A Conversation with Blues Traveler’s John Popper – HuffPost 2.29.12

Mike Ragogna: John, what are you up to?

John Popper: I’m in New York. We just finished some gigs and I saw my friend get married, and before that, we made a really cool album. We’re starting our 25th year as a band and this record is the beginning of it.

MR: Nice, and we’ve got this new retrospective, 25. Disc two has b-sides, rarities, unreleased tracks, and disc one is the hit plus . Let’s get into that, for instance, the new track, a cover of Sublime’s “What I Got.”

JP: Sublime covers are one of the things that we just love doing. The label really wanted us to put it on because they loved the way we played it, and we were really excited about it because we’ve loved Sublime so long and it was a way to help out their family with the publishing and get people excited about that song. It’s really not a hard push because people have always loved that song. They never really stopped so it was an easy sell for us.

MR: Did a certain Sublime fan, oh maybe Jeff Fura, sell you on it? (laughs)

JP: Yes, among others, but the people who really sold us on that song was the audience. When we finally got that song together and played it, almost instantly people loved it. It has pockets. We’re a band that sits on pockets and grooves and things like that. That song was just tailor-made, it has everything you look for in a really good song you want to dance to, you want to play to, you want to groove out to.

MR: Yeah, that song was magic for them. But sir, you’ve had a lot of your own magic, 25 years worth.

JP: Yeah, a quarter century. It’s just bizarre. I don’t know how we got this old. I remember where the time went, but that’s what a quarter century feels like? It’s weird.

MR: Weird though it may be, let’s go back a quarter century to your humble beginnings, to your Princeton-to-New York exodus.

JP: Yes. A lot of people were chased out of New Jersey. (laughs)

MR: Ah, but New York welcomed you with open arms.

JP: Well, kind of. Our parents said, “High School’s over, you can get jobs or you can go to school and we’ll pay for school.” And we all looked at them and said that we’ll go to school. Then we all skipped school. We pretended to go to school and then we just went out to clubs at night and tried to figure out how to play and get jobs. Once we had a job figuring out how to play and do what we love, we went to our parents and said we’re quitting school.

MR: You went to The New School, right?

JP: Yes, I was very wise in my selection of what school to go to because I picked a music school. First of all, they had free amps, let’s just start there, and all of the rehearsal time and space we wanted. That cost money back then and it still does. The other thing was that we were exposed to the best musicians ever. It was this real great opportunity. It was a new fledgling class, it was a handpicked bunch of students from around the country in a room with some of the best jazz musicians in New York. The rock musicians in that class of jazz musicians kind of congealed. That’s where you got Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors. It was interesting. That was really where that sort of came from, that little scene. When we went out at night and we were opening for John O’Manson and the local rock scene that was already in place there and that was really the beginning of the New York scene as it was and ultimately the H.O.R.D.E. music scene and all of that.

MR: You were “discovered.” Is there a story on how “the suits” came by and said hi?

JP: It was such a weird thing. Well, I was trying to be all cool and above it all, but you know, I was pissing in my pants in my own way. But, the thing you’ve got to remember is the one that made us the longest term connection to Bill Graham Management was his son David Graham, who is still one of my best friends. He was going to Columbia University, and he saw us play a gig in Barnard. We eventually just started playing around New York. I think we were doing like six gigs a week. We were the band that was playing everywhere. We caught on with the college kids, I think that’s because we were going to college and college kids go out and they talk. We were sort of that band on that scene at the time. He saw us at a gig and he was getting out of Columbia that year. He was going into his dad’s business and he told his dad about us and that was the best connection, really. Right before that happened, we were starting to get approached by suits. But, you know, it was a very preliminary thing. Bill Graham sent us a letter and said, “If you’d like to wait until I get there, I’d like to talk to you,” and from that point on, that’s really what we had, a nice bulwark, or at least a structure to receive the other offers. I think A&M Records was just coming to us right around then. I think the New Music Seminar was coming around. It all timed pretty well. We’d been in the city maybe two years or three years.

MR: So then you’re signed to A&M and all of a sudden, you have a hit.

JP: Yeah, it never felt all of a sudden. It always felt like, “We’ve made it! We’ve made it!” and really what that meant was, “Okay, now it’s really time to go to work.” It took us four records, really, to figure out how to make a great record. I’m not knocking the first three because the first record had a great sort of capturing of our enthusiasm and our catalog, like all the songs we’d made from the time we were in Brendan’s basement in high school and up until that point. The second record was us trying to branch out. The third record was us really appreciating our own little inner circle of people we’d made.

