Authors: John Popper
Back in the day when they couldn't stand us I don't really think it was us. I think they were doing a lot of heroin and their whole world was pissing them off. It was such a dark cloud with themâ“Everybody Sucks. . . .These people are terrible. . . .
They
don't know rock and roll.” And some time later I was backstage, and Marc Ford, who was no longer with the Crowes and was not partying like that, said about someone who was playing, “These guys are pretty good.” I kind of lit up.
For me there was negativity about them I never understood. I think they lumped us in with a time they were going through, when things were not really good in their world.
About a year before Chris Robinson and I were on Stern, I went on there to thank Howard for helping me lose the weight. I ended up taking off my shirt, which was a big dealâit was something I never did. I also got three grand for it.
I didn't go on the show intending to take my shirt off, but I figured that they might ask me, so I was ready with a number if they wanted
me to. The key was to pick a number that Howard wouldn't balk at but was the most money he was willing to give me. I had heard some people ask for five thousand to do something embarrassing and they got denied, and I heard some people do something embarrassing for two thousand, and I felt that they could have gotten more, so I felt good about the three thousand.
I really have to credit Howard for pushing me. My thought at the time after Bobby died was that I was going to die too. My best friend had died, but I still had all of this press booked for my solo record. I had commitments. I was on Stern and talking about what happened, and he said, “I'm worried about
you.
I'm worried that
you're
going to die.” It was very confrontational but in a very loving way. And that was a real tough interview to get through.
Roseanne had a new talk show and had me on, and she did the same thing. Having someone confront me like that about my weight, I couldn't get away from it. Fame had been a way to hide, and they turned it on its ear because it became how they were going to confront me.
Oprah also wanted me to come on her show as someone she was going to help lose weight. The thing about Oprah, though, is she didn't want me on as the guy from Blues Traveler, just as a regional musician. She didn't really know who I was, so that was going to make it even worse. Plus, it was too scary; I didn't think I could do it.
But then I decided to get the bypass, and Howard kept in touch with me about thatâagain, in a very public way. Then when I had lost 150 pounds, I went on the air with him. I knew they were going to weigh me, but I didn't know they were going to ask me to take my shirt off. That was a big thing to me because taking my shirt off was something I never did. The cash made it all the sweeter, but the truth is that if it weren't for Stern, I wouldn't have lost the weight in the first place.
THE PRINCE INSIDE THE MICHELIN MAN
My imagination was always a real boon when it came to songwriting and other creative endeavors, but it became a real hindrance for my romantic life or the facsimile thereof.
I was in love with Sarah, the girl who played alto sax in the high school band. One day during senior year I had called her up and revealed my feelings to her, but she told me she didn't feel that way about me and just considered me a very good friend. So then I became her confidante, her Duckie if you will (
Pretty in Pink,
anyone?).
Still, in her yearbook I taped a key to a little treasure box that I put on her doorstep. Inside the treasure box was a note professing my undying love for her. I had also enclosed a locket with a glass slipper that I'd gotten from Disney World at precisely midnightâI'd had to wait around because Disney World closed at midnight and I wanted to be there at that moment to buy her this glass slipper. The box also contained a tape with a song I'd written for her called “Honesty and Love.” I did the vocals, harmonica, keyboard, bass, and guitar, and I had poor Brendan do the drums for this four-hour session. By the end it started to sound like “Piano Man” with fifty verses.
She was going off to Switzerland to study structural engineering, and we would remain friends and exchange letters. I swore to her I would never give up loving her even though she didn't feel the same way about me.
Sarah would set the pattern that would keep me socially cloistered, which was putting a crush or an unrequited love in a bubble. I would formulate a love affair in my mind, and rather than disturb the bubble, I would keep it a secret. Sarah was the source of songs like “Alone,” “100 Years,” “Sweet Pain,” “The Best Part,” and most if not all the early acoustic songs where I would play guitar. She represented the perfect love that I could never have for some reason.
I think a real part of it was that I was very obese and felt that she was failing me because she didn't see the prince inside the Michelin Man.
It took over a decade and the help of a shrink for me to acknowledge that I wasn't obsessing over fat girls. I was looking at healthy women. So that was on me. Why shouldn't any woman I judged incapable of seeing the real me instead seek out someone who looked vaguely healthy. I should have wanted to look vaguely healthy.
I wooed Sarah over a period of eight years. She was in Switzerland and then came back and saw that everyone was singing these songs that I'd originally written and sung just for her at gigs we were playing at Nightingale's and Wetlands. This is when she started to take me a little more seriously.
