by John Popper
When we were walking down the street in the wild and wooly eighties, I would do some trick grappling hook stuff like taking out a light bulb here and there, but it was more for show. People always thought there were knives in the thing, so I hid a knife in the back so I could say they never looked there. That was my whole little shtick.
One time I walked into the one gun shop in New York City; it was downtown and had that old-timey revolver over it. It was a hangout for cops, and I walked in to look around. There were all these officers who looked at me with my harmonica belt, so I said, “Don’t worry, these are just harmonicas.” Then they all they asked the same thing that cops seemed to ask when I wore the belt: “What’s in that one?” So I showed them the harmonicas one at a time but never the knife. This was back in the Alphabet City days when New York was a different place and it was fashionable to wear a knife.
In the mid-nineties we were in Ireland, and I walked into a store looking for some sort of shawl or a poncho. The guy took one look at the harp belt and said, “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but they have it across the street.” I guess it was sort of fun to intimidate people unintentionally, but it became a problem when people were getting scared of me.
I kept adding to it, with various tool kits and then a big, clunky Swiss Army knife attached to the bottom of one side. The idea was all about weight ratio: if you put a grappling hook on this side, you’ve got to put jack knife on that side, and I would be endlessly tinkering to make this a perfectly balanced thing. It was really just a hobby before I got to buy weapons. At one point I even had a .22 mini-revolver in one of the pockets until a crew guy found it, thought it was a toy, and shot a chair. Then I figured this belt won’t just be in my hands all the time, so maybe I shouldn’t have the harp belt armed—somebody’s going to get hurt that way.
Eventually we decided to upgrade me to something that was specifically designed to be my harmonica belt, with little Blues Traveler cat heads and black leather. The only place we figured to go was a bondage store to find somebody who designed piss gags and weird cuffing harnesses, and he built a great one. (His collection of piss gags still haunts me to this day.) It was a little bit heavy and a little elaborate and there were a few incarnations of it. The guy who built the last one made a soft leather version with a nice belt to keep it from flapping around—that belt is now attached to an old pirate cutlass that I keep on the bus because you can’t go on tour without some kind of a sword—there’s just that pirate aspect to it. I must have a cutlass for leading a charge or a cheer, and you never know when you might need to chop something.
When I bought my first gun I wanted to see what would happen if I shot the harp belt with a harmonica in it—maybe it would stop a bullet. So I put a phone book behind it and shot it. Nope. It went right through like butter. And that’s an important lesson to know, harp players.
I lost the belt when I lost all my weight in 2000. When you’re four hundred pounds, you think, What’s an extra fifty pounds of crap? But after I shed the weight, my attitude was, I’ve got this new body—why do I want to hide behind this elaborate thing?
When I was doing the TV show Selfie in 2014, they wanted me to wear my harmonica vest because there was some line where I was going to threaten the opening band for wearing a vest. They didn’t end up using the line, but we got my harp belt sent out, so I figured why not wear it? And wearing it brought back so many memories, in particular how annoying it was to play with a harp belt on.
I’m not sure where all the old ones are, but I remember giving Dan Aykroyd the one I wore at Woodstock ’94 for the Boston House of Blues.
These days I keep my harmonicas in a case, and when I set up the case, it’s as if I’m laying the harp belt on the ground. So on my left side, as if I’m wearing the harp belt, it would be low G, which is the lowest key, then A-flat, then A, then B-flat, then B, and then C. And on the next side it would be D-flat at the top by my collarbone, then D, E-flat, E, F, and F-sharp. That’s the order I keep them in today, lowest to highest. If I were to wear that briefcase, if it were glued to my chest, I could look to my left side and the one closest to my head would be G.
When you start getting crews, they don’t know the order, and being all out of order is a nightmare for a harmonica player. I was playing the Blue Note in 2013, and they put my case on a music stand. I got up to do something, and the wire knocked all of my harps onto the table in front of me. So people are picking them up off the floor, and some are covered in beer; one landed on a guy’s nuts and I gotta put that in my mouth.
