Suck and Blow (15 page)

By the end of the tour people were talking about next year, and in 1993 the same problem existed: we wanted to get out of clubs and into sheds. The Spin Doctors were off doing their own thing, so we couldn't count on them, and Phish had made the decision not to commit to a multiband festival. But we found other bands: Big Head Todd & the Monsters, the Samples, and the Dave Matthews Band on a few dates. Rather than eight shows, we did twenty-six, opening with two nights at Red Rocks on July 2 and 3. All in all it was a solid showing, with the exception of two dates we had to cancel due to low ticket sales in Darien Center, New York, and Syracuse (no doubt the coyotes would have been howling again had we returned).

By the second year Dave Frey said, “We're doing the all the work. This is our tour—we should incorporate.” There was an extraction on Dave's end from Bill Graham Presents because they had funded the first year, at least on paper. So BGP would get a disappearing annual percentage, and eventually Dave and I would own it, fifty-fifty.

Dave did the vast majority of the logistical work, and I was the figurehead. I would call people and find out what our party position was, what we needed to talk them into, and try to sell it. Then I would try to find out what
they
needed. I saw my job as attempting to accommodate everybody. Eventually, though, there was this point when everybody wanted to be accommodated in ways that were impossible, and by 1998 we were fed up.

That first year, in order to appease the guys in my band, I had given them each 5 percent of our promoter's funds. Of course on top of that, they also were paid to be on the tour. Rich Vink, our sound guy, had been spouting off this idea, had spiritually been talking about this, so it seemed wrong not to cut him in for something. So he got 2.5 percent. And Dave Precheur, our trusty road manager who was with us since high school, got 2.5 percent as well. That left 40 percent each for Dave and me.

There certainly was some amount of resentment from the band over the years, but they had to begrudgingly acknowledge that I was earning it. If need be, I reminded Bobby of the Spin Doctors' call from 1992. A few years later it was reinforced via this band Red Thunder. They were a Native American group but were sort of manufactured: one guy was Apache, another was Shawnee, and one claimed to be Aztec (which is almost indiscernible from being Mexican), but they had formed a native supergroup, and they'd do new age music with a tribal influence. They tried, and I thought they were okay, but none of us thought they were a great band. The reason they were on the tour is that they were opening for one of the other acts, who had said that they would only appear on H.O.R.D.E. if we could find a slot for Red Thunder on the bill (which also demonstrates how things had changed since year one and also how the live touring business often works). The day before the tour started Chan went on a drunken tirade in front of everyone in the commissary—the room had to clear out—screaming at me because Red Thunder was on
right before us. I had to sit there and listen to him yell for what seemed like hours, and he was like Frank Sinatra on a bender. I was the one who was sober back then, and I just filed it away thinking,
Someday you're really going to regret that you did this.
Well, here's that day Chan—enjoy the book.

H.O.R.D.E. was like a real job. It wasn't songwriting or playing; it was more about planning and negotiating. I was willing to do it, but I'm a musician; we cater a little more to imagination than reality, and that's really a better job for me. That's when I think I gained a lot of weight. I had to be the guy who explained to James Brown's manager why he wasn't worth fifty grand in New York City in 1993. Try living with that karmically. Go on, I dare you.

Who decided that James Brown wasn't worth fifty grand? It wasn't me; it was the local promoter, who during that time in New York would have been Delsener/Slater. They have numbers that are facts, and you cannot escape these facts. They saw what James Brown pulled in the last few times he appeared in the area and then deduced mathematically how much he's worth as a draw. Then they have some sort of algorithm to decide what James Brown would be worth on a festival, and that number becomes what it is. There's no getting around that number, no matter how creative or artistic you are—you're stuck in that number. So really I was just relaying to the musicians the bad news the promoters gave to me, and it just felt like I was on the wrong side of that.

