John Utter is a fit 60-year-old, his long grey hair pulled up in a bun. Several guitars are perched in cases along one wall of his office in Bellingham, Washington. It's an old brick building with lots of windows that make the room feel bright despite the rainy afternoon. John picks up one of them and starts to play.
“I mean, just strumming the guitar, it's been shown that it's really good for your brain stem, just this nice, rhythmic strumming,” he said. “And then singing. There's so many good things about singing and humming and so forth. That's just very grounding and is great for anybody who's suffered from any kind of trauma.”
Utter is a certified hypnotherapist and is studying to be a counselor. But it took a while for him to get here. He started a band with his classmate Hawk Björn in the 1980s when they were at Whitman College in eastern Washington. Their sound was a mashup of the English pop band Thompson Twins, ABBA and Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys.
“Lots of harmonies, lots of songs about college girlfriends. Yeah, we were both romantics,” Utter said.
Fellow Whitman alum Rick Stevenson was a movie director and producer. He heard their music and used it in the film Some Girls, starring a very young Jennifer Connolly and Patrick Dempsey.
“I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," Utter recalled. "It was playing in the Walla Walla cinema and the Walla Walla theaters.”
After graduation, Utter and Björn moved to Seattle. There, they named their band Bounce the Ocean. It comes from a technical term in recording where two tracks are combined together.
“I think it was Hawk who said, ‘Oh, well, we need to bounce the ocean,'" Utter said. "We both thought that that was a cool term. And we were looking for a band name."
Stevenson helped the duo get a record deal with Private Music, a small label based in Los Angeles that represented some big names.
Bounce the Ocean was then in the company of acts such as Taj Mahal and Ringo Starr. The deal also gave Utter and Björn access to top producers. They paired up with Glen Ballard, who had co-written and produced the self-titled album by Wilson Phillips — a huge hit. Before that, Ballard worked with Michael Jackson and co-wrote the song “Man in the Mirror.”
The close proximity to all that success made Utter think, “We're gonna be big stars.”
When their self-titled album Bounce the Ocean was finally released, Private Music promoted it heavily in Seattle. And Utter experienced something unusual: He couldn’t go anywhere in Seattle without seeing his own face. Private Music put ads for the album on the sides of buses, and a banner of it flew over Husky Stadium during a game.
Utter remembered going to the Fred Meyer grocery store in his neighborhood in Ballard and seeing hundreds of albums on display with him and Björn staring back from the covers.
Utter said he was quiet in high school and not part of the popular crowd. Now, things that seemed out of reach a few years earlier were very attainable.
“Getting the attention of girls, that was awesome,” he said. “And then I thought, well, more of that wouldn't be bad, right?”
But after a while, it didn't sit well with him. It was overwhelming.
“I started thinking, ‘I think I'm kind of like a one-woman guy,’” he said. “I want to find a nice woman, like, just somebody who I feel comfortable with, who I can settle down with.”
That need surprised him. “I thought when I was younger, especially in high school, like, yeah, rock star, the more women the better," he said. "And it just wasn't me.”
Doubts about living a rock-star life had cropped up earlier, when Utter and Björn were making the album. Utter remembered being stressed. One night in the studio, he went to the phone to order pizzas for the crew. Two of the buttons on the phone were labeled “hookers” and “drugs.”
“Whatever vice you want, just hit the button. You don't even have to dial the number,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh God, I need that,’ right? And then, on the other hand, this other part of me came in, like, ‘Oh no, you don't, like, you're not going to do that.’ And suddenly, I looked at those buttons and I couldn't breathe.”
He was having a panic attack. Later, he asked one of his producers if they knew any famous recording artists who had healthy personal lives.
The producer was confused about why Utter was even asking the question. But Utter wanted to know the answer. He started rattling off the names of artists the producer had worked with to see if any of them modeled a future Utter could see for himself. None did.
In that moment, Utter realized many of the musicians and bands he’d grown up listening to in the '80s were suffering privately, even as they presented a glamorous public image.
Utter started to experience chronic anxiety.
"There's just this anxiety with me constantly,” he said. “In hindsight, telling me, ‘Yeah, this isn't the path for you.’”
That path ended up being derailed by something else first: Grunge.
In August of 1991, the band Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten. Bounce the Ocean’s album was released that September. A few weeks later, Nirvana released Nevermind.
“We're in a Nirvana-Pearl Jam sandwich essentially being released out of Seattle. And I don't think Private Music saw that coming,” Utter said. “Two of the biggest albums of all time, you know, on the Rolling Stones’ top 100 albums of all time, and everything coming out of Seattle at the exact same time as Bounce the Ocean.”
Two songs from Bounce the Ocean made it pretty far up the music charts, and they sold 250,000 albums. But the cost of production and promotion made it a financial failure for Private Music.
The label dropped Bounce the Ocean in the summer of 1993. Utter felt like he had let his friends and family down. For a long time he felt betrayed by music and pushed it out of his life.
He became a career counselor and then a computer programmer. But music wouldn’t leave him alone.
“As it turns out it's in my DNA, so I couldn't kick it out. And even when I was working on other projects, I'd go to sleep every night with some song in my head that I couldn't help but start composing,” Utter said. “Eventually what came to me, and where I'm at now, is that music itself is healing.”
Today, he uses music to help his hypnotherapy clients, playing songs that tap into how a person is feeling.
That helped a client have "a real breakthrough" recently, Utter said. “So I use music like that.”
Many of Utter’s clients are guitarists, musicians and poets. Among them is a famous musician who lives in Los Angeles, he said. Because of his experience with Bounce the Ocean, Utter believes he’s in a unique position to help this person.
“I think the root of illness or ill-being is that sense of isolation, like nobody gets me,” he said.
Utter hopes that he can help this person work toward fame, fortune and a meaningful life away from the spotlight. Maybe they will be the exception.