This brings me back to the early days and an incident that happened at the Mondo Cane, which was the next place we wound up after Nightingale’s. This was when we worked six or maybe seven nights a week—back in New York in the late eighties we would do that and then take a day off. We did three forty-five-minute sets, but I had the flu that day and was playing when suddenly I started vomiting while I was playing. So the harp sort of clogged, but I was standing over people who were eating and drinking. What I couldn’t do was just take the harp out of my mouth like it was a cork and vomit all over everybody; instead, I had to swallow it back down and bite the big chunks. I threw the harp away as soon as I could, and some lucky audience person caught it. I can’t say they’re a fan—at least they’re not a fan now. They probably caught it with glee and then got some emulsified oatmeal—the consistency of this thing—splashed on them and got more and more horrified as they sought to answer the question of what that was.
We started at Nightingale’s. You could spot a Blues Traveler gig in the Nightingale’s days by this crowd of hippies sitting on the ground and this cloud of smoke. People weren’t using chairs so much as using chairs arbitrarily. And it was Monday.
Thanks to Gina, one of the first fans we ever had, a lot of people from the Hippie Hotel on 99th Street started coming down to see us, and it became a thing.
Gina found us, and we noticed her because we would be playing some place like Kenny’s Castaways or the Bitter End, where there were chairs and she wanted to dance her hippie dance. The bouncers would come and tell her to stop because they wanted everyone sitting at tables and buying booze at these bridge and tunnel places, and she’s about four-foot-nine and 80 pounds and would get into fights with bouncers who were six and a half feet tall and 250 pounds. It was very impressive to see how she could hold her own.
It was about the music for her. She started doting on us, mothering us. Later on she would sleep in the wheel well of our van and do our laundry, working for free just to be a part of it, and it made her feel like family.
One day she wanted a job with us and to be able to define what that job was. So she got help and presented us with a résumé. She wanted to be the assistant to the road manager. So from that point on we created a job that could only be defined as Gina. It was what she wanted to do to help because she could think of ways that we couldn’t to interact with the fans. We were terrible at that, but Gina could get to know everyone. It was amazing how many people she knew and could contact. It was like she was our own little Erin Brockovich who would take care of all the details. We have a great deal of love for Gina.
The song “Gina” was a testament to how bouncers would throw her out of these clubs because she was dancing—they wanted people to sit at tables so they could sell them drinks, but she wasn’t having it. So she’d have fights with the giant bouncers and they’d toss her. She’d be sobbing, “Oh my God, I’ll never get back in there.” She was always so upset when she’d made a scene. And that’s why the song starts out “Gina, Gina don’t you cry . . .”
A few years ago I went up to this elementary school in South Bronx—it was a really bad neighborhood—and the teacher used that song along with a Dave Matthews song to teach kids to read. They all loved “Gina,” and she went up there with me. We were both in tears. Those little kids knew every word to it—it was something. And I said, “This is the Gina that I wrote the song about,” and they were like, “Who
a . . .”
She kind of outranked everybody in the crew, and there were times when she pulled the motherly vibe and outranked all of us. She helped build that initial audience connection at Nightingale’s, and from there we went to Kenny’s Castaways and the whole Bleecker Street scene with Mondo Cane and Mondo Perso.
We even played CBGB’s once in 1989. I was told that Hilly Kristal saw us and gave us an A rating. I knew nothing about the lore of the club. The night we had to prove ourselves they put us between two heavy-metal hair bands where there was a lot of head banging, so it was easy to be original between two bands that sounded the same.
The sound guy from Kenny’s Castaways, Rich Vink, started hanging out with us and became our sound guy, and he knew Dave Swan-son, who was the sound engineer working at Greene Street Studios and became our monitor guy. This was the formation of the guts of the crew. In 1988 and 1989 those clubs and associations were coming together.
