BM: How did you feel going into your angioplasty compared to how you feel now?
JP: Well, I don’t get those nifty chest pains. I’m convinced if I smoke one cigarette, I’m going to die. I haven’t smoked. Once you feel that steel wire in your artery, and they take a really long time cleaning all the gluck out of your arteries, suddenly smoking seemed very silly to me. Dieting is going to be the real problem. That’s my addiction. My drug of choice is food.
BM: How much weight have you lost since the operation?
JP: I’m ping-ponging all over the place. I lost 10 pounds, gained back six, lost two, up three. I weigh more than 400 pounds. I never thought I’d get that big.
BM: Do you think you’ll be able to keep losing weight and refrain from smoking while on a club tour?
JP: There’s the question. I don’t know. I’m going to give it a shot. That’s definitely a concern. I know that everybody in the band and crew is pulling for me. We’ve got a system that’s pretty good. Normally with Blues Traveler, when we’re doing an arena kind of tour, we can bring a kitchen with us and hire a chef, but on a club tour, it’s going to be catered and hotel food.
When I’m on my own buying food, that’s when I really screw up. I go looking for celery and wind up with Big Macs. I’ve got to just treat myself like I’m an addict. Left on my own recognizance, I’m not going to make smart decisions about food. If I leave that decision-making process to someone else, at least for now, I think I can get my weight down.
Exercise is going to be a tricky one too. When you weigh what I weigh, it’s hard to move your joints. Non-impact, that’s fine.
This whole experience of going to a funeral has made me angry at death. I don’t want to die anytime soon. I was looking at my Jimi Hendrix poster, thinking about Bob and people who died young. I used to think there was something so pure about what I thought was their bravery. But I think it was more fear than bravery. A friend of mine pointed out that life isn’t pure. Your life is a convoluted, complicated thing to survive and live and face. That’s courage.
Bob and I were co-dependent destructive people. I’m really excited about changing that.
BM: You certainly have the music to fall back on.
JP: Yeah, I do. I’m glad that that’s what I’m worrying about. I have to take care of myself and the music.
BM: Which songs on ‘Zygote’ really fire you up?
JP: The spirit of doing the solo album can be summed up in track two, ‘Once You Wake.’ This album, to me, symbolizes something for me that I’ve always wanted to do. Our drummer was expecting a baby. A&M was just acquired by Interscope, so there were a lot of reasons to take some time off. But I wanted to make sure that I got to do this thing that I always wanted to do and just on my terms. The idea behind ‘Once You Wake Up’ is that you work to become aware of something, and once you are, you have to respond to it. I love that song.
I also like track 5, ‘His Own Ideas,’ because I get to really do the kind of guitar solo I’ve always wanted to do.
BM: That’s the great thing about this album. You hardly pick up the harmonica.
JP: I said that on the last album, there’d be no harmonica. It wound up being on exactly half, which is about right. I wanted to not have to worry about the harp solo, so then when I used it, it would add to it. It wasn’t required.
BM: Like a Clarence Clemons sax solo.
JP: Exactly. I remember some press guy said, ‘It’s like watching a Chuck Norris movie. You know somebody’s going to get their ass kicked.’ The gratuitous harp solo was starting to bother me a lot.
You know, it was a chance for me to do my guitar work. I did all the guitar solos. That was a real scary challenge. It’s fun being scared.
BM: Musically?
JP: Yeah. I feel like I can’t fail on the harmonica. It’s nice to have that, believe me. I go to that when I need to. But on the guitar, I can fail. There’s something very exhilarating about that. I have to really tried hard all the time.
BM: It’s part of that challenge.
JP: Uhm-hmm. I think you can hear it in the music. There’s a vulnerability to that. The harmonica is a mathematical certainty. The guitar has some unknowns to me. Live, that song is going to be hard to do, but I’m going to do it.
Our rehearsals pretty much got squashed by the funeral and stuff, but we’re feeling pretty ready. We’re just going to keep it loose. I predict my solo band is going to start out shaky and get really good.
BM: Who else is in the live band?
JP: Everybody who was on the album except for the drummer (Dave Matthews skinsman Carter Beauford).
BM: Who’s drumming?
JP: His name is Aubrey Dayle. He’s from Canada.
BM: So it’s the Cycomotogoat guys and Aubrey.
JP: Exactly. Crugie Riccio, even though he’s not doing a solo on this album, there’s something about the way he plays that just inspires people around him. He has a very innocent approach. He cuts right through things. He can feel things in four-and-a-half (time) that I can’t feel, and I’m pretty good. So he can play in four-and-a-half, which is hard to do.
Then there’s Bob Clores on keyboards. I would say that if there’s a band director, he’s the band director. He’s just a brilliant musician. And then there’s (bassist) Dave Ares.
BM: And that was Cycomotogoat, which is one of the bands you really tried to push with HORDE.
JP: Yeah. They had another drummer, but we went for Carter. One of my wish list items was Carter. He’s very unlike Brendan whom I’ve played with for most of my life. And I love playing with Brendan. He’s the drumbeat I hear. But I wanted to try something very un-Brendan-like.
BM: How are they different?
JP: Blues Traveler has a very heavy bottom, a very big bass and drum sound. So I wanted to get away from that as much as possible. Carter’s more cymbally; an Omar Hakim style rather than a John Bonham style. Brendan’s a Bonham student. That’s were we live, but it’s nice to get to an Omar Hakim kind of thing. Carter is one of the best drummers I know of.
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