Suck and Blow by John Popper Page B

the plumber responds, “It’s the plumber.” The parrot repeats, “Who is it?” And the plumber answers, “It’s the plumber.” Then the parrot asks again, “Who is it?” And the plumber yells, “It’s the plumber!” This happens a few more times, and the plumber eventually gets so upset that he has a heart attack and dies. Then the lady comes home, sees this dead guy on her doorstep and asks, “Who is that?” and the parrot says, “It’s the plumber.”
    Arnie had us play the joke over and over again with everybody taking different turns being the parrot, being the plumber, being the lady, while a pocket evolved behind it. And it became a song. It was a really neat exercise, and we would often do things like that.
    His approach was very ethereal, and Arnie was the first teacher other people took seriously who I could actually relate to. He was starting the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music the next fall on 13th Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village. And after the Manhattan School of Music sent me the thirty-two bars of Bach that I would have to learn, it became pretty clear that the New School was my best bet. And after I sat down and played for the dean, I was in.
    When I went to the New School the first year, it felt very unofficial. It was 120 handpicked students in a room with the finest jazz musicians in New York. There were no rules or curriculum, so we’d invariably just play, and that’s where I learned the most.
    The second year had some of that, but they needed a formal curriculum, and suddenly you had new classes where you were going to learn to read music. I wanted no part of it. The way I am with school is the more you offer me that I don’t want, the less I will attend. So I would just show up for the classes that interested me.
    I remember one time I didn’t go to school for about three months because I was so busy with Blues Traveler. Then I came back and they said, “We’re flying you to San Diego tomorrow to represent the New School, not to compete but as an exhibition.” I was the harp wunderkind that everyone was talking about, so I was a selling point for the school.
    But unlike high school, the focus really wasn’t on competition. What I liked about the New School is they didn’t make you feel like a student; they made you feel like you were already gigging, and getting used to that feeling was the best lesson they thought me. You had to figure out stuff on your own.
    Arnie Lawrence was the perfect guy for that. He was a straight bebopper who made his bones playing for the Tonight Show in the sixties—he was first alto in that band with Doc Severinsen. He played with everyone from Count Basie to the Brecker Brothers to the Rolling Stones to James Brown, and he was born to teach.
    In high school Mr. B’s focus was on being fast and loud rather than whatever we might be thinking about. But Arnie would expound on ideas that would stay in your head. He could talk about music the way you imagined Gandalf talked about magic or the way Yoda talked about the Force. He was like Yoda to me. He would challenge you in spiritual ways. I told everyone back home that he was teaching me the dark art of harmonies.
    He had this great line, “The blues is the sound a baby makes when it cries for the first time because after you know you’ll get picked up, then it’s all show business.” And getting that first cry is what the blues is to me. If you can remember why you cry even though you know you’ll be picked up, I think that’s a good exercise for everybody. It’s not about just sitting there and doing primal screams; it’s a much deeper thing than that. Life by its very nature kind of hurts, and that’s not a bad thing—it’s just the experience of living. I think the objective of anybody playing music should be to take that, express it through