In my opinion we never left a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. We were generally pleasant to work with—we might have gotten a little sloppy, but we never really broke anything. We didn’t fight over money as a general rule, we usually did as we were told, and we always left everybody pleased. By and large, people wished us well, at least that’s my take.
Nightingale’s was the first bar that didn’t just tolerate us; they encouraged us. But there were others too: Mondo Cane and Mondo Perso and then Wetlands. It’s so rare as a band that you get to have your own little club that you get to take for granted. I remember seeing Jono in Nightingale’s and saying to myself, I want that. We could never quite have that at Nightingale’s because of Jono, but we finally would at Wetlands.
First it was Mondo Cane and Mondo Perso and the Bleecker Street scene. Those rooms couldn’t have held more than 150 people—I’m probably being generous—but they seemed so important. I remember Downtown Julie Brown from MTV came to Mondo Cane. And one of the bartenders at Mondo Cane, Daniel Kellison, became a talent booker for David Letterman, told them about us, and helped get us on his show.
Adolph, the guy who ran those two clubs, was great. He’d do things like say, “Hey, you dropped that,” and that was his way of giving us twenty dollars. Another time we told him how the utility company had shut off our heat, and he came back with this space heater, saying, “I don’t need this. I’m throwing it out.” He was so aware that some people might be offended by his charity, but we were like, “Cool, a heater.” We didn’t blink, but we were aware he was trying to spare our feelings in case we were proud. He basically went out and bought us a big-ass heater, and we threw it in our car with the gear, drove it home, and had heat.
He’d also take everyone out for breakfast—the waiters, the waitresses, bartenders, and bands. It wasn’t in a pervy or a douchebag way; he just really saw twentysomethings in New York with dreams and without money.
When the lunch box that held my microphones fell apart, I gave half of it to him. I also gave him a tumbleweed. The first time we played a gig in California, we were driving back through Flagstaff, Arizona. It was the first time we had been across the country. The only ones awake were me and Rob Lester, who went to high school with us and was our driver in the early days. He asked, “Is this really Arizona?” and then just as he said it, a tumbleweed blew by. Without a word we looked at each other, jumped out of the van, chased down the tumbleweed, threw it inside, and took it back to New York. We wound up giving it to Adolph, and it lived in the Mondo Cane.
We first heard about Wetlands when some of the people who were working on it came down to Nightingale’s in late 1988 and told us about this club that would be opening in February. I don’t think we held our breath because at that time lot of people would come up to us and say, “We have this new thing we’re going to be doing—come on down and be our band.” So we said, “Sure, sounds great,” and nothing ever came of it, but Wetlands wound up being a real thing.
We became the house band, and there was that relationship of belief—give me something and I’ll give you something; we’ll work together. Larry Bloch was among the first to do that, before Bill Graham gave us that feeling. And especially when you’re a little band from Princeton, New Jersey, that meant a lot. When we sort of had carte blanche at Wetlands—they made it clear this was our scene and our house—it felt similar to being signed by a label.
When I walked in for the first time, I noticed that bus and all those leaflets and pamphlets and different organizations trying to get stuff done—Oh God, what is this place? It had a cool bar and an equally cool paint job. Everybody always complained about the location of the stage, but I always liked the intimacy it created, and I played to more people than I ever did before anyhow.
We had a thousand people in there at times; I know that for a fact, although later on I learned that the capacity was only 389. That’s hysterical to me. That’s also why I ended up calling it Sweatglands: because with all those bodies in there, the air conditioning wouldn’t work, the pipes would drip, and the walls would sweat.
Then we would go downstairs and there were all those pillows, and everyone was smoking weed. You’d grab your girl and start making out, and nobody seemed to be bothering anybody.
I met Bear down there, Owsley Stanley. I was trying to lose weight at many points, and he told me to only eat meat. He gave me this whole spiel about how Eskimos eat seven thousand calories a day. I went to my doctor and told him what Bear told me, and my doctor said, “Yes, because they’re in subzero temperatures and burn two thousand calories just trying to stay warm.”
