Suck and Blow by John Popper Read Free Book Online Page B

and hung out with us. So we called it the Black Cat Jam, and that’s where our mascot of the black cat came from. A lot of our early songs came out of that jam too—“Sweet Talking Hippie,” “But Anyway,” and “Mulling It Over.” I wrote a poem about it called “Black Cat Blues,” and we recorded a version of it later with a really slow pocket because we’d already plumbed the grooves we had from the original jam by that point.
    Around this time we began sneaking into Princeton University to play frat parties and eating clubs. One time this college kid came up to me and said, “I know what you’re thinking—rich white kid exploiting your music.” I didn’t want to tell him that my dad was VP at Squibb and I lived up the street and that I think I’m Caucasian as well. So instead I said, “I hear you man,” because that’s what he wanted—you just learn what role to play.
    But I would never suggest I was anything but a white kid from the suburbs. One thing I’ve always felt is essential is to keep it true. I wasn’t going try to talk about the blues in some stereotypical way, like I was James Cotton in some juke joint in the 1950s. I will never know what that experience was like. I can’t fathom what James Cotton went through, all anyone can know is their own experience.
    I think that’s also why I came to value songwriting, which became important. If I just went for chops I think I would have gone the way of Joe Satriani where people know my quantity and think, Okay he does that, and it would pretty much be my only function. This way I can be more than a harmonica meme.
    They say that Paul Butterfield, who was one of the best ever in my estimation, died on a bar stool trying to convince someone he was Paul Butterfield. That is the fate of a harmonica player—no matter how good you are, you’re a harmonica player. The way around that is to write songs, and because I’m a songwriter, I don’t ever have to just be a harmonica player. But being a songwriter allows me to put that harmonica in weird places, and that allows me to surprise and to think in terms of melodies.
    During my senior year the space shuttle Challenger crashed. I wrote a song about it for my English class called “Ain’t That Life.” Picture a seventeen-year-old telling you about life. All of my songs went about ten verses too long, and this one had a very sappy bridge:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  A newborn kitten freezes
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  While two young lovers part
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And maybe right here some sucker
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Could be taking this song to heart
    It was a bit juvenile, but they had me come in and sing it for the PTA. I could smell that they didn’t know how to talk to the kids about the space shuttle disaster. I was really good at honing in on stuff like that. People were traumatized, and the teachers really wanted to connect with students. I loved it when teachers wanted to connect with students—they were easy prey. I didn’t have to do any homework senior year; I just got an A for writing a song about the space shuttle blowing up.
    Later, at the New School, I had to take one English class, and again I didn’t do any work, then I busted out this space shuttle song around Christmas and passed. I remember thinking it was good because everyone I sang it for thought it was so deep and moving. But then I tried it out in New York to some girl in her twenties, and she laughed in the middle of it. I remember thinking all of the demoralizing things a young man would feel at that point, but at heart I was like, Yeah, she’s right. I knew it was lame. To be fair, it was a high school assignment gone awry that I had milked for two years, but it had