The current issue of Relix looks back 20 years to the inaugural H.O.R.D.E. tour in 1992 which featured Blues Traveler, Phish, Widespread Panic, Spin Doctors, Col. Bruce Hampton and Aquarium Rescue Unit and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. Here festival founder and driving force John Popper recalls the 1992 tour. To view all of our special H.O.R.D.E. content, which we will post over the coming weeks, visit www.relix.com/HORDE .

Photos by Steve Eichner

The Fantasy

I was into Attila The Hun, so here’s my fantasy. For some reason it’s got to be a town in the Midwest because that’s how big our armies would be. A storm comes rumbling from the East and here comes Blues Traveler’s fans…and from the West come Phish fans…and from the South it’s Widespread fans…and from the North it’s Spin Doctors fans. So the town is converged upon by a hippie gang. All the food in the area gets eaten up by these people. I wanted it to sound like some sort of Mongol H.O.R.D.E.. It was originally going to be Horizons of Rock Developing East Coast because that seemed to be an identification of a scene but Eric Schenkman wisely said it should be Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere. And sure enough the next year we started using band like the Samples from Colorado and that would have sucked if we had to make an alteration letter. Decorum is everything.

Reality and Imagination

Your imagination and your reality are constantly pulling at you. You keep having this great idea and some of it comes true and you also have these incredible obstacles and some of them stop you. And that’s really what the H.O.R.D.E. to me was about.

It’s kind of like you get stuck between reality and your imagination. In your imagination it’s world conquest. You’re thinking we’re gonna fill up Shea Stadium and then you’re disappointed when it’s anything less. Then there’s reality: you’re amazed that you got more than one band to agree to show up anywhere at the same time. It was already starting to fracture and to get that kind of allegiance from so many bands that were already going in their own directions, that to me was that the best part about it. These bands came together and there was a like-minded audience and I think there still is. What was great about H.O.R.D.E. were that there were just enough bands to do it and now there’s no shortage.

The Players

We’re talking about some of the most gifted people on earth and every state of the mindset that keeps that going. Some of the sweetest, shiest, brashest, loudest, funniest, just ingenious people.

Not every show that first year was a sell out

My memory of the concourse in year one was that it was kind of like an emaciated Third World ghetto. It was like Guatemala when the crops went bad. There’d be a coyote eating out of a tin can and one really thin hippie on the ground, trying to shield his face from the tumbleweeds blowing by. But the thing I remember being cool was that everyone from our scene in New York was there.

Aquarium Rescue Unit
What I remember is whenever ARU played no matter where they were every musician stopped and were checking them it out. It was like church was in session. They had the reverence of all the musicians. They did kind of embodied the spirit of the H.O.R.D.E. movement, at least among us. They were an empire within an empire.

Howard Levy & The Flecktones

That harmonica player Howard Levy, he was just a freak. He is I think the best harmonica player on earth on the blues harp. I saw him do something that I never saw anyone else do on a harmonica. You know how someone has a left hand on a piano and a right hand, he can do those independently of each other. We did a jam together and I had to go where he wasn’t because what do you when someone can play chromatically on a blues harp and I can’t. I had to go rhythmically so I was being more of a percussion instrument and he was doing a melodic thing, so I could go places he couldn’t go. It was a great little dance back and forth.

Legacy

Neo-hippie was the term that was always thrown around and “jamband scene.” H.O.R.D.E. was probably a reflection of that. The thing I always debate is are you being shaped by your generation or are you doing the shaping? And it’s hard to tell.

The thing I feel grateful for is that people, attribute such a heritage to H.O.R.D.E. and we’re honored that we could do that. But basically it was trying to solve a survival problem with playing out in sheds and all the rest of it was paths of least resistance

The Highlight from 1992

My favorite moment that first year is a weird one. After the show in Lakewood Ampihteater in Georgia. I’m leaving and I haven’t eaten yet, so we hit a Burger King and they’re out of food. That to me was one of the best moments of H.O.R.D.E.. You come into a town and their fast food joints are empty. That was as close to the reality and the imagination coming together in my bizarre Attila the Hun fantasy, that Burger King in Georgia.