Suck and Blow (18 page)

So he came up to me and asked, “What are you, lonely?” And that has been ringing in my ears ever since.

We really busted our asses to get to
Letterman
that final time. It was his last month, so we had to take whatever he gave us, which was right after we booked a gig in Kentucky two days before and a gig in Vegas the very next day at three in the afternoon. So doing the taping meant I would have to fly on no sleep to Vegas. It was a really annoying day the next day, but what spurred me on and made me feel better about doing it was the excitement I heard from people and the messages I received on Facebook and Twitter. The people who supported us were so excited about us being on
Letterman,
and that made it a more worthwhile enterprise. Because historically we'd never get a bump in sales when we'd go on Lettermen, and sometimes we'd grouse a bit because with TV, you always want more than they're willing to give you, and they always want to give you less than you want. But it always excited our fan base, and that just reminded me that the reason we were there was the right reason to be there—we're lucky to have somebody to do it for, to have people boostering us on.

So to answer Tony Danza's question: “It's good to have an audience to write autographs for. So yeah, I guess I am a little lonely.” And the question, Tony, is: “Why aren't you?”

17

WE WILL BREAK YOU

People say, “You were smart to wait until your fourth record to get huge.” Yeah, that was our plan. Actually we were happy to be able to make a fourth record. All along the way we weren't sure whether we were going to get a chance to make another. Our attitude was, “Thank God A&M wants to keep doing this.” After each record we had ideas about what we could do with the next one.

If it didn't happen, though, we still had this fully flourishing business. We always looked at it as two businesses: the record business and the touring business, and you use one to feed the other. Hopefully they feed each other. That's really what happened, and that's been our biggest success. The reason people buy the records is that they saw us and we reminded them that we're still out there, and the reason they hire us is that they like the records.

The albums certainly helped us tour, but when the albums weren't out, we could still tour. And that's kind of the way we've found it the whole time, with a slight interruption by a successful album in 1995.

Before we got there, though, our third record saw these two worlds come a bit closer together. Our sound guys began pressuring us for a chance to produce—“We think we can do better.” Dave Swanson, our monitor guy, was a hot engineer at Greene Street Studios, and our front-of-house guy, Rich Vink, had theories on mixing everything. So
we told A&M, “Okay, we tried it your way two times. We want to go with our guys.” They responded, “Okay, we'll give you enough rope. We hope you don't hang yourselves.” And that's when I had the motorcycle accident. As it turned out, I think Dave and Rich did a pretty good job, because the albums before and after
four
are my two favorites (although I will acknowledge that because
four
became so successful, it's hard to see it; it's hard to have perspective).

But what A&M also said was “We'll let your guys produce if we can find you guys to mix.” They found Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, who wound up producing
four
. That's how we met them. I think the record company knew what they were doing—“Let's introduce them to the guys we want to produce their next album.” Thompson and Barbiero certainly understood that as professionals: “Our job is to get you comfortable so we can do the next album.”

I love the songs we wrote for
Save His Soul,
but some of them were too long. In mixing the album, Thompson and Barbiero instantly showed us some of what we were missing, and we were finally ready to utilize their experience for
four.

Our relationship with A&M did progress a bit with the third album. They had given us money to keep us going after my bike wreck, and we appreciated the faith in what we were doing. They even let us make a video for “Conquer Me,” although I defy anyone to remember that video—I can't remember that video.

I can remember the video we made for “Defense and Desire.” It was shot at Nightingale's, directed by Dave Dobkin, who has gone on to direct such films as
Shanghai Knights, Wedding Crashers,
and
The Judge.
He's the one who put us in touch with Lorene Scafaria, who wrote and directed
The Meddler,
in which we appear as ourselves, performing on a boat at a lesbian wedding—the cast includes Susan Sarandon, Michael McKean, and J. K. Simmons, who won the Oscar for
Whiplash.

I think they believed in us and were trying to find a way to promote us, but part of it was that they just didn't quite understand us. We had to win over their departments.

Just like with the previous records, they set out a singles strategy with us, explaining how they would release a second and maybe even
a third. Then they gave maybe a month to see what the first single could do before the whole thing was kiboshed. We had our live following, though, and when they sent us into the alternative department, the people there said, “You guys are doing it. We have no advice to give you.” So we couldn't even catch a break at alternative.

