Suck and Blow (12 page)

              
As if a cold and frozen soul is warm to love

              
By love's own hand.

              
So goes the prayer, if for a day, peace on earth

              
And good will to man.

              
I wish a one-horse open sleigh would come carry me away,

              
And I'll keep waiting through next May

              
Until Christmas comes my way.

12

FELLOW TRAVELERS

When we first signed with Bill Graham in 1989, the first band he put us out there with was the Allman Brothers. We were terrified. We would do our forty-minute set, and then the Allman Brothers would take us to school—that's how we would put it. We would play for forty minutes, and then class was in session.

Dickey Betts was very intimidating. You'd hear all kinds of stories about him, and it's possible that none of them were true: that Johnny Neel, who's blind, was scatting during “Liz Reed” and Dickey punched him out; that Dickey was the kind of guy who would get drunk and use karate, even though most people who were black belts in karate wouldn't use it; that he had some sort of incident involving a crew member and a gun. I gave him a knife that I got in Wyoming—it was an old saw blade polished up real nice—and was told I shouldn't have done that.

He might have a temper, but I never saw it. He's always been very nice to us. By the end of the tour they had me play on “Statesboro Blues” and “One Way Out.” And it was probably during the first night when I sat in with them in August 1990 at Jones Beach, that Dickey came right over to me—he had that hat on and he always looks angry when he's playing. I almost shit my pants when he said in this nice, cheerful voice, “We're gonna trade fours, all right?” A bit later he
came at me, and I thought he was going to hit me, but it was just to give me a high five. That was when I realized that although they were all very intimidating, they were just dudes.

That being said, they've really lived it and walked that walk. (Plus, there was a time a couple of years later when Dickey had to leave a tour after he shoved a cop.)

Whenever Gregg would get drunk, he'd want to join our band—“Man you guys gotta let me in your band.” He once got into a big argument with Chan over whether he could join the band, and Chan was drunk enough to tell him, “No, dude, you totally can't.”

So here were these two mental giants just completely sauced, arguing over the silliest thing I could think of. Why would Gregg Allman even want to join Blues Traveler? It never made sense even at the time. I suppose that was his way of liking us. It was very sweet, and I wanted to say, “Gregg, don't be silly.” But when he's in that place, what are you going to do? The appropriate answer would have been, “Sure, you can join the band,” but what Chan chose to do is say, “No, you can't join the band.”

He had no business joining us. We were a very tiny, barely functioning band.

There was also a time many years later when Dickey had Gregg convinced that the band was thinking about kicking out Gregg and replacing him with me. Now that's even more absurd, but apparently Gregg bought into that for a little while. I had to miss my chance at sitting in with them during their Beacon run that year.

The one member of the Allman Brothers I had met before that first tour was Warren Haynes. In the early days I'd always go sit in with people in the New York area, and around 1989 this guitarist showed up and was doing the same thing. Warren was so on fire and so awesome and so understated, but when he started playing, he was amazing and he's kind of been that way ever since. And he really breathed a life into the Allman Brothers.

Another thing I'll say about Gregg Allman is you should never play poker with him when he's drunk. At the end of our first tour, they had a poker night as their end-of-the-tour party—they figured they'd clean up. Well, I was up around two to three hundred bucks, and I was
walking out of the room when in came Gregg Allman, ass-out fucking drunk. It was a miracle he was upright, and he was like, “Come on, sit down.” I was ready to leave, but he was so drunk that I figured it would be easy—how could I pass it up?

Well, basically, Wild Bill Hickok was asking me to sit down and play cards with him. So I sat down, and he came up with “Jacks are better to open,” which is really hard to do when you're playing Texas Hold 'Em and he's pulling jacks and slamming drinks and the drunker he gets, the better hands he gets. I can't figure how he pulled it off. He's either really good or really lucky, and I lost about $250. It was quite a lesson.

They told us that we reminded them of them when they were young. I think we were more like the Allman Brothers than we ever would be like Phish, and we were a volatile bunch of drunken slobs figuring it out as we went along, and we all grew up together. We were like a family going out on the road, being in a band. I think that's a common pattern, and a lot of your great bands are like that.

