Suck and Blow (8 page)

We even played CBGB's once in 1989. I was told that Hilly Kristal saw us and gave us an A rating. I knew nothing about the lore of the club. The night we had to prove ourselves they put us between two heavy-metal hair bands where there was a lot of head banging, so it was easy to be original between two bands that sounded the same.

The sound guy from Kenny's Castaways, Rich Vink, started hanging out with us and became our sound guy, and he knew Dave Swan-son, who was the sound engineer working at Greene Street Studios and became our monitor guy. This was the formation of the guts of the crew. In 1988 and 1989 those clubs and associations were coming together.

In my opinion we never left a bad taste in anyone's mouth. We were generally pleasant to work with—we might have gotten a little
sloppy, but we never really broke anything. We didn't fight over money as a general rule, we usually did as we were told, and we always left everybody pleased. By and large, people wished us well, at least that's my take.

Nightingale's was the first bar that didn't just tolerate us; they encouraged us. But there were others too: Mondo Cane and Mondo Perso and then Wetlands. It's so rare as a band that you get to have your own little club that you get to take for granted. I remember seeing Jono in Nightingale's and saying to myself,
I want that.
We could never quite have that at Nightingale's because of Jono, but we finally would at Wetlands.

First it was Mondo Cane and Mondo Perso and the Bleecker Street scene. Those rooms couldn't have held more than 150 people—I'm probably being generous—but they seemed so important. I remember Downtown Julie Brown from MTV came to Mondo Cane. And one of the bartenders at Mondo Cane, Daniel Kellison, became a talent booker for David Letterman, told them about us, and helped get us on his show.

Adolph, the guy who ran those two clubs, was great. He'd do things like say, “Hey, you dropped that,” and that was his way of giving us twenty dollars. Another time we told him how the utility company had shut off our heat, and he came back with this space heater, saying, “I don't need this. I'm throwing it out.” He was so aware that some people might be offended by his charity, but we were like, “Cool, a heater.” We didn't blink, but we were aware he was trying to spare our feelings in case we were proud. He basically went out and bought us a big-ass heater, and we threw it in our car with the gear, drove it home, and had heat.

He'd also take everyone out for breakfast—the waiters, the waitresses, bartenders, and bands. It wasn't in a pervy or a douchebag way; he just really saw twentysomethings in New York with dreams and without money.

When the lunch box that held my microphones fell apart, I gave half of it to him. I also gave him a tumbleweed. The first time we played a gig in California, we were driving back through Flagstaff, Arizona. It was the first time we had been across the country. The only ones awake were me and Rob Lester, who went to high school with us
and was our driver in the early days. He asked, “Is this really Arizona?” and then just as he said it, a tumbleweed blew by. Without a word we looked at each other, jumped out of the van, chased down the tumbleweed, threw it inside, and took it back to New York. We wound up giving it to Adolph, and it lived in the Mondo Cane.

We first heard about Wetlands when some of the people who were working on it came down to Nightingale's in late 1988 and told us about this club that would be opening in February. I don't think we held our breath because at that time lot of people would come up to us and say, “We have this new thing we're going to be doing—come on down and be our band.” So we said, “Sure, sounds great,” and nothing ever came of it, but Wetlands wound up being a real thing.

We became the house band, and there was that relationship of belief—give me something and I'll give you something; we'll work together. Larry Bloch was among the first to do that, before Bill Graham gave us that feeling. And especially when you're a little band from Princeton, New Jersey, that meant a lot. When we sort of had carte blanche at Wetlands—they made it clear this was our scene and our house—it felt similar to being signed by a label.

When I walked in for the first time, I noticed that bus and all those leaflets and pamphlets and different organizations trying to get stuff done—
Oh God, what is this place?
It had a cool bar and an equally cool paint job. Everybody always complained about the location of the stage, but I always liked the intimacy it created, and I played to more people than I ever did before anyhow.

