Late-July Chris and the Alchemy of John Popper (Dispatches from the Underground)
The joys of old friends, harmonica mysticism, and rooting around shirtless for blueberries like an animal
“Late July Chris is the best Chris” — that’s what our elusive friend SB said to me a couple nights ago. The comment was made in a Facebook event page for an upcoming performance at Boston’s Wilbur by the great and legendary classic Creed frontman Scott Stapp. I had invited SB to this event, along with several of my closest friends and family members — I mean, obviously. Everyone needs to know this is happening.
I’m don’t know that this is actually the “best” me, but he’s right that I do have a very distinct self that appears in mid- to late July. We always turn that corner of the year between the solstice and the Fourth of July, and when the New Age of the year’s second half really settles in, that’s when this me comes out — that’s my working theory, anyway.
Like I said, I’m not sure how good or bad it is. It’s a micro-season in which I can probably be best described as both hot-blooded and loose, in all the best and worst ways of each. I’m feeling fiery and lusty for adventure, always up for company; in fact, this is the only time of year I’m willing to be spontaneous and make last-minute plans. Just a few weeks out of the year and that’s it. It’s a tough case given how damn good I am at enjoying myself year round, but one might argue that I’m at peak fun right now. That’s why I’d invite everyone to go see Creed next year and also why I’m available to hang just about any night of the week.
I might be good at hot but it’s not always a positive — it might seem paradoxical, but this is also a time in which I am short-tempered, impatient, and prone to snapping at people irrationally. In fact, I’m very ready for a fight of any kind, perhaps not for any reason but for an expanded array of them. I don’t like this side of it so much.
I’m also loose, though — after the frenzy of the spring and the revelry of Midsummer, I can finally lower my hyper-vigilance a couple of notches. Whether I want to or not, I always find myself relaxing (whenever I’m not fighting or falling into another Bacchanal Lite) for what seems like the first time in forever. It’s not just that I make time for reading and allow myself to chill in bed instead of working overtime on writing (and have an increased willingness, as we saw last week, to skip Dispatches for no good reason) — I actually start taking it easy on myself across the board. There’s even a whole hunk of my usual dignity that kinda gets lifted for just a few weeks. Like last Saturday, up on the mountain, I spent the entire day shirtless and unashamed, scurrying about like some sort of forest boy-creature eating wild blueberries every few steps. It was awesome, but you won’t see me doing that any other time of year.
Three or four weeks from now I’ll go back to being as delightfully uptight about appearance and decorum as usual. For this little moment, though, I am a savage — a delighted savage, and delightful, too, so long as you stay clear of my misdirected slings and arrows.
It was in this very spirit of spontaneity and loose hot-bloodedness that I found myself scoring a last-minute ticket to the Northampton (Mass) stop on the All Roads Runaround tour featuring moe. and Blues Traveler as a double bill. It’s pretty rare that I’d say eff it mere days in advance for a major show at 5 pm on a Wednesday night nearly three hours from my office, but I said exactly that and invited myself along with two very dear and very old friends from the Keene days.
The innocent halcyon days of 2005 were not just the Keene days, but indeed also the moe. days as I’d been introduced to that all-star party band jam band by Peter way back then, and we’d been accompanied on many subsequent occasions by Sean. These came to be…very formative experiences, shall we say, over the years, and there were dozens of them. The last time we’d seen moe. together was when they’d stopped in Keene back in 2013, and at that point it had been years since we had been regular attendees. So the opportunity to do this, now, in 2019, with these dudes, was just too good to pass up.
Then there’s Blues Traveler — we’d all gone to see them together as well, also at the Colonial in Keene, back in like 2010 or 2011, and that had been a riot. John Popper had been a bit of a mess at the time, getting loaded from eight or nine different solo cups scattered about him that appeared to each contain something a little bit different — even ripping butts without care on the historic stage. Nonetheless, he’d blown me away. I’d expected a fun time from a band that had loomed so large in the mid-90s, as one of those bands like DMB that skirted the edge of the true post-Dead jam band scene in the bro-hippie subgenre. I mean come on, I’m a suburban white Older Millennial — we ALL crossed paths with Blues Traveler. But no, not only was this guy the harmonica savant I imagined, but he had one of the most incredible voices I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing in person. Booze and butts be damned, he filled that ancient auditorium in a way I’ve seen no one do before or since. It had been stunning, a gift.
And so was the opportunity to go to this show.
It’s always gonna be easy to dismiss Popper and his band on the basis of that currently uncool subgenre, but after years of denouncing it in my own coolness, I’m pretty comfortable defending it. Take “Hook,” for example. Go listen to the first thirty seconds on YouTube if you can’t remember it. You know this song, its poppy catchy old ubiquity is buried deep in your brain as long as you’re over 30. Just a silly catchy song from the 90s.
No, no. It’s the work of a master genius trickster, a multi-layered spell that self-effaces, performs alchemy, and declares the meaning and nature of all music all at the same time.
I started talking about this in the car on the way down and Peter stopped me. “Yeah — it’s about heroin, isn’t it? ‘Hook’…”
No, no.
