Authors: John Popper
Shortly after the great
Saturday Night Live
announcer Don Pardo passed away in August 2014, Jordan, my then girlfriend, now wife, was hanging out with someone who had a question for her: “I don't make any judgment . . . I just want to know what John said to make Don Pardo that upset.”
She didn't know what he was talking about, and
I
didn't know what he was talking about. It turned out there was quote about me that someone had posted online:
My least favorite episode of
Saturday Night Live
? September 30, 1995. Blues Traveler was the musical guest. The singer was a real creep.
âDon Pardo, from his autobiography
At first this made me really upset. What did I do to Don Pardo? I loved Don Pardo, although I only met him one timeâwe just showed up on the day of the show. It started me thinking,
What could I have done to Don Pardo in that moment?
The mind plays terrible tricks.
Maybe I shoved him, maybe I ate the last donut, maybe I asked him how his family was and his mom had just died. Maybe he thought,
I'm seventy-five years old. I'm sorry I've been doing this job since you were six years old, so leave me alone, you creep.
Maybe he imagined I was doing all sorts of disturbing things to myself in my sad little apartment while he was making the
Saturday Night Live
announcements.
I also know that I don't act normal around famous people, and
Saturday Night Live
was so important to me that maybe I kissed Don Pardo's ass so hard that it became annoying. I know that I approached him like a dweeby fan.
I have genuinely admired Don Pardo for decades. So if there's anything I regret it's that I was so corny when I met him. What I said to him was “I know this doesn't make sense, but I need to tell you âI will fight the good fight.'” Then I saluted him, and he said, “Go forth.” My interaction with Don Pardo took all of forty seconds, but because he said, “Go forth,” I left thinking that he got it. Hopefully he did, but this made me rethink it.
We hosted the season premiere of
Saturday Night Live
that year after Prince canceled. We actually had to cross an old friend to make that appearance. We went to high school with Michael Showalter, whose sketch comedy show
The State
had been on MTV for a couple of years and was going to debut on CBS. But because we were doing
Saturday Night Live,
we couldn't do their CBS special. Their show aired, CBS decided not to pick it up for any more episodes, and to this day I think some of the cast members are unhappy with us. I completely understand how they would feel that way, but we were all in our twenties, and to get an offer to play a show we'd wanted to do since we were kids and might not ever have a chance to do againâthere really wasn't a choice.
My thought going into it was,
Here I am on
Saturday Night Live,
and it's probably the only time I will be here.
So I wanted to do everything that I'd always wanted to do. Part of that was to have an interaction with Don Pardo. Another part was to sit in with the band at the end while everyone is waving. I'd heard the saxophone do that for years, ever since I was six, and I'd always wanted to play on thatâit's a nice blues song that goes to that major third. You have to pursue
those chances. It's like if you have an opportunity to have a cigarette in the White House, you've got to do it.
The key is you need to find that line where people are letting you do things and enjoy that moment without insulting anyone terribly. If there's an insult, you want it to be a Grey Poupon insult, where they've got some nerve for being insulted. Then it's kind of evenâ“Screw you, I'm having my
Saturday Night Live
moment.” But Don Pardo, he'd been there for every show, so I could see how that could have been lost on him.
Then I remembered something else that happened that night. A few years earlier Sinead O'Connor had held up a picture of the pope, tore it up into little pieces, and said, “Fight the real enemy.” Well, I had this idea that at the end of our performance I was going to rip up a picture of a jellyfish and say, “Fight the real anemone.” I thought that was clever and was really excited to have a chance to do this on
Saturday Night Live.
I thought it was nothing but harmless fun, so I sent someone out to get a picture, but word got back to Lorne Michaels, who called the head of our record company, Al Cafaro, and down through the ranks it went until it got to meâ“They don't want you to do it; they don't want anyone to mention that episode. Do you want to make an enemy of these people? It might be nice to be able to get on the show again.” So I said, “Fine. Give me a hundred bucks and I won't do it.” Immediately they gave me a hundred dollars, and then a little light bulb went off in my head: “Oh my God, they'll just give me money.” And that started a new thing that went on for a few years while
four
was hot:
“Hey we got a lot of press for you.”
“Great. Where's my hundred dollars?”
So I would get a hundred dollars all the time, and they had no problem with it; they let this float. All except one insecure guy in the Midwest who tattled on me. So eventually they had to stop doing it, but even then, a lot of them would still sneak me a hundred dollars.
After the album peaked, though, I remember one guy came up to me somewhere outside of Philly and said, “John, there's a couple of press guys out there. Give me a hundred bucks and I'll make them go away.” And I thought,
Oh, the jig is up.