Phish met the tour for two shows, and I was able to follow up on the previous year's trampoline gag. (I feel you out there reading this, not believing it was a gag, but dammit I am going to prove to you retroactively along with everyone who was there, that this time it was a gag.) I was still in my wheelchair that summer, and we got another wheelchair and a dummy dressed exactly like me, playing the harmonica, and dangled it above the stage. Then at the end of the show there was a big jam session, and in the middle of that jam, with no explanation to the crowd, the crew brought out a giant yard trampoline, as Phish jumped on their regular tiny trampolines. Then the audience could see what they thought was me dangling from the top of the stage in my wheelchair over this giant yard trampoline. Surely the giant yard trampoline could hold me, right?

I was offstage on a wireless mic, playing, and at the very end they dropped me right through a giant yard lawn trampoline, which was also rigged to break (I swear to God) while I was offstage, saying, “I'm okay, oww . . . I'm all right” The cool part was we ran so long that as soon as I fell through, the lights had to come up due to the union guys, so some people thought I was really hurt, and it looked as though something really wrong had happened. For the following several years I had people say to me, “I was at the Richmond show—are you okay? What happened?” It was the only time I ever made milk come out of Trey's nose from laughing, and that to me was my proudest moment (it might have been beer, but I'm still proud).

The next year we had the Allman Brothers Band as the headliner. I always enjoyed playing with them, and they had appeared on a couple of 1993 H.O.R.D.E. dates as well. The most memorable of those in 1993 was in Stowe, Vermont. Apparently Dickey had a physical altercation with a police officer the previous evening and got arrested. He couldn't make it to the show, so Jimmy Herring from Aquarium Rescue Unit played guitar with them. He would do it again during the summer of 2000 after Dickey left for good, but that night in Vermont was huge for him. I was still in my wheelchair, and I sat in for about half the set. Jimmy and I were on cloud nine, and I remember looking over at him, and we both couldn't believe where we found ourselves. “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” was really the moment for both of us, and I kind of owe it to Dickey for punching out a cop.

The main stage opener for most of the 1994 H.O.R.D.E. tour was Sheryl Crow. We also ended up touring with her that fall, which was a lot of fun. She was opening up for us, but we all knew she and her band were a big deal because her song “All I Wanna Do” was all over the radio. I got to play on it with them every other night, and I remember one time our tour manager said, “That's the number-one song in the country you just played on.”

There was one night at the end of the tour with Sheryl when we harassed James Taylor. We had a big dinner with both bands and everybody's crew at this sushi restaurant in Atlanta. We were all on A&M, so Al Marks, our A&R guy was throwing us a dinner. While we were waiting for our table, Tad, Sheryl's bass player spotted James
Taylor. He was in this private little booth. We wanted him to come out, so Tad and I started singing:

              
You just call out my name

              
and you know wherever I am

And nothing happened.

              
I'll come running

              
to see you again.

Still nothing.

              
Winter, spring, summer, or fall

              
all you have to do is call

And finally he came out—“Would you stop that?” It was hysterical. I think he recognized Sheryl because at the end of the dinner he came over to say hi, which blew us all away.

Sheryl and her band were always up for that kind of thing. Brendan's rule (which continues to this day) is that when someone had been touring with us, it was our job to prank them. It was usually silly string, and I always prided myself on being the godfather about it and not ever being there when it went down. But in this case we went all out and silly stringed the shit out of them one night when they were onstage. We just nuked them with silly string. So they decided to prank us back. They ran out while we were playing and started mopping up. Then Sheryl came out with a little waitress apron, brought us drinks, and danced off. I thought that was really cool of them.

Back to H.O.R.D.E. By 1994 we had expanded to two stages, the Gonzo and Mondo stages. In fact, Sheryl was originally scheduled for the second stage, the Gonzo stage, but after her album took off, she moved to the opening slot on the main stage for most of the shows.

Eventually we would have three performance spots. I was particularly proud of the workshop stage. Someone had carved a life-sized blue whale out of one piece of a redwood tree, and we brought that around with us as the workshop stage. This was where someone from
one band could perform with someone from another band. We had a lot of good jams over the years with Taj Mahal, Dave Matthews, and Sheryl. I was involved with quite a few of them, including one with Warren Haynes, Allen Woody, Jaimoe, and LeRoi Moore. Of course, Warren was in with plenty himself, including a spontaneous performance by Warren and the other members of Gov't Mule joined by Ben Harper and Chris Barron. Another one that people still talk about was a bass jam with Les Claypool and Marc Sandman from Morphine.

