thing. I would like to use this book as an opportunity to thank him for that. Poor Conan was getting shit on both ends because I was trying to think of a creative way to not deal with the fact that I wasn't allowed to be on his show.

In 1997 I had a conversation with Howard that landed me on
Celebrity Deathmatch.
I was at the MTV Music Video Awards in 1997
when Fiona Apple gave her “This world is bullshit” speech. I was one of the presenters; I was giving an award to Beck with Dermot Mulroney. Everyone else got copy, but they didn't write copy for Dermot and me; they forgot. So I said, “Don't worry, I'll wing it.” This would not be a winning solution for Dermot, who would wind up having little to do and instead would be relying on my “wit.”

So as I was standing there, wondering what I was going to say, Fiona came off stage after having given that speech. I didn't see the speech, but she said, “I can't believe I did that. That was the dumbest speech.” And I said, “I'm about to fuck it up. They don't even have a speech for me,” and we bonded over that. Then her boyfriend at the time, David Blaine, the performance artist, came over and said, “You were perfect, baby.” It was such a cheeseball pimpy way to say that. I kept it to myself, but I thought he was all wrong for her.

So I listened to Stern the following Monday, and she was on, defending her speech. I was at home and thought, “Man, they're railroading her.” So I called in and said, “Hey Fiona, don't let them back you in a corner. You told me you were drunk and that you didn't mean it.”

And as soon as I said the word drunk, I heard “Ooohhhh . . .”

It turned out she was nineteen and wasn't supposed to be drinking. And I was like,
Oh God. Now they're off the speech and into her drinking.
I just threw her into the fire.

So I sent her a Bundt cake because that's an old rule of thumb: nothing says I'm sorry like a Bundt cake. No one can refuse that apology.

That became the premise for a feud, and a month or two later we were opponents on
Celebrity Deathmatch.
My first line was “Nice to be here, I guess.” That was my persona, a well-meaning, easygoing, slightly indecisive hippie who was going to come in and sit on your picnic—“Sorry, did I just sit on your picnic? I didn't mean any trouble. Sorry I just squashed your thing on the Stern show.”

But back to the MTV Music Video Awards. Poor Dermot Mulroney. I sent him a sweater for leaving him out in the cold because my “clever improvisation” was “I can't believe they didn't write me any copy.” Then I said a bunch of incoherent babble like a lunatic, which was fine because Fiona Apple had given such a worse speech.

Dermot did send me a thank you note for the sweater. But I never did hear back from Fiona Apple about the Bundt cake.

I also had an issue with Chris Robinson on Stern in 2001, when we were the two guests and he wouldn't come out until I left.

He had developed this thing, which I kept to myself for a long time. I felt I had been reasonably nice to the guy, but at some point in October 1999 I was sitting in with Warren Haynes and Gov't Mule at the Fillmore—this was a giant jam session in which they brought out Gregg Allman, Audley Freed, and some other players—and Warren told me that Chris Robinson wouldn't come on stage until I left.

This was long after they'd done H.O.R.D.E. with us. At that time they were doing a lot of drugs—the only other one in our band who was doing that was Bobby—and they said in an interview that the only person they could hang with from Blues Traveler was Bobby, that he was the only cool guy in the band. Brendan is convinced that they stopped liking us when we did a version of the Rolling Stones' “Miss You” when they sat in with us and we ended on an upbeat, so they lost respect for us. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes Brendan a cool guy in a way that the Black Crowes may never grasp, and by that I mean the worry. In another article they said we were corporate. Maybe we were corporate, but it
was
a business; the band was also a corporation, and we were there to work.

The first time I spoke to him he was including me peripherally in a conversation in which he was saying that when he's recording, he needs the lights dimmed and there needs to be a giant candle melted a certain way. I kept thinking,
God, I like the lights on when I'm singing; otherwise I'm going to fall asleep. I don't like all the cool ambience; I want to see what I'm reading if I need to read words. I want to feel like I'm awake and doing something.

The Crowes' style was more to do repetitive blues solos rather than the school we came from, which was from the bebop guys. I was a Coltrane student with the modal approach I took on the harps. I was trying to extend the solo, and they found me kind of noodley.

But that never explained to me the decision he made to never be on stage when I was there. When Warren told me this, I said fine and I left the building because why do I want to be around if somebody doesn't want me there? I'd already played, so I left.

Then the next festival we played that the Crowes were at, he wouldn't come out of his trailer until I left. We were always parking next to the Black Crowes, so it was kind of annoying. Oddly they had a Winnebago and we had a tour bus—maybe that had something to do with it? I never wanted to go outside because why would you want to go outside when there's somebody who just loathes you out there?

After that Stern appearance people would come up to us and say, “Fuck the Black Crowes,” and we'd make a point to say, “No, they're a really awesome band.” “She Talks to Angels” is one of the greatest vocal deliveries ever, and I never really had a problem with them.

We were in airport bar in 2006. It was Chan, Tad, and me, and one of them saw Chris. He was sort of hiding, trying not to be recognized. They said, “Go buy him a beer.” So I did, knowing that he was cornered and had to wait for a plane, and he was like, “Hey John. How's it going? I'm just dealing with stuff after the divorce.” He stuttered on the word divorce. He seemed smaller, like the wind had been taken out of him, and he wasn't as feisty. We did some gigs with him later when he didn't seem as adamant about me not being there. Some part of it made me sad; I almost missed his anger.