Our first kiss happened at a diner where the waiter kept coming back to our table asking us if we wanted more ketchup. I mention this because it was extremely odd how often the waiter came back to interrupt us as we were having this pivotal moment it took eight years to arrive at. You might think I am saying this to embellish the story, but I am not kidding. As soon as I said, “I'm still in loveâ” the waiter swept in and asked, “Are you sure you don't need more ketchup?” Then he came back again and again with the same damn question. Was the waiter secretly in love with Sarah? I'm not sure; they didn't seem to know one another. But finally after we had the all the ketchup we could possibly have at the table and we assured the man after much
discussion that we indeed had enough ketchup, we got back to our discussion eight years in the making about how finally she felt the same way.
I still don't know if he was putting me on.
When we finally sealed the deal, it only lasted a month. I think it was because I had put her on such a high pedestal that she thought she couldn't live up to it. After all, I had written eight years of songs about this woman and this magical time. Now we were beginning an actual relationship that was almost impossible to live up to. I finally broke up with her, but she wanted to end it as well. The last straw was when she said, “Why can't you just be dumber?” I'd heard that one before because I'd found that a lot of women just wanted to control me.
I was virgin until I was twenty-one. The first girl I ever had sex with saw us at Nightingale's and brought me home to get back at her mom. When she found out I was a virgin, she said, “I'll have sex with you, but it's just this once.” I looked at her and said, “I think I can handle that.”
The next day she called me to let me know that she'd be going away for the weekend, and I thought that was odd for just once. But then she came to the Lizmar Lounge the following week where we were playing and said, with a jarring urgency, “I have to talk to you.” I thought,
Oh my god, she's pregnant
(or in my weaker moments,
Oh my god, she has herpes
). But instead she said, “I'm in love with you.” So I figured,
Okay, I guess this is normal.
But then we went to her house, and I assumed at least I'd get sex out of it, but we just talked about what a bitch her mom was. When I decided to break it off with her, she went fetal on Second Avenue, sobbing. So I had to rescind my breakup order just to get her off the pavement. Two days later she dumped me, and that was my first adult experience with women.
I've thought about mentioning her name, but this was the microcosm of a long, torrid, horrible relationship all compressed into a week. And we only had sex once.
I would start to meet girls through being in a band, but all the while I was secretly in love with Felicia. I would formulate love affairs in my mind, and rather than disturb the bubble, I would keep it a
secret. She was the source of songs like “Run-Around.” It was me trying to confront her with my love for her well after she had a boyfriend. The worst part was that through it all I suspected she just didn't feel the same way that I did.
Carolina was this passionate Italian girl. She adored me and I loved her, but I wasn't in love with her that way. I remember her punching me square in the face because we just had sex and she said, “I want you to know I will wait for you.” And I said, “That's good, because I don't know . . .” What a thing to say to somebody. She was like, “What did you say?” I tried to explain myself rationally, but then the “fuck yous” started, and she full-on punched me in the face and gave me a bloody nose. So I told her to go upstairs and I waited downstairs and then drove her to her train. That's what that song “Carolina Blues” is about.
I also wrote “Yours” about Carolina because she was so passionate. A few years earlier I saw that Beethoven movie
Immortal Beloved
and wanted to go write a song that was passionate. Looking back, Carolina was very good to me, but I kind of treated her like shit, although she ended up treating herself like shit tooâshe loved to be a pariah.
Around the time we were starting to get on
David Letterman
I had a brief fling with Claire, who had been dating Dave Graham as well Eric Schenkman and, I believe, Dave Precheur for a second. We had developed a strong friendship, and I finally got the nerve to act on it at Wetlands after they aired our appearance on
Letterman.
At the moment of our very first kiss Tom Gruber, who worked for Dave Graham, walked up and started to kiss the both of us, which kind of ruined it. (Tom was really hard-working and dedicated but almost too dedicated.) Perhaps that awkward beginning was a foreshadowing. We lasted about three months. She was one of my very first sexual experiences along with Carolina and the unnamed crazy girl.
I had so many coping mechanisms during this period that kept me out of actual, healthy relationships. For instance, I employed faux intimacy, where I would share so much about myself that I would scare off women. Or I would have these feelings that were pretty much a bubble in my headâI would fall in love with people from afar and hold these huge crushes on them without actually living it.
After I broke up with Sarah the bubble needed to be replaced with a new goddess upon the pedestal. This would gradually become Felicia, who played violin and joined Blues Band as our earnest but terrible bassist. She was a friend of mine, someone to whom I could piss and moan about my unrequited love for Sarah, and she was really brilliant, and I think she liked the attention, certainly the friendship. I would write songs about her, and along with the songs about Sarah, these became the bulk of our work in the early days.