But things changed with
four.

Michael Barbiero and Steve Thompson were amazing producers, and their enthusiasm was on a whole different level from anyone we'd met. They were the first outside producers who really seemed to get us. Rather than, “I need to save this weird, backward band,” they were like, “Wow, these guys have a sound—let's go after it. There is something here.”
four
was the first album where the producers related to us like we were the artists. By getting Thompson and Barbiero, we were getting actual producers who were not resting on their laurels; they were doing things now. They had worked with Metallica, Tesla, and Guns N' Roses, so it was a much more aggressive posture.

On
four
Thompson and Barbiero confronted me about songwriting, and that to me became the first time we made a professional album. If you get lucky, that's a moment you might have on your first record, but you have to prove yourself before people will even say you're good enough that they want to fuck with you on this. I was getting somewhere, but I needed help. That was the biggest songwriting education I had yet received because they wouldn't settle for pretty good, and they pushed me on that. And from that point on, once you learn that discipline, you can't ignore it. You notice that you can say the same thing in a simpler way, and the simplicity of it makes a more impactful statement. “Whoop, I think it's right there” is nowhere near as good as “Whoop, there it is.” I love that as my example. But what really motivated me was that I would see the results almost immediately.

We were at the point where we loved playing music but wondered why our albums didn't sound like what we heard on the radio. They introduced us to the things that are true about songs, like repetitive choruses that people can sing over and over again—don't go the Bob Dylan road, where it's long and drawn out. And songs should be about three and half minutes on a record because a record is to show people the idea of the song, and then you go play it live however you want.

“Price to Pay” originally had a few more verses, and Thompson and Barbiero knew how to say, “Look, if you pull this away, you're still getting to your story. You have nice images that you're painting here, but remember, you're trying to paint a story.” So I looked at my images, and what I found was that the ones I trimmed away really weren't that important—and that has happened almost every time since. I find that I can take the good stuff from verse two and the good stuff from verse three and make one verse. I really wasn't doing that before Thompson and Barbiero.

I wrote “Run-Around” as a slow, sad dirge. When I sang it for Felicia, she cried, and that was the desired effect. It was sort of a sad song, and they heard us rehearsing it and told Brendan to put in a backbeat to it make it faster. Suddenly it was a peppy song almost instantly, and we all knew, “Wow, that's different.” It was like in
That Thing You Do!,
where suddenly you put a backbeat to something and the song takes on a new life. If we tried to sell “Run-Around” the way I originally wanted it, which was this sort of sad, touching song, it wouldn't have gone very far. Thompson and Barbeiro caught that.

Everybody at A&M was freaking about “Run-Around,” so we decided this was our moment to take a stand. After three previous albums, where they had broken their promise to go two singles deep, we figured we could finally make them commit to it this time. When we went into our meeting about
four
they wanted “Run-Around,” and our mission was to force them to wait and do another single before they could get to the single they wanted.

I walked into the meeting dressed in a bathrobe and Buffalo Bill–fringe gloves and carrying a saber. I plopped my saber on the table, pulled a Diet Coke from my pocket, and said, “Let's talk.” I was trying to take a note from Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante. After the meeting, I told this to the label president, Al Cafaro, who referred to the mob boss as if they were good friends. He told everyone, “Hey, he was doing Vinnie.”

That was during my performance-piece era. I remember in my first interview with MTV I was holding a teddy bear at knifepoint like he was a hostage throughout the entire interview. I never explained why I was holding a teddy bear at knifepoint, and I was always proud of that. I wanted people to make up their own minds. You have to let art speak for itself.

We sat at the table, and everyone else was on the side of J. B. Brenner, the radio guy. He wanted “Run-Around.” But we argued the case: “Why can't we have the single you want released after Christmas, and we do this other single, ‘Hook'? Let's work ‘Hook' first, and then if you really believe in our record, then you can go two deep.” Slowly but surely we won our argument.

But along with that, we had to do all this ass kissing. One thing we had to do was play for all the A&M people at some private party at a bar. I remember Al Cafaro, came up to me, grabbed me by both sides of my head, and said, “John, I promise you, we will break you.” I remember wondering,
Does he mean break us or break us?