You drive around in a van. Your best friend is the bottle of Dimetapp you've got for that “cold,” and you drive fifteen hundred miles, riding on the floor of a van, eating whatever community Arby's you could scrape together.

The Allman Brothers Band and crew would give us little lessons, and we always tried to pay attention. They'd say, “Don't forget this is the funnest time. You're gonna look back and think that this time was as fun as it gets.” It's sort of true because you didn't have any responsibility yet. The IRS wasn't interested in us, we didn't have the commission thing figured out yet. “You wanna go to Vegas?” “Sure!”—you'd put whatever cash you could in your pocket. There's something about a diner the first time you hit it in Muncie, Indiana—you remember those Buffalo wings.

We were living a tribal life on top of each other, and one of the side effects is that we would come to blows. Quite often there were scuffles, and it usually was just half-drunken bullshit. This was compounded by the fact that I really wasn't drinking during this period; my overindulgence was food, so I became something of a slave driver pushing everyone forward.

Bobby and I in particular would have issues, but it was kind of a marriage, and there are few people I'll ever love more than Bob Sheehan. That says something.

I remember one time he made us wait forty-five minutes so he could get a giant nitrous balloon. We were waiting around and waiting around, and we were all late. Then he showed up with the balloon, and I had a samurai sword, so I popped it. He started wailing on me, and I was trying to put this sword down while he was swinging on my back. Then he ran and grabbed my Daisy Red Ryder BB gun and was going to shoot me in the face with it. The gun misfired, then I grabbed his head and began smacking it into the windowsill of the bus. The third component of all this was the stress on Chan because he was clearly the physically strongest of all of us. So he was the great peacekeeper—he would break us up and make Bobby apologize to me. It was a terrible pattern.

I remember another time, when we were driving back from a writing session in Rhode Island, and Bobby couldn't stand the fact that I was playing with this squirt gun I had found in a pile of trash somewhere. So I was twirling it around, being really obnoxious with the squirt gun, and he was very hammered. I wouldn't put it down, so he just cocked me in the face and broke my nose. Dave Precheur was driving, blood was gushing down my face, and I was flailing on Bobby from the back seat like a lunatic.

So Dave stopped the car as best he could, and I got out and ran into the woods. I remember I was still wearing my harmonica belt—because I would wear my harmonica belt everywhere like a crazy person—and threw the harmonicas at him and yelled, “They're yours.” Then I marched off into the woods. He came after me and said, “John, you can hit me back,” but as I started swinging, he added, “Not in the face!” But it was too late. I split his lip, he had a nice bloody lip, and then I went off to sit in this abandoned school bus until he coaxed me back. At the height of this I'm still quite upset, and I said to him, “So what do we do now?” And he answered, “We're going to go back and get in that car and become rock stars.”

It was this weird thing that would happen all the time: Bobby would be a dick, somehow it would devolve into me punching him, and then he would say he was sorry. It was quite the codependent relationship.

He could cut the ace off a cold deck, and I was the only guy who would do that back to him. That was the challenge of him and me.

One time we were sitting in a patch of clover at the Princeton Communiversity (a yearly event at Princeton University), and without looking, Bobby reached down and—
boink!—
pulled a four-leaf clover: “Oh my god, a four leaf clover!” And without looking, to answer him, I reached down and—
boink!—
I pulled a five-leaf clover. I'm not kidding—it was a four-leaf clover with a fifth leaf on the stem. I will remember the look on his face for the rest of my life. He just pulled a four-leaf clover and then got trumped by me. After that, the four of us were digging through that patch of clover and could not find a four-leaf clover of any kind.

That was our relationship: he just pulled off a miracle, and then I said, “Oh yeah? Well, here's a bigger miracle.” That was Bobby and me—we pushed each other to heights neither of us would have made without the other. Of all the pressures I could name, like record companies, money, just actual survival, Bob Sheehan was the best and biggest pressures because he wanted action and could not tolerate nothing happening. He was great at that. All action, that guy.