Felicia became my very best friend, my confessor, and, eventually, a crush that would become a blindingly powerful love in my own mind. She was utterly brilliant and was quite a guide for me in the early days, as she seemed to have no end of advice for me and a sense of wanting to take care of me. I even found the fact that we were not acting like we were attracted to each other as respectfully keeping the secret of my unrequited love. That's the beauty of such a ruse: by not acting on it, you are making it that much more real, because it still exists as a silhouette's darkness does against the light.
She was always willing to accompany me to events like the Grammys, and in her mind she was going somewhere with her friend, but in my mind I was thinking,
Finally I get to take Felicia to the Grammys
or
Finally I get to take Felicia to the Howard Stern movie opening.
Walking down that red carpet at the
Private Parts
premiere, Felicia became terrified by the screaming throngs and wanted us to get through the red carpet as quickly as possible. I think that was the chief difference between usâI needed the crowd in a way she could never understand.
I couldn't help but notice a wave of sympathy from Felicia as I got more and more obese. I think there was a point where she was beginning to humor me, not knowing what else to do. And she did value the friendship we had and still does to this day. But at some point I had to confront her, and it did not go well.
Felicia inspired most of the Blues Traveler love songs from
Save His Soul
through
Bridge.
This also was true of any song in
Zygote,
where “Once You Wake Up” was my coming to terms with Felicia not being in love with me. I found that the most honest songs that I wrote
during that period were ones where I expressed and explored unrequited love, and I think Felicia was the perfect model for that.
Eventually as a result of Felicia's rejection of me as a love interest and my corresponding rejection of Carolina as a love interest, I would come to have a catharsis. I decided that I wanted to have these experiences and feelings for real and that the only way to do that was therapy. It was about developing my own life. After twelve years, all I knew of my identity was Blues Traveler. I had to develop my own identity, and it was in there somewhere. I had a lot of work to do in establishing that identity outside of the band, and the shrink was helpful in my doing that work. They don't do the work for you; they're more like line judges while you work it out. They keep you honest. So in order to get to a place where I could have love, I had to start with me.
This is what led me to my
Zygote
album and also a brief but positive relationship with Tiffany, a really cool girl I met at showsâshe was with me when I had my chest pains, although we didn't last much longer than that. Tiffany represented life after big crushes and unrequited bubbles, and though the relationship was shortâit didn't go six monthsâat least it was real, probably the most real relationship I'd had to that point.
Then after Bobby died and I lost the weight, it was a very different life for me. I couldn't recognize the guy I used to be. I see pictures even now and remember consciously being there, but I can't to this day imagine what it felt like to have three of my friends help me out of a chair or to discover a barbeque sauce stain on a part of my belly I couldn't even see. It's an amazing thing your brain doesâselective amnesia, I guessâbut I started to see myself more as a sexual being and, therefore, other people could too.
That's when I met Delana. Chan's wife, Serena, knew her; she was Serena's sister's nanny. Delana was a breath of fresh air, about thirteen years younger than me and was there at the time when I was remaking myself, so it was easy for me to embrace something new, as she came to represent. We had a four-year relationship, the longest one I've ever had. She was the one who led me to move from Pennsylvania to Washington State in 2004; she had a connection there. I proposed to her on the last day we were at my house in Quakertown and totally
caught her by surprise. I faked her out because she thought I was going to propose the day before. Here's a life lesson: never let a girl drive just after you give her an engagement ring because she'll stare at it, and you'll drive off the road.
Ultimately it was too destructive a relationship. We had a lot of fun at first, and I still care a great deal about her to this day, but Delana was really allergic to alcohol, and when Bobby left she became my new codependent. At times she would put herself in dangerous situations, which would terrorize people. And now that I couldn't use food the way I once did, I discovered drugs and alcohol.
A year after we moved she broke up with me. I think also the fact that she needed a live body in her bed to cope with what she was dealing with from her past was incredibly important and sort of a deal-breaker. She just became too lonely. We were six months from getting married. She helped me find a house and then moved into my guesthouse for a while, so it was amicable. I think she wanted to prove to her mom that she could live a conventional life, but her version was to marry a rock star, so it really wasn't that thought out.
After we broke up I did an Air Force Reserves tour overseas with the New England Patriots cheerleaders, and I instantly fell in love with Amber. Not much happened there, although she used me to get out of a relationship. We became friends, but there were always a few guys after her; eventually it became clear she was stringing me along. Still, in the first five days I knew her I wrote five songs. There was something inspiring about her. Perhaps it was her noncommittal nature or perhaps it was the mystery of hoping she'd be tamed if I just wrote one more song. I haven't heard much from Amber; I hope she's well. Her father was a New England Patriot, her husband was a New England Patriot, and if she has a son who grows up to be a New England Patriot, then I think she'll have pulled the hat trick.