But there seemed to be something different in his tone. That was when we saw how you could really make things happen back then if you were a record company. It was weird. Doors were opening that we never thought possible.

We were told to go to Z100 in New York and play for the DJs. They brought us into a little room, all the DJs came in, they put out this little plate of ziti that they ate, not us, and we played only for them. At the time we didn't know why we were doing this, but it was because they knew that the next day, after they put us into heavy rotation, everything was going to be different—“We are about to put you on this vast apparatus in which you will be exalted and never take our calls, but before we do that, kiss the ring.” Bear in mind,
we
didn't know this. I had just put my Labrador retriever to sleep and went into a meeting. But we kissed it because that's what the label told us to do, and that had never happened before. But we really had no grasp until the machine was turned on and we saw the results. Needless to say, we still don't call those radio people.

From the nineties perspective, when they decided to push you, it was just a matter of them deciding to do it. They could tell an audience which songs they should like by saturating them. Now, the song would have to be good enough not to annoy people, but basically I think there was something to the infrastructure they created: we're going to put enough standees in windows so there's a percentage we can guarantee will buy this. We know how to capitalize on that percentage, we know how to keep your disc in a store, should we decide to do that, and we know how to go to radio stations and say, “You
like bands on A&M? Well, if you want Soundgarden, you gotta play Blues Traveler.”

“Run-Around” was put into heavy rotation in early 1995. We didn't play any live dates until February 15, when we went down to open for Hootie and the Blowfish in Atlanta, and that was when we realized that the buzz had started to catch. We were playing our set, and people liked us, but then when we played “Run-Around,” it was like a Beatles concert. Something was definitely different. It was as if somebody had gone around and paid everybody a hundred bucks to scream at that song. Were they aware of the excitement difference? They liked our music, but when we played the radio-backed one, the one that Mike and Steve had said would be a hit, the applied science of making a single, of making a song catchy, was suddenly not theoretical anymore. It was direct proof. It took us about a year from conceiving the album, writing it, and then finding out the results.

Suddenly we were told to do a tour of radio shows for little or no money, but we'd be glad we did it. By that summer we were making so much stupid money and we were working so hard that we didn't even get to appreciate it, really.

I do recall one moment, very early on, when the album was just starting to go but we hadn't quite felt it yet. Brendan and I were walking through Times Square and saw that this new restaurant was opening, the Official All-Star Café. There was a red carpet there, and Brendan said, “We have a song on the radio—we should try walking on the red carpet and see if that works.” Everyone else was dressed up, and we were wearing our street clothes, but I loved that it was Brendan's idea, so I said, “I'm game if you are.”

So we tried, and sure enough, everyone let us through, with no credentials or anything. We did a circuit, we were on E! Entertainment Television—“And here's Blues Traveler!”—and it totally worked. Shaquille O'Neal was there and all sorts of people along with free food at a time when free food was a big deal. So immediately Brendan and I got on the phone to Bobby and Chan: “Get your asses down here right now!”

John McEnroe was there, and he had a band. The finest moment was when, in between his sets, John McEnroe was sitting in a chair, grumbling to himself—“Man, I screwed that up”—just like he was in
a tennis match. I had always wanted to sit next to John McEnroe in that situation and say, “Look, you did okay, you did fine. There was nothing wrong with it. You'll bounce back.” And I got to do that, as I happened to be somebody that he kind of had to listen to because I knew what I was talking about—it was music. Eventually Blues Traveler backed up John McEnroe, so we basically infiltrated and then took over that party.

That was a strange time. I had people try to climb into my car when I was driving. When I would order in a pizza, the delivery guys didn't want cash tips—I had to give them harmonicas. One time I ran out and someone said, “Can I just have some stuff?” So I gave him some stuff. When I would go the supermarket, kids would talk to me, and I would have them help me put my groceries in the car.

Things became a little confusing for our fans as well. Some of them who had been around since the beginning were really put off by these new kids who treated us any like any other pop band, waiting for the two songs they knew, bored by everything else. These new fans would create such manic energy for those two songs that it would almost balance out their apathy for the other stuff. We had hoped older fans would help educate the younger fans—I had seen that happen with Phish—but it was more like two factions who could never reach détente.