Bear was in his mid-fifties and showed me his muscles. He was strong. I think what he was preaching was the Atkins Diet in a sense. I can never eat an entirely meat-only diet because eventually I need ketchup and French fries, but he was a cool guy. We hit it off—we could both tell the other guy was weird.
We were at Wetlands the first month, opening for Sonny Rhodes, and then almost immediately we were headlining. We got signed out of Wetlands. It was the first time the Village Voice had to acknowledge our existence. It was also the first time people heard about this scene going on.
I remember looking around and felt like we were in The Doors movie for a second. It was cool. We were our own scene. We weren’t punk rockers—it was a sort of hippie rejuvenation, this jam band thing, although we didn’t call it that. It just felt like we were home.
I remember when Jerry Dugger from the Worms first saw us play. He said, “I really like the psychedelia, but you gotta develop it.” That’s when I thought, Oh, so we’re psychedelia. We were definitely into that music, but I never thought, I’m going to be a hippie and adopt a hippie lifestyle. That never occurred to me, and in fact it seemed kind of dumb to me. I always wanted to be a friend to a hippie but not a hippie. I wanted to make sure he got home okay. I wanted to make sure he was eating. You always have to make sure a hippie’s eating if you care about him.
Shortly after Bobby joined the band, he had all these friends in Princeton who would invite us to play at their parties. They were all Deadhead guys, and I have this tape where someone asks, “Does Popper know the words to ‘Fire on the Mountain?’” “Of course Popper knows the words to ‘Fire on the Mountain.’” I didn’t know the words to “Fire on the Mountain.”
Bobby also wanted us to do “New Minglewood Blues,” but I’d never heard any Grateful Dead songs, so our version was definitely different. I was really unschooled in singers and bands, so I guess I was sort of trying to do an Iron Butterfly impression, but it really sounded like Bill Murray doing his lounge act. I didn’t know how to sing. I had to learn to let my voice go and not try to sing through my head. Drugs helped a bit because then you relax and go with it and can respond to a beautiful moment, and the New School certainly helped me get to my voice.
While Bobby was always trying to steer us in that direction, before he joined the band I felt more kindred with George Thorogood than the Grateful Dead. But improvisation was second nature to everyone at the New School, so
it became a little easier to go that way. I also felt a bit like Little Walter reborn, but I didn’t want to know any Little Walter songs, just as I didn’t want to know any Grateful Dead songs. I thought the key was not to know anything and to go in and be original because it’s easier to be original when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing or who you’re referencing.
Eventually I would see the Grateful Dead a few times and come to appreciate their music, but it wasn’t easy. The first thing I noticed about the Grateful Dead is that my friends would put on a tape, cue it up to their favorite song, and then proceed to talk during the entire song. I’d want to smack them with a carp so I could hear the song. And when you don’t know the Grateful Dead and can’t hear them too well, every song seems like they’re singing “Ham and eggs . . .”
I can remember the first time Bobby, Dave Precheur, and some other friends took me to a Grateful Dead show. There were two things I noticed as a first-time attendee: everyone wants you to dance, and everyone wants to tell you about the first time they heard a song, so you never get to hear that song. It almost becomes the emperor’s new clothes because they’re so busy talking about how great it is to be there that you never know what it’s like to be there.
I couldn’t enjoy the Grateful Dead because everyone was so busy telling me how much I should enjoy the Grateful Dead. I remember being on acid, convinced that people were trying to brainwash me because they really wanted me to enjoy the show, and I just wanted to hear the show before I could enjoy it. That was tough to do. All of my friends were singing in my ear along with the band, and all I could hear was “Ham and eggs . . .”
The one time I was finally able to listen to the Grateful Dead was when I ditched my friends and went off and found a chair somewhere and sat down where I didn’t know anybody. The Deadheads around me said, “Aren’t you going to dance?” And I said, “No,” and just watched the show and got to hear the music, and that was the important thing.