Being in a touring band really is like being in a military empire because you're trying to expand and conquer. You're on a smelly bus with a bunch of dudes and need that espirit de corps. Rich Vink, our sound guy, was in the Coast Guard and was always talking about espirit de corps, so we sort of borrowed from that.

What I can say about the early crew is how much everybody cared about it. There was such a ferocious dedication, and you can't buy that. You can buy professionalism, but you can't buy ferocious dedication. Occasionally we would have bouts of professionalism, but they rarely lasted.

It can be challenging when you have friends in the crew rather than professionals. They're often less inclined to listen to you, but their loyalty was unquestionable.

During this era we had two vans, the crew van and the band van. The band van had Dave Precheur driving, someone would ride shotgun, and then each band member would have a bench they would lie on. The crew outnumbered us, so they had two guys to a seat and all
of their gear loaded in between them. I remember the crew van passing us one time, and in the back corner I saw Tim Vega with this horrified look on his face, stuck in corner, saying, “Help me.”

Tim was an incredible artist specializing in the tag art that the graffiti guys do. His sister was Suzanne Vega, and their whole family was really passionate, artistic, expressive, and sensitive. I was kind of the sensitive guy back then, but Tim could easily out-sensitive me, depending on what we were talking about.

He did the art for us, the backdrops, but he also went on the road, selling merch. He made the shirts himself and partnered with Darren Greene, who designed the cat head. The two of them rose to any occasion we could throw at them, and eventually another artist, Sandy Garnett, would come in and help out as well. (I remember Sandy would often drive in from Greenwich, Connecticut, to our shows and then head home at five in the morning or later.)

Darren had lived with us in our first band apartment along with Chris Barron. Darren, Chris, and Bobby all had a running tally of the various women they would pick up at the gigs that we'd play. Of course, Chan was far out in front, but for an artist, Darren did pretty damn well.

Tim designed the art on our first album, the spray paint look, and he put it up on the Nightingale's wall, which was red brick. Somebody said he could paint it on there, and apparently we got all excited when we were done and left it there. We thought they might want it there. But apparently the neighborhood block association got really mad, and the police came in and made my friend Bill, who was the bartender, paint the building red again.

Tim Vega did the banner for H.O.R.D.E. He painted the inside of Wetlands—he was just brilliant. I have two of his paintings in my house. You'd forget that when you're touring with the guy because it was all about setting up the sales booth like it was a lemonade stand.

Tim was a real sensitive soul, and I think that led him to drink too much. At some point, after he came off the road with us, he was working at Wetlands as a bouncer and was going through a bad patch, and I think his heart gave out. At the funeral I heard he was heartbroken about Wetlands closing and 9/11. I felt really lucky I got to know him, even though it was fraught with the best kind of agony and
tension—there was very little time he was at peace; he was never satisfied in that way that an artist is never satisfied. He loved his friends more than anything and was just the guy you would want to go into business with as well as the guy you would dread to go into business with if you were at all logical.

As we began touring, I had a map of the United States and would shade in pencil where we played and fill in ink where we could draw more than a thousand. That map grew until 1995, when we had all fifty states shaded in ink, along with Canada and Mexico. That progression was based on the
Penguin Historical Atlas
because I was a big Attila the Hun fan, being Hungarian. Gradually you could see us growing. I'd update our conquests in a tour diary that I kept from 1991 to 1999.

Here are a couple of entries to show the flavor (both, oddly, involving Arkansas):

October 18, 1991

       
We have struck into Canada mercilessly, and in a covert move, we've pushed deep into her borders. The carnage was complete and exquisite. The battle was fought well, the press was with us, and B.C. lay in ruins at our feet. Success!

As good as our northern conquest is going, news today paints a dimmer view of the southern expansion of our empire. As we raid Texas, we are not striking Oklahoma. And Arkansas is lost as well. The reason for this is simple: our mighty army is expensive and needs to be fed. These new southern markets are lean on cash and can't meet our price. We'll just have to wait. It will be all we can do to expand into Kentucky and Mississippi. They are not definite either.