We had a thousand people in there at times; I know that for a fact, although later on I learned that the capacity was only 389. That's hysterical to me. That's also why I ended up calling it Sweatglands: because with all those bodies in there, the air conditioning wouldn't work, the pipes would drip, and the walls would sweat.

Then we would go downstairs and there were all those pillows, and everyone was smoking weed. You'd grab your girl and start making out, and nobody seemed to be bothering anybody.

I met Bear down there, Owsley Stanley. I was trying to lose weight at many points, and he told me to only eat meat. He gave me this whole spiel about how Eskimos eat seven thousand calories a day. I went to my doctor and told him what Bear told me, and my doctor
said, “Yes, because they're in subzero temperatures and burn two thousand calories just trying to stay warm.”

Bear was in his mid-fifties and showed me his muscles. He was strong. I think what he was preaching was the Atkins Diet in a sense. I can never eat an entirely meat-only diet because eventually I need ketchup and French fries, but he was a cool guy. We hit it off—we could both tell the other guy was weird.

We were at Wetlands the first month, opening for Sonny Rhodes, and then almost immediately we were headlining. We got signed out of Wetlands. It was the first time the
Village Voice
had to acknowledge our existence. It was also the first time people heard about this scene going on.

I remember looking around and felt like we were in
The Doors
movie for a second. It was cool. We were our own scene. We weren't punk rockers—it was a sort of hippie rejuvenation, this jam band thing, although we didn't call it that. It just felt like we were home.

I remember when Jerry Dugger from the Worms first saw us play. He said, “I really like the psychedelia, but you gotta develop it.” That's when I thought,
Oh, so we're psychedelia.
We were definitely into that music, but I never thought,
I'm going to be a hippie and adopt a hippie lifestyle.
That never occurred to me, and in fact it seemed kind of dumb to me. I always wanted to be a friend to a hippie but not a hippie. I wanted to make sure he got home okay. I wanted to make sure he was eating. You always have to make sure a hippie's eating if you care about him.

Shortly after Bobby joined the band, he had all these friends in Princeton who would invite us to play at their parties. They were all Deadhead guys, and I have this tape where someone asks, “Does Popper know the words to ‘Fire on the Mountain?'” “Of course Popper knows the words to ‘Fire on the Mountain.'” I didn't know the words to “Fire on the Mountain.”

Bobby also wanted us to do “New Minglewood Blues,” but I'd never heard any Grateful Dead songs, so our version was definitely different. I was really unschooled in singers and bands, so I guess I was sort of trying to do an Iron Butterfly impression, but it really sounded like Bill Murray doing his lounge act. I didn't know how to sing. I had to learn to let my voice go and not try to sing through my head. Drugs helped a
bit because then you relax and go with it and can respond to a beautiful moment, and the New School certainly helped me get to my voice.

While Bobby was always trying to steer us in that direction, before he joined the band I felt more kindred with George Thorogood than the Grateful Dead. But improvisation was second nature to everyone at the New School, so it became a little easier to go that way. I also felt a bit like Little Walter reborn, but I didn't want to know any Little Walter songs, just as I didn't want to know any Grateful Dead songs. I thought the key was not to know anything and to go in and be original because it's easier to be original when you don't know what the hell you're doing or who you're referencing.

Eventually I would see the Grateful Dead a few times and come to appreciate their music, but it wasn't easy. The first thing I noticed about the Grateful Dead is that my friends would put on a tape, cue it up to their favorite song, and then proceed to talk during the entire song. I'd want to smack them with a carp so I could hear the song. And when you don't know the Grateful Dead and can't hear them too well, every song seems like they're singing “Ham and eggs . . .”

I can remember the first time Bobby, Dave Precheur, and some other friends took me to a Grateful Dead show. There were two things I noticed as a first-time attendee: everyone wants you to dance, and everyone wants to tell you about the first time they heard a song, so you never get to hear that song. It almost becomes the emperor's new clothes because they're so busy talking about how great it is to be there that you never know what it's like to be there.