The records on both sides of Four happen to be my favorites of the whole Blues Traveler with Bobby in it because it was us sort of milling us around different ideas but not the most popularized ones. When you hear Four, so often, you start going, “Okay, that’s the commercial, baby.” I love “Save His Soul” and “Straight On Till Morning” just a little more. Those were just part of a great process but it really took about 10 years.

MR: With Four comes “Run-Around,” your number one record.

JP: Oh yeah, that was fun. And what’s great about that, it went gold around the same time the first record went gold. One we toured the old-fashioned way and slowly but surely eeked our way to a gold record and the other one went gold that year the year it came out. Yeah, it was really fun. We got to have two in one shot.

MR: Now, 25 also has a b-sides unreleased disc. What’s your favorite part of the package?

JP: The b-sides is my favorite part. I’m grateful for all of the greatest hits, and all of that, but when you get to give a new shot to songs that never saw the light of day, to me, that is about the funnest thing as a songwriter or someone who is a part of making a song. There’s a song on there, “Random Amounts,” that I’d completely forgotten about. I remember the guys bringing it up when we were talking about the b-sides. I was like, “What is this song “Random Amounts”? Then I remembered it, and I was like, “Oh my God, I love that song!” I worked really hard on that and I completely just blocked it out. It’s an awesome song. I was trying to write a little short story and I was trying to do the fastest cadence. It’s a fun song. Hopefully, I won’t have to do it live because I don’t think I could do it in one breath anymore. I had to have been on some oxygen.

MR: Disc two features one of the best titles I think I’ve ever seen, “The Poignant and Epic Saga of Featherhead and Lucky Lack.”

JP: Yes! That was a fairytale that I wrote a while ago about a kid who has weird humps on his back that turn into giant gossamer wings, and what’s weird is that I saw the Collective Soul video years after I wrote it, and it had somebody with weird humps on their back that grew into gossamer wings. I was like, “Should I sue them? Can you sue somebody for ripping off gossamer wings?” But I didn’t want to be involved with the ripping off of wings.

MR: Ripping off gossamer wings, love it.

JP: Also, it can’t be stressed enough, “Traveler’s Suite.” That was our attempt of our big rock opera, and three of the songs on this kind of rock opera are on there. We left “Path” off because we wanted to give (space) to songs that hadn’t seen the light of day and “Path” got on another album. “Traveler’s Suite,” which is the main part of this rock opera, is 20 minutes long. What do you do with that? Where do you put that these days? It’s so awesome. We put it online. It’s a song that Bob Sheehan, Tad and Ben were all complicit in contributing to. That, to me, is the center of us. That is named the “Traveler’s Suite” and it’s sort of like Aesop’s fable about the sun and the storm having an argument about who’s more powerful. The sun makes the man take his coat off and no matter how much the storm blows, the sun can make the man warmer. I had the sun sort of take the form of true love and the storm was the storm of this man’s wildest dreams. I’m proud of it, I’m glad people get to hear it. I’m not sure if I’m going to ever play it again. People ask for it and we have played it live, but to get the version in the studio that comes out right, it just satisfies you to no end, as a songwriter and a player. For me, the b-sides are such a fulfilling thing. You mentioned “…Featherhead and Lucky Lack.” That song has played and is a favorite amongst our fans throughout the years, and they’ve heard it on special compilations here and there. But songs like that get forgotten about. Songs are like your kids…you want to give them an education or an opportunity to go to school, to have a good job and settle down. That’s what this is like.

MR: John, I really appreciate your time and the stories, as usual. What advice do you have for new artists?

JP: Wow, well, do it your way. Looking back, that’s the thing that I value most about what we’ve done. You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to do things right. We could not have done it if we didn’t approach it like a family. That’s not something I’m not sure that I can tell you to go out and do. We were really lucky in that we met in high school and we were really lucky that we happened to be good musicians and good business partners and people we could trust. I think that was the irreplaceable asset and that was just luck. But, I would say, the advice for what you can go out and do, hold to what you care about and try to have that be something that really matters. A lot of young bands won’t go do their song on David Letterman because David Letterman wants them to do it in three minutes. That stuff is silly. Do the three-minute version, it’s an ad for your song, think of it that way. But, when it really comes down to it, when you really see why you’re fighting for it, it’s probably a good fight. I think anything artistic, anything anyone cares about, a business that you love, pick the battles that you really care about and fight those battles. More often than not it shows, even your adversaries, that you care about it and I don’t think there’s anyone that would object to that.

Transcribed by Brian O’Neal