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Great bands always sound better live! While hardly infallible, legions of Blues Traveler fans the world over have been betting safe money on the validity of that observation for more than twenty years. During that time, the band has racked up an impressive body of works including nine studio and four live CDs (six certified gold or platinum) representing ten million copies sold and more than two thousand live shows performed before three million devoted followers.
The standard bearers of passionately played music their many memorable songs are constructed around Cleveland-born front man John Popper’s clever lyrics, vibrant vocals and the gale-force, quicksilver runs of his virtuoso harmonica playing. (Remarkably, Popper didn’t pick up the instrument until he was fifteen!) But the most potent weapon in their arsenal of sonic tricks is the chemistry between band members that make them such an improvisational powerhouse on stage.
Cast from the same mould as Led Zeppelin, Santana and the Allman Brothers, Blues Traveler spearheaded a jam band revival in the early 1990s. From their humble beginnings as a high school garage band in Princeton, New Jersey, the original quartet gelled as Blues Band in 1987. They became Blues Traveler after plucking the second half of their name from Gozer the Traveler, the evil demon in the Ghostbusters movie.
Upon graduation from high school, the group moved to New York where they shared an apartment while attending college and crashing the city’s club circuit. They were discovered by famed concert promoter Bill Graham who launched them on a whirlwind tour of the Eastern seaboard of the US and facilitated a deal with A&M Records.
While the band’s first three releases failed to make a splash big enough to wet public interest, they shook hands with mainstream awareness in 1994 with their fourth outing, the simply titled Four, which rocketed into quintuple-platinum orbit. The album’s exuberantly playful smash hit Run-Around became the longest charting (nearly a year) single in Billboard history and earned the band a Grammy in 1995.
Blues Traveler’s fortunes took a tumble in 1999 when Popper underwent angioplasty and Bobby Sheehan, the group’s original bassist, died of an accidental drug overdose at age thirty-one. The death knell for many a lesser band, Blues Traveler expanded its dynamic range with the addition of keyboards, rolled up its collective sleeves and got back to work. In the last decade, the band has released live CDs, an acoustic greatest hits package and creatively challenging studio material culminating in 2008 with their latest opus North Hollywood Shootout.
Highlights of Blues Traveler’s other exploits include Woodstock ’94 and Lollapalooza 2008, several spots on the Late Show with David Letterman (Thunder Bay celebrity Paul Shaffer has played on a number of the band’s recordings.), opening for the Rolling Stones, movie appearances as well as film, television and video game sound tracks.
As raw and defiant as ever, Blues Travel continues to strive to improve and to be unfashionably different. “I think that as long as we have more to learn as a band, we’ll be alright,” states Popper. “What makes it work is honesty. As long as you mean it, you’ve got the potential to come up with something really good.” www.bluestraveler.com
Ken Wright
