Posted by Every once in a while someone comes along who just completely changes the game that they are playing, someone who turns every head in every room and who utterly transcends the maybe-they-will/maybe-they-won’t rule of fame and stardom, and you just know it from the very first moment you witness their talent.
Names like Wayne Gretzky, Glenn Gould and Jeff Healey spring to mind, each one an example of someone who spent an untellable amount of time obsessing over their particular vice until they had traversed all known pathways and methods, when finally unrelenting passion and dedication to their craft virtually forced them to forge brand new, previously unthinkable paths. When these rare curiosities are finally brought to the world’s stage for all to see they invariably arrive so fully-formed that they shock audiences into thinking the talent they are witnessing could only have been gifted by God or by some sort of miraculous one-in-a-trillion DNA fluke.
Now, I hate to date myself here, but if you could go back in time to 1991 or so and see Blues Traveler the first time they played on the David Letterman show you’d probably agree with me that lead singer and harmonica re-inventor John Popper is one of these people. With so many decades to acclimatize to his astoundingly fast and furious harp playing one may be fooled into thinking that Popper doesn’t deserve to be listed amongst such company but I assure you, back in the day John Popper was it.
There has been quite a trajectory for Popper’s career since those early, turn-every-head-in-the-room days. Blues Traveler started up their own touring music festival, hiring bands like the Spin Doctors and a quartet of young upstarts from Vermont called Phish to join them on the bill. Then came their album Four, which had hit after hit and made the band utterly ubiquitous at every campus party and on every FM rock station. Then things started going sour. One of the band members OD’ed, their label dropped them, and Popper got into a motorcycle accident somewhere along the way. It was right around this time that July 13, 2001 came up on the calendar, the day that I saw Popper and his Blues Traveling brethren at the Ottawa Bluesfest.
The ever-expanding festival was taking place at the as-yet undeveloped LeBreton Flats, which was just a short stagger from my apartment. I remember standing on a dusty field that seems emptier in my mind that it must have been in actual history, but one thing for sure is that that John Popper dude was still turning heads, even though by this time everyone in the crowd already knew what to expect.
And what we expected was a harmonica player who shredded up and down his humble mouth organ with single-note flourishes that were crisp, clear, fast, precise, musical, endlessly creative, and absolutely unprecedented amongst the entire history of the instrument in popular listening circles (a caveat I make out of extreme prudence rather than personal experience). And the moment he’s done tearing your musical head off with his blistering riffs Popper pulls back the harmonica, steps up to the mic and…Oh my gawd the guy can sing too!
And the songs were pretty great. Their set touched on their entire career up to that point, but they saved two of their big hits off of Four for last, Run-Around and the head-cutting widdly-widdly-a-thon Crash Burn. You might not remember the title but you’d definitely recognize the song from the first three hundred notes two seconds. Long story short I was drunk and excited as were my crew of music-loving compatriots, and we rocked it out solid to the greatest harmonica playing of our generation, swaying together in a featureless dustbowl of a non-venue that would one day become the cultivated home to one of the biggest blues festivals in North America.
As to the rest of the trajectory: Popper started making solo records and still occasionally spends the odd summer playing the festival circuit with Blues Traveler, but aside from an odd stint making the entertainment news as an online stalker the harmonica maestro and his Travelers have mostly retreated back into the obscurity from which they emerged.
But nobody goes around pinning that on God or DNA.
Todd Man Out 