But I couldn't figure out how Don Pardo would even know about any of that. Then someone told me that Don Pardo never even wrote an autobiography. So although there's a comical aspect that I don't want to let go ofâI almost wish that Don Pardo was somehow insulted by my absolute worship of himâI have to acknowledge that all of this probably started with a Twitter troll.
I've always been quite willing to interact with our fans. It's really cool when people like what you do and are nice to you. Twitter has been quite an experience because that was when I discovered people who don't like me. And that has catered to this part of me that wants to go and mix it up with some middle school kids.
I think the first time I got Twitter assaulted was when we were at Bonnaroo and I wanted to sit in with Dave Matthews, but they said he wasn't having anyone sit in with him. Then these Twitter people said, “No, he's totally having people sit in with him.” I felt like I kind of got the run-aroundâif you'll excuse meâfrom Coran, his manager. I wouldn't use the pun, but there's no other way to put it.
So I think I said, “It's disappointing to be old. I miss the old days when I could just jump on stage and do it.” And 50 million Dave Matthews fans Tweeted, “How dare you!” and started laying into me. I was feeling all this anger and was trying to be funny. But eventually, as you get comfortable with Twitter, you realize that everybody has a “Fuck you” saved up their butt, and that's kind of the currency on Twitter.
So I've learned about Twitter trolling from the trolls.
It helps if you call someone a racist or a fascist and get them defensive: “Wait, how am I racist?”
“If you have to ask that question then you really need to learn.”
The thing you have to remember about Twitter, though, is that it's Twitterâit means absolutely nothing. Unless you actually start spewing hate speech, there's really nothing you can do wrong on Twitter.
You can say something and later explain, “I was being completely benign,” and you can imply something unbenign while remaining completely benign. I love Twitter for that reason.
Twitter is not an effective form of communication. If you're interested in having a conversation, then Twitter is not for you. But I look
at Twitter as a way to practice one-liners. You have only a few characters, so try to say something as surreal as you can.
I name search because I want to find the guy who says, “John Popper sucks,” and then start fighting with him. They usually can't believe that the guy from Blues Traveler is fighting with them. That to me is really turning it on its earâI love that.
So we battle on Twitter, and if they're childish with me, I'm childish with them, and then we develop a camaraderie and you are forming a communication that has a rhythm to it. Eventually, if the guy says something truly funny, I like to think I'll laugh at it.
We all want to do a prank phone call. I don't blame them for that. We all want to harass a celebrity if we have nothing to do, but I
am
one, so I get to harass the harassers. As long as that doesn't make me a belligerent bastard.
By setting up a Twitter page, I'm saying, “Who wants some?” Except I didn't set up a Twitter page; I use the band's page. If I had my own Twitter page, I'd be hunted for meat. But I get to hide behind, “It's not me, it's the band's position that your mom sucks.” Then I've got a little leeway and try to play these things as best I can.
Tad has some things to say because he actually works our social media, but no one else from the band will get on Twitter, so they're kind of at my mercy. To be fair, I don't think I Twitter properly, but I'm lucky I joined a band that is more social media inept than I am. Except for Tad, who really just wants content.
One time I got into an argument with someone who worked for BuzzFeed. It started when she and a few of her friends were trying to recall the interview on
Behind the Music
where I was discussing being so obese that I started having chest pains while masturbating. The odd thing was that ten years earlier, being honest about that was helping people, but now it seemed to be some sign of weakness or something to be laughed at. I was trying to go along with the joke, so I told them it turned me on that they were so interested in this. She answered, “You can't even rape your hand,” and I responded, “Nothing funny about hand rape . . . unless the hand was asking for it.” The next thing I knew, “Rape advocate John Popper” was all over BuzzFeed.
That had been my best attempt at being jovial in that context, and a fight then broke out and it all degenerated into me calling her the c-word. To my mind this entire exchange just illustrated the stupidity of everyone involved on Twitter in which we get into fights with the middle schoolers in all of us and also with actual middle schoolers.
In the middle of this Roseanne chimed in, “Hey John I haven't talked to you in a while.” Then she must have noticed everyone was saying “Cock, asshole . . .” and I didn't hear from her again for a while. She just got out of the way. It was hysterical.
We all take ourselves so seriously on Twitter that at times it can become a place to have an adolescent-style fight. We're really worried about what words we're typing, as if those words have the power to destroy, and in this case what word was being said? The female variant of the word cock. Completely useful in England, by the way, and English people Tweet, I just don't get it. The whole point is that Twitter is not a place for brilliance; it's a place to be mediocre. That's the great equalizer of Twitter: you have 140 characters, and you're not as clever as you think you are.