(Although it’s an understandable thing to think given that all the songs in the 90s were about heroin and this one is called “Hook”, but there’s apparently actually a couple songs that were exceptions and this is one of them. It strikes me as odd that today’s music seems a LOT less heroin-based than that of a quarter century ago, despite the fact that we’re in the midst of a far worse opioid epidemic, but that’s a digression for another day and I’m not sure I have the answers for that anyway.)
Indulge me a little exegesis here. First off, the fact that the tune even presents itself as a poppy little single is an impressive feat all its own, for it’s no such thing. It’s Pachelbel’s Canon — and not a licentious interpretation, either. If you check out the harmonica solo, it’s pretty much note-for-note with the epic baroque piece, which is insane in and of itself, even if he weren’t able to replicate this live on stage. Oh, but he can.
The fact that the music underlying the words can be called archetypal or at least unusually resonant in a very timeless way is critical to the meaning of the song — and we come to the brilliance of the first verse:
“It doesn’t matter what I say
As long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel I’ll convey
Some inner truth of vast reflection.”
“I’m playing you,” he says, right out of the gate. “I’m fucking with you and I’m telling you that I’m doing it and it’s still gonna work.” I love that kind of spirit. But then he really goes for it:
“But I’ve said nothing so far,
And I can keep it up as long as it takes.
And it don’t matter who you are,
If I’m doing my job, it’s your resolve that breaks -
(Chorus)
Because the hook brings you back…”
Hoo boy, that one line — “If I’m doing my job, it’s your resolve that breaks” — really cracks my skull from multiple angles. I mean it’s the essence of creative alchemy, of the purpose of art. Right there in just ten simple words, laid out like that. I relate to that because I take a lot of pride in my resolve. It’s really hard to get me with music or a film or any sort of art, but that resolve isn’t a defense mechanism. It’s not like that. I want to be moved, to be seduced, for my walls to come down. But because I make it difficult, when my resolve breaks, the man is right — it means someone did their fucking job.
It also gets me because I feel like that’s my job, as writer and wizard and creator. It’s your resolve I’m after, and I don’t get it all the time, but I do when I’m really doing my job.
There’s further elaboration in the second verse, which he starts off the same way:
“There is something amiss;
I am being insincere;
In fact, I don’t mean any of this.
Still, my confession draws you near.”
“I’m lying to you — in case you missed it the first time — but it doesn’t matter because I’ve got you anyway.” I love that just as much the second time around, but then there’s a new element introduced:
“To confuse the issue, I’ll refer to familiar heroes from long ago”
— a play on Jung’s archetypes or Campbell’s subsequent monomyth. If you hit the right notes — with myth and allusion just as much as with sound — you can move people no matter what they think with their minds. You can get them. He proves it with a couple totally nonsensical lines about Peter Pan that still seem somehow moving.
Then we get that harmonica solo, which, again, is pretty much spot on with the climax of the original piece, and then for the third verse he manages to compound the great accomplishment of this work even further, declaring essentially that he hates the cheap superficial shit, the easy trick, and that he intends to sing sincerely of serious matters — love, rage, hate, pain, fear itself — because he can’t hold it all inside, perhaps even despite the cynicism underlying the very premise of all of this.
He shifts gears again, declaring his independence and intention to assert and express his will, almost implying he’s gonna just RIDE this line between ersatz commercial viability and real soulful art, switching then to contradict most of what he’s said so far:
“Hear what I say,
I have a prayer to pray,
That’s really all this was…”
And I mean, is it really a contradiction? It’s that alchemy thing again, only this is a real confession, just for a split second — a moment in which, actually, what I’m saying isn’t manipulative bullshit after all, I’m really going after the transcendent here — and then crashing down to earth without losing the honesty:
“And when I’m feeling stuck and need a buck,
I don’t rely on luck,
Because the hook brings you back…”
So wait a minute, was this a sincere prayer to the muses or the cosmos or whoever else, or is the prayer the supernatural act of creating a hit song that will be played for decades and ensure that he’ll always have some income. Talk about an amazing self-fulfilling prophecy.
The guy did exactly what he said — and he’s still out there crushing it. I saw it with my own eyes, because unlike those ungrateful wretches in bands who resent the success of their hits, pretending that’s not how they get paid, Blues Traveler has no problem closing out every show with Hook.
It may be tempting to look at Popper and see a buffoon, but don’t. One wizard recognizes another.
I’m very grateful for Peter and Sean and I’m glad that Late-July Chris is the guy who’ll jump at the chance to go to a show like this with people like this.
I don’t see them too much these days — maybe a few times a year. We used to live, work, and play together around the clock, along with several others. For years we lived like this. And then each of us, all in our own time, went in other ways and settled down, as people do. Sean and I even left the company — the one that’d brought us all to one place to begin with — at the same time, a big End of an Era that happened over half a decade ago now. But the friendship, those deep loving bonds of familiarity and experience and shared growth, it just never goes anywhere.
That night as we got down in that wonderful venue (practically like a backyard, we could walk right up to the stage) it could have been any other year. It could have been a decade ago, and there we were. moe. crushed their set; I’ve always seen them as the party band out of all the upper-middle-tier jam bands, and they put on a party for us.
It’s good to know we can still have this, and maybe even still dance around a little bit of trouble like the old days. We’ve gone quite far — and in some ways, some very wonderful and delightful ways, nobody ever really goes anywhere.