Suck and Blow by John Popper Page A

recommend to any jamming band that they trip some serious balls once, maybe twice. I think it’s useful a couple of times. Is it useful all that time? That depends on you.
    We were locked in an overcrowded, very furry room, and there was nothing but the music. In that era the band would play two-chord songs—we’d get a groove and beat it to death. But when you’re tripping, it’s amazing how stuff comes out of nowhere and starts to connect to other stuff. If there’s anything I remember from that jam, it was how we would segue into other parts of the jam and into a melody. When you play in a band where you’ve had this sort of acid test, you connect in these ways and can always recall that connection. Something really important happened to us that day. I still have the tape somewhere.
    There were two kinds of musicians coming out of Princeton High School, the kind Mr. B loved and the kind he hated. Brendan and I were in Studio Band, which Mr. B cared about, despite the abuse Brendan got from him. He saw good things for us, and we shared a lot of favoritism in Studio Band. But as far as Mr. B was concerned, Chan and Bobby were potheads, and Mr. B put anyone he didn’t need in a practice booth with their instrument. He didn’t give them any attention, and the way Chan tells it to this day, that was the best thing he could have done for him. I think that’s true because Chan needed to woodshed.
    Our music program rejected Chan and Bobby, so they did not have the musical rudiments beaten into their heads, while theprogram loved Brendan and me, so we did have those rudiments beaten into our heads. It was a good combination because Chan and Bob brought a sense of “Do what you want to do because it sounds good,” and Brendan and I brought a sense of “Here’s a section within a structure, and here’s where it has to go.” It was the combination of those two approaches that made it good.
    I would also say that Bob Sheehan was the band’s first promoter. He knew how to get the word out, and that was a major contribution to Blues Traveler. We didn’t even have a name for it. If there’s a thing I regret, it’s not being able to value this skill and acknowledge it at the time because even he didn’t know he was doing it—it’s just the way he was. Suddenly there would be a bunch of people there. It was because he could make friends like diving into water.
    This is a description of Bobby taking a midterm exam: as soon as the teacher walks out the door, he says, “Okay, smart guy, you give all the answers, and you, you’re the lookout.” Then he would get the whole classroom organized so that everyone is going to get a good grade and does it in a way with the smart guy, the lookouts, and the people writing it all down that would make it fun. There was a lot of Huck Finn in him. Bob Sheehan is eternally Huck Finn.
    After we finally put him in the band, Bobby said, “We need a cool name like Blues Entity, because when we play right we become this extra entity.” Ghostbusters was on cable around that time, and there’s a scene in which Gozer announces, “The Traveler has come!” So we became Blues Traveler.

6
    THE DARK ART OF HARMONIES
    I first met Arnie Lawrence at a Manhattan School of Music summer session after my senior year of high school. He really opened up my head.
    â€œJust play something,” he told me.
    â€œWhat do you want me to play?”
    â€œJust play anything.”
    No one had ever asked me to do that before. It’s a small thing, but it’s a really important thing to just “play anything.”
    He also had this great exercise with me, a trombonist, and a saxophone player. There’s a joke—a woman’s away, no one’s home except for her parrot, and a plumber, who the woman had called, stops by. He knocks on the door and the parrot says, “Who is it?” And