Another time I said, “I am so pro-choice that I think a mother should be able to kill and eat her baby until it can physically escape from her, like a lioness in the wild. Good luck starting that lobby.”
You can't read the tone of my sarcasm, and this “pro-life” magazine (or again, “anti-abortion,” if that makes you feel better) put out a headline: “Blues Traveler encourages mothers to eat their babies.”
And there was an organization that was having a festival and they fired us from the gig at the last minute because of that. I'm not really allowed to say too much about it because they gave us half the money. I wanted to fight it tooth and nail because I can't stand it when people tell me I can't do stuff, and I was in the area already, so I was tempted to stroll in there and try to sit in with somebody. But my managers bought my girlfriend and myself a nice dinner, so I let it go.
I had said the same joke on Ricky Gervais's Twitter feed, and all of the pro-choice people started asking, “Are you saying pro-choice is murder?” So I caught a bunch of shit from them too.
And the moral of that story is the abortion issue is a hot-button issue. Or that it's just not as funny a joke as I think it is.
However, I couldn't stop with the Twitter jokes: “But they're so delicious. I could eat them up, especially when their fontanel hasn't hardened. I just pop a straw right in and drink it like a kiwi.” I said I would remain “soylent” on the issue.
And I know it's a stupid little joke. But that is what Twitter is for. People who go on Twitter to express true ideas are morons because you've got 140 characters, and what do you hope to express in 140 characters? Is this the new game that the only true thoughts are in haiku? Is that really how we're going to express things to each other?
“You suck balls.” “No, you suck balls.” I am the guy who will sit there and debate who's actually sucking balls. I think it's important for people to know that they, in fact, actually suck balls. And I'm willing to sit there like their bartender or their therapist and prove conclusively through patience that they do indeed suck balls. I will stick with them and hear all of it until something good is on television.
The only thing that bothers me is when really nice people from really nice places just want to say, “Hey, I really liked that song,” and then they have to see, “No, you suck balls.”
I won't shy away from a good troll battle, but I don't want to subject the nontrolls to the ball-sucking declarations.
Ultimately, though, we all kind of suck balls for being on Twitter.
I feel that going on a USO Tour is like getting a free ride to the moon without being qualified to fly a spaceship. You're watching all these young kids deal with stuff that didn't even occur to you to deal with when you were their ageâhonor and saving each others' lives and facing death willingly, not to mention a host of technological processes. These guys are the only people I know on the road more than we are, and they really don't know whenâor ifâthey'll go home.
Every single one of them I met who was wounded was pissed off because their friends, their brothers, were at the front and they couldn't be with them. They didn't care about politics or who the president was; they were upset because “my friends are back there and I'm here.”
I went to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and listened to a lot of the wounded, and some were mad because their corporal died and they didn't and where was the fairness in that? These are things way beyond my experience, and I'm watching people process this. All I could do was listen.
The third year I finally burst out crying. I was at Landsthul Regional Medical Center, where they fly the wounded directly from the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq. This guy had one arm leftâtheir tank had blown up and a gun turret flipped on top of himâand he
couldn't reconcile how the guy inside, who he considered a better man, didn't walk away while he did. I was trying to engage him and just started sobbing. He had to crawl out of his bed with one arm to hug me, and that made me feel worse.
They told me it's a normal thing, but that was the last time they had me back. I think they decided that after three years I couldn't take it anymore.
Whenever I've been overseas, the troops just wanted to know that somebody back home cared. I could have been the Crazy Eddie spokesman.
Our first USO tour was Korea and Japan in 1998. I just wanted to do my part if I could help in some way. It's something I'm really proud of, and I recommend it.
In 2002 we went to Landsthul. They explained that the average turn-around is forty-five minutes, so sometimes people were there only forty-five minutes and sometimes they came straight from the battlefield before heading out to Walter Reed stateside or wherever they needed to go.
Then they told us that some Green Berets who had been in a fire-fight had just arrived, so we ran down the hall to see them before they left. We had no idea what we might see, how horrible it might be but we raced to it. I remember thinking,
Why am I running to see this?
It turned out that they were all right, though, they were just covered in dirt, but I can't imagine what that's like for them: one minute you're engaging the Taliban, and then there's Blues Travelerâhow surreal is that? They still had shit on them from the battle and looked dazed.