I couldn't enjoy the Grateful Dead because everyone was so busy telling me how much I should enjoy the Grateful Dead. I remember being on acid, convinced that people were trying to brainwash me because they really wanted me to enjoy the show, and I just wanted to hear the show before I could enjoy it. That was tough to do. All of my friends were singing in my ear along with the band, and all I could hear was “Ham and eggs . . .”

The one time I was finally able to listen to the Grateful Dead was when I ditched my friends and went off and found a chair somewhere and sat down where I didn't know anybody. The Deadheads around me said, “Aren't you going to dance?” And I said, “No,” and just
watched the show and got to hear the music, and that was the important thing.

The New School steered me toward the idea that you should know what's out there so you can react to it and rail against it if you must. But it seemed to me that if you don't know what you're doing, you can remain more innocent. The result is that a lot of your songs stay in one or two chords for a little longer, but there was something pure about it that people responded to.

Nightingale's didn't belong to us—it's what we belonged to. If it belonged to anybody, it was Jono's place. Nightingale's was a place where we lived by our wits as a band; it was a proving ground. But the Wetlands took us in, and because they encouraged us to do precisely what we happened to be doing at the time, we got to feel exactly like we did a few years earlier when we were rehearsing or playing somebody's keg party.

They would close the place down sometimes and we'd play an extra hour. It felt like a slumber party—“Hey, let's stay up and tell ghost stories!” We didn't feel like we had to be as professional as much as we got to have fun playing.

I don't think we could even do that today because nobody would let us. But even if we suddenly wanted to go an hour past curfew, now we'd have to think about union costs, we'd have to get to the next gig and unload, the crew's tired, and we'd need to pay everybody. Back then those thoughts weren't really on our mind. It was more like, “This is fun and the crowd's raging—this is what we're here for.” Sooner or later, in order to function, you've got to become a business, and Wetlands was the last place we got to be innocent. After that it wasn't worse; it just became efficient.

The first time we played with Bruce Willis was at Wetlands. It was the standard harmonica thing, where we always want to duel, so the first thing I did was rip him a new one. I wanted to punish him because I was angry at all harmonica players, really, but the thing is, he was such a fun guy. Then at set break he was like, “Yeah, you're fast, but can you play slow?” (As if to say, “Do you have soul?”) So the next set I took it real easy on him and traded, and it was an instant mutual love affair after that.

He invited me to Idaho to sit in with his band. He plays harp and dresses up his other harmonica player in a Krispy Kreme donuts uniform and says he's the billionaire founder of Krispy Kreme donuts who just goes out on a lark to play with him. So with me, they had three harp players.

I remember he handed me this wooden duck decoy. Apparently he was at some hotel in New Hampshire or Vermont where these ducks were in every room, and he got drunk and collected them all. At first he told me that he had carved it himself, that he was in therapy and his therapist told him he needed to work with his hands. But later he acknowledged that he just said that to people and then handed them ducks.

My other memory of that time is that he was married to Demi Moore, but I kept calling her Diane because this was before
Ghost
and I didn't know who she was. She looked at me dead in the eye as if to punch me and said, “Hey, it's Demi.” By the time I visited them in Idaho a decade afterward, it became a funny story, at least to me.

I later invited Bruce to record with us on our 2008 album,
North Hollywood Shootout.
I just wanted him to do some beat poetry. I asked him to write something with a pocket behind it, and he got hold of it, gripped it and ripped it.

As for Wetlands, we would come back and play for Larry long after we were too big to play there anymore. I think I did two solo Wetlands shows where it was just me emptying my stockpile of every song I had written since high school. “Run-Around” was in that batch, unveiled that way. I debuted the original, slower version there, and it was a magical evening for me. Somebody recently sent me the tape, and I just love that it's out there. When you're doing shows like that, you have fantasies in your head that someday someone will remember this, and it feels great to know they really did. Plus, in this case the advantage is that there are so many songs I had forgotten about that I can learn to play again or at least can strip for parts. Thank you, social media.