The year 1995 was big for H.O.R.D.E. because that was the first time we outdrew Lollapalooza. The combination of us, the Black Crowes, and Ziggy Marley made for a really nice package.

The Crowes were very determined to have something that was not corporate. They thought we were too corporate and didn't want to play with a beer banner behind them. To our minds, H.O.R.D.E. had grown organically to the point at which we
could
sell beer.

This was a time when it seemed everyone was turning against sponsorship. But the fact is we were being paid a million dollars, and most of it we were paying to the Black Crowes. We figured out another sponsorship that made everybody happy, but ever since the Andrews Sisters in the 1940s, beer companies have been paying bands to play, and I never saw a problem with it. It would be one thing if a beer company was promoting death to puppies as a political practice, but they just wanted people to drink a beer that a lot of people tended to drink anyway. If that's not your brand of beer, I guess that really matters to you, but if it essentially comes down to brand loyalty, I think that's silly. I would go with the beer company that pays the most money, although admittedly I'm not much of a beer drinker. So am I betraying my art for trying to make a living? I don't think so. There was no other way we'd get the Black Crowes on the bill. So I'm glad we had sponsors pony up the cash—it allowed people to have a lot of fun.

We really tried to make the Crowes as happy as we could. They liked the medicine show idea, so we took that angle of a weird carnival and just ran with it.

Ziggy Marley had the best pot ever, and they gave everybody a jar of the finest ganja we could remember—if we could remember. Their drummer, Squidly, was on our bus every day, and we took pride in the
fact that we were the only band on the tour besides his own whose weed he respected.

Here's a related Marley story Dave Frey tells from that tour: “We were playing the Waterloo Village, in Stanhope, New Jersey, and there were a lot of traffic problems because it's a field out in the forest, with a two-lane road coming in and out. They were stuck out there, but their tour manager had one of the first cell phones. So we called him and explained that we'd send a state trooper to lead them in. And there was this profound silence on the other side because we realized what we'd asked them to do—because usually the state trooper would be leading them somewhere else.”

That was also the year the Rembrandts were on the tour. I said that was okay so long as they didn't play the theme from
Friends.
I suspected they would but I wondered how they would respond to that kind of challenge because did the Rembrandts have any other songs? As you can imagine, they wound up playing it anyway. They came with Sheryl Crow, who had jumped on for a few dates—again, there was always an accommodation we had to make for somebody.

Then 1996 was the year when it
really
got huge. It was the second year in a row that we outdrew Lollapalooza, and that meant something to us. We had Lenny Kravitz, the Dave Matthews Band, Natalie Merchant, and King Crimson.

Dave Matthews was on fire but was just an easygoing guy and really easy to work with. One of my favorite moments playing with Dave was a version of “All Along the Watchtower” that we performed acoustically on the Blue Whale Stage. It was so odd to us how somebody we met at the Van Riper's fest and perhaps Wetlands as an opener become so massively huge, but they were really such an effortless band to play with. Boyd was nothing but optimistic, and LeRoi was the exact opposite, and that combination was in their playing styles—it was so wonderful. Stefan on bass was just so nice and completely conducive to making whatever jam work. Then you have Carter who, in my opinion, is one of the best drummers in the world (I would later nab him for my solo album
Zygote,
where he would save the day—stay tuned).

In June 1994 I had joined them in the studio up in Woodstock, New York, to play harmonica on “What Would You Say” (a song that would later be up for a Grammy against Blues Traveler's “Run-Around”). They
sent a crew guy, a runner, to drive me up there in a rented Gremlin, and you should just never drive a rented Gremlin. The car broke down on the highway en route to the studio, and I really needed to head back to catch the only flight remaining that day to England for a tour. So I only had time to lay it down twice. I think Dave went to the bathroom, and when he came out I was done. That became the track they used on the song, so I felt like a badass, but really I just had to go to England.