Suck and Blow by John Popper

finally hit the ceiling in that moment. I was humiliated but also thought, This is why I came to New York. It’s time to put away the stupid bullshit you can get away with and do something real.
    Back in high school I also wrote a song called “Honesty and Love” for Sarah, the first alto sax in the Studio Band. That one I submitted to my creative writing class because if you’re going to write a song, it might as well be homework too. But my teacher kept telling me to revise it—she asked me to knock out about half the verses. I remember thinking, How dare you! Which verses? At the time I thought she was so full of herself. She seemed like one of these small-minded peoplewho thought everything she said was brilliant, but I have to admit she was right about one thing: revise, revise, revise. In my mind everything I wrote was gold, but the thing is, if you revise properly, you’re bringing the gold out that’s being worn into the ground by your inability to shut the hell up.
    I wrote “And So It Goes” on a Casiotone with the electric rhythm section and the drum-fill button. I stole the bass line and timed out the fills that Brendan would have to do later. My voice hadn’t even changed yet, but it was about my “wisdom.” We worked that one for a couple of decades, so I guess I owe Casio a royalty.
    There was another one I would pluck out on the piano, this really annoying, poorly executed Bach homage. I used two fingers and the sustain pedal so it sounded all echoey. It had nice songwriter form, but I was ripping off so many pop songs from the seventies, Carpenters kind of songs that were prevalent in the suburbs. I remember it was the first time that girls would talk to me because I was the weird kid. One of them said, “You know, when I heard you play that song, that’s when I realized there was more to you.” She didn’t want to have sex with me or anything, of course, but we became friends.
    So even if Blues Band had some cheesy, formulaically written original songs, at least we had original songs. We had ambition, we had confidence, and soon we had a new bass player and a new name.
    When I went off to the New School in the fall of 1986, the rest of the band was still in Princeton High School. We decided to keep the band going and I’d come back to rehearse and do laundry. One of these times I heard a rumor that we’d fired Felicia and that this major Deadhead Bob Sheehan was now our bassist. I had met him a couple of times—he kept showing up with his bass—and we let him sit in with us at a school homecoming dance.
    The rumor kept circulating, and eventually Felicia said, “You know, I don’t really want to do this anyway.” She stepped aside happily and Bobby was in the band—it was kind of like he talked himself in. He knew we were the best band around for what he wanted to do.
    Now, I can’t confirm or deny that Bob Sheehan started that rumor, and we will indeed never know how it came to be known that Blues Band had fired their bassist and replaced her with the King of the Deadheads Bob Sheehan, but I do find it interesting.
    What happened next was we took a lot more acid, smoked a lot more pot, and sounded better, at least to us. We needed an acid test, and we did one of those in New York City. It had rust-colored-carpeted walls—imagine tripping balls in a room with rust-colored-carpeted walls.
    My friend Steve came to play and trip with us on the saxophone, so picture five absolute maniacs throbbing on one chord over and over again with occasional flurries of individual expression. This must have gone on for five or six hours at top volume, and I suffer to think what people must have thought when they walked by. The rust-colored carpet kept everything in a Van Gogh painting, while we took the Black Cat Jam—that one-chord vamp with lots of pockets in it—and brought it to a new echelon of throb.
    I would