I'm not sure whether they were necessarily fansâI think they wereâbut they were happy to have anyone come see them and know what they were doing and be proud of them. I really got that feeling whenever I would go overseas. They want you to know that this is the best helicopter in the Army because it's their helicopter and that it runs right. Every time we visited a vehicle, we received a little speech about how it worked.
When you're visiting the wounded, they just want to know they're not alone and are appreciated. They just wanted to see a civilian of noteâor any civilian, really. If everyone received the same tour I did, they would appreciate what's done on their behalf. You really do see
some of the best people ever. I've never approached being honorable the way they do, and their whole day is built around that.
I talked to one woman who was a helicopter pilot and asked her what it was like when people were shooting at her. She said it's all routine; you're doing your job and then they shoot at you, and suddenly you take it really personallyâ“You're not going to keep me from seeing my kids again.” Think of that. It's easy as an anecdote to go,
Wow,
but when you're living that way, seeing your kids is now a fight between you and someone you've never met before who is trying to kill you and now you're trying to kill them. It's unreal.
In Afghanistan I was in a MASH hospital, and there were these mountains over my head. Every once in a while somebody would say, “shush” and then “all right.” People had their guns on. I walked into the hospital, and a local guy had stepped on an IED and gotten some glass in his brain. So the doctors invited me to put a mask on and come in. The thing I'll never forget was his friend in the waiting room, this really old man with a turban. He looked like Osama bin Laden's grandfather. He saw people come up to me for autographs, so he knew I was somebody, and I could tell he was scared of me. That's how I was meeting people from Afghanistanâthey were in a state of abject terror. And I was terrified of him as well. There we were, afraid of each other. To me that's how it was being over there in terms of the local people, mutual fear.
When we first went to Bosnia in 2002, the guy who took us on that tour with the USO was Captain David Mills. He was going in for SEAL training, and he was a badass. We didn't see or hear from him for years, and it got to the point where we were afraid to ask what had become of him. Then in 2006 I went to Saddam's palace and he walked up to me.
I believe that if you're a VIP, you're not in any real danger. I've been technically shot at, but what that means is that miles away someone was trying to hit us with something. When the plane lifted off, we took some small arms fire, but it was so far away that it just bounced off the side like a BB gun. We could hear the dings; they sounded like pebbles. We took off in a corkscrew motion so they couldn't really get a good shot at us, but when that happens you are aware that people are trying to kill you, which is a strange feeling because that doesn't happen in my daily civilian life.
Another time, at Camp Victory in Iraq, we were on stage practicing, and someone tried to hit the stage with a mortar. I guess they saw something shiny. In a weird way we were bait, because after that, I heard the .50 cals being shot from a helicopter, and then I didn't hear the mortars anymore. Somebody flew out to kill the people who were firing the mortars, and we got to hear that. We were listening to sounds of war while we were getting ready for the show.
The closest was when I was in Saddam's palace and an IED went off. It was all serene, there's the Tigris River, and suddenly I heard a
Boom!
maybe fifty yards away over in a city block. It sounded like three m80s combined. My first instinctâthis is me in combatâis that someone was practicing. No, it was a real IED, but I wasn't in the perimeter, although I was in earshot and it was enough to make me jump.
Another time somebody was shelling the base, and I came out of the PX with some Lucky Charms. Everyone said, “shhhh,” and I stood there for a bit, and then we were good. I felt safe because I was in the center of the military, being very protected.
If you think about it, had the Blues Traveler guy or the six New England Patriots cheerleaders been blown up or hurt in any way, policy would have changed. So there was a real interest and effort to protect us and make us feel protected. Incidentally, if you ever do go into combat, try to bring six cheerleaders. It lends a surreal aspect to the whole affair, and there's nothing like going into any place with six cheerleaders in uniform. The seas part, people get out of your way, and I can't attest to this, but I have a feeling the enemy never hit us for a reason.
We got to ride around in Stryker vehicles through downtown Bagdad and sit up top. People were waving, and even there I felt safe.
Later on I ran into these big SEAL-looking guys, and they said, “If you want, we'll take you on a run with us.” But that got stopped.
In Afghanistan the impression I got was that you never know where it's coming from. We were at the base of the mountains in this MASH unit we were in. So when soldiers had their guns on, you had the feeling it was because they really needed them.
In Iraq the captain said to me that they had a good idea where they were going to be attacked. They set up IEDs on roadsides and intersections and learned how to anticipate that and up-armor their vehicles
to have an acceptable amount of damage. In Afghanistan that never happened because there no infrastructure to guard; it was just little village after little village.
