1989-John PopperVocals, harmonica
Chan KinchlaGuitar
Bobby SheehanBass1989-1999
Brendan HillDrums
Ben KeithKeyboards
Tad KinchlaBass1999-
Blues Traveler vocalist/harmonica player John Popper wanted to be a comedian. He was a big fan of John Belushi, and took up harmonica after watching him do it in The Blues Brothers.
Founding bassist Bobby Sheehan died of a drug overdose on August 20, 1999. The band contemplated breaking up but decided Sheehan would want them to continue, so they brought in guitarist Chan Kinchla's brother Tad Kinchla to be the new bassist.
They are good friends with Paul Shaffer, who was leader of the Late Night With David Letterman house band, and appeared on the program more than any other group. Shaffer played the Hammond organ on "Stand" on Blues Traveler's breakout album Four.
Until 1995, they got very little airplay. Their first albums sold fairly well because they toured constantly and developed a fan base, especially at colleges.
In 1993, Popper was severely injured in a motorcycle accident while riding to a recording studio in New Orleans to work on the band's third album, Save His Soul. The crash put him in a wheelchair for almost two years and forced him to use a cane long after. The accident had a surprising benefit as Popper learned that he had more wind for his harmonica while seated in the chair because he didn't have to support his body weight.
Popper weight got as high as 400 pounds. He had his stomach stapled in 2001 and dropped approximately 200 of it. He has maintained a healthier weight ever since.
Blues Traveler started the annual H.O.R.D.E. tour (Horizons Of Rock Developing Everywhere) in 1995.
The band first went by The Establishment and featured Popper with Brendan Hill on drums and Hill's brother on bass. Guitarist Chan Kinchla came along shortly after. A black cat milled about their first jam session, inspiring the band to change their name to The Black Cat Jam. They finally settled on Blues Traveler after seeing a ghost named Gozer the Traveler in the Ghostbusters film, but they continued to use a black cat as an aesthetic, most notably on the cover of Four.
Guitarist Chan Kinchla
told Songfacts how they became mainstays on David Letterman's show. The band had just moved to New York City and were playing every show they could book. "One of the bartenders at one of the clubs we played got a job with David Letterman, so he got us the introduction," Kinchla said. "Dave was great the whole show - they were nice enough to put us on before anyone had ever even heard of us. It was our first even close to national television event, and that was kind of ephemeral. From there, things started to happen."
Popper wrote some of the band's best material during his recovery from the motorcycle accident, setting the foundation for their mainstream-breakout album,
Four, released in 1994. It contained the band's signature songs "
Hook" and "
Run-Around."
While recovering from his motorcycle accident, Popper found his spiritual connection to New Orleans deepening as he dug into the city's rich musical history. He buried a harmonica at New Orleans' Congo Square, a celebrated site with connections to music going all the way back to the Houmas Indians. It started a tradition for Popper, who buried multiple other harmonicas in places that were important to him.
During an interview with VH1, Popper revealed that he would get too winded while masturbating and would have to stop from chest pains. The legend of this story outlived its source, so Buzzfeed reporter Katie Notopoulos decided to do some Twitter digging on the topic to check its veracity. The search sparked an offensive/hilarious (depending on your perspective)
Twitter war.
Chan Kinchla was a standout Princeton High School athlete in baseball, lacrosse, and football. He intended to play in college and had the talent for a scholarship, but he chose to go with music instead.
In 2026 Blues Traveler played 35 shows on tour with fellow '90s luminaries Gin Blossoms and the Spin Doctors.
Blues Traveler took over the Allman Brothers' tradition of playing an annual 4th of July concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. Blues Traveler opened for the Allmans from 1989 to 1991 before taking over as the lead act. They started playing the amphitheatre in 1994 and made it every year since except for 1999 when a heart attack forced Popper out (Sheehan coincidentally died only weeks later) and 2020 when COVID-19 lockdowns shut things down.
In their early years the band were often associated with the Grateful Dead. They didn't mind at all. Talking to Goldmine in 1995, Chan Kinchla said, "That's because the Dead are probably the paragon of improvisational music, or the most familiar of improvisational, live-oriented music that's around. They've just become kind of heading for a class of music, and people need to categorize. So, they can go ahead and categorize us with whomever they want."