I learned all this information about IEDs, and then
Stars and Stripes
sat me down for a television interview to demonstrate how informed people are who come to visit. I gave this incredible, erudite twenty-minute lecture on what I had learned. I was knowledgeable because I'm a weapons guy, so I could explain it properly; the problem was that every time I should have said IED, I said IUD. The guy filming tried to stop me, but I was just on a roll. It was my best most informed self, I was speaking to
Stars and Stripes
broadcasting, and explaining, “Yes, an IUD could go off at any point and if you're driving by, a handkerchief or a can could be a sign of an IUD.” They just couldn't use it because IUDs are dangerous if they do go off, but in a completely different way.
In Bosnia I learned a couple of things about my crew, in particular that they could find weed anywhere. I came into the barracks where we staying and could smell it and told them that they could get arrested for stuff like thatâ“This is the military; it's not the same thing.” Alcohol wasn't really allowed on the base, and with the smell, it was ridiculous.
One year the Air Force got worried that we were too drunk and rowdy, so they assigned us a chaperone. In the playfulness of having a chaperone, we said, “Oh, so you think you can keep up with us, huh?” He responded, “Oh I intend to.” But what he wasn't counting on was hanging with Chan. I think we were in the Azores and the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing, and it was two in the morning and Chan was really counting on the Steelers to win, and we'd all had a lot to drink. And this chaperone started showing me death moves like how to slit a man's throat and was playing with this knife I had, and this was clearly bothering Chan a bit because he can tell the guy's intoxicated. We have wheels up in three or four hours, so we knew we were not going to get any sleep, everyone's going to congregate at the plane, and we're really good at going without sleep and meeting at the plane because it's like bus call.
This guy had a lot to drink, and we clearly drank him under the table because he was nearby but unconscious while Chan was getting
so upset that the Steelers had lost that he started throwing glass bottles around his room. I was walking to my room, and just as I turned to go in, I could see MPs coming up the hallway. I said, “Okay, good night,” shut the door, and got ready for bag dragâyou have to have your bag ready and put it outside your door so they can bring it to the plane.
We all made it perfectly fine, except the chaperone couldn't find any of us because we all beat the guy thereâhe was twenty minutes late. And he looked like an old undershirt that somebody had ripped off in a hurry. The man looked like used laundry. He didn't last long; he was replaced pretty quickly.
Another time we were on the tarmac of some place we had flown to, and Fisher, from our crew, rest his soul, started snapping pictures. The next thing we know the crew was surrounded by MPs. I'm not sure whether they told us, but it's common knowledge that you don't take a picture on a military runway because that gives potential terrorists information they can use about where things are that they might want to blow up. So we could not leave with that film. Fisher was arguing, “That's my cameraâI have pictures on here.” And the MP said, “I know.” Fisher became so upset that the band had to go over and talk to the MPs. The master sergeant recognized me and was a harmonica player, so the way to get Fisher and essentially all of us out of jail was that he came and sat in with us that night.
In Qatar (we were never allowed to refer to Qatar as Qatarâit was always “Location Three”âsomething to do with international diplomacy), I got to go out on a mission, but there was nothing in Qatar. It was technically a forward area, but that's where the brass were, so nothing was going to come and get them. Later I saw some pictures and realized I had been wearing my reflective belt that you need to wear in the camp so that you don't get hit by a car. Apparently no one told me to remove my safety patrol belt. And I was safety patrol in the sixth grade so I knew how to wear the belt. Standard issue. All you see in the picture is my belt, but I did get to wear a uniform and hold a gun.
When I was there I was too shy to take a dump in the regular bathroom with the stalls. The brass got wind of this (excuse the pun) and gave me one of the two private toilets in the entire theater. A general somewhere had one and I had one. It makes you feel special and also like the biggest pussy ever. That's me in combat.
There has been discussion of us going to Guantanamo Bay. Some might say that we shouldn't play this place because it goes against the ideology of what American stands for. I understand that point of view, but I feel like it's a shitty posting for solders who are trying to do their job wherever they're sent on behalf of us, so I would go and play for them. Also if my government's doing something horrible, I would want to see what conditions are like. It's a crazy time we live in, and I want to be present when stuff goes down. Not seeking trouble but not running from it either.
In 2004 I met the New England Patriots cheerleaders during our first day in the Azores. There's something in common between a hot chick and a fat guyâwe're both judged on our appearances. I would see the shit they would getâsoldiers would look at them and see the cheerleader in
their
high schoolâ“You're probably a bitch, aren't you?” And they'd just be trying to be nice to a bunch of soldiers. The cheerleaders would listen, and it would make them cry.