Riffs, Rants & Rumors: Chris Barron – The Spin Doctor Is In
posted in: Features • Music News • Rock
1991 was a strange year in the mainstream rock & roll world. The hair-metal sounds that had dominated radio and MTV since the late ˜80s were on their way out, but the grunge revolution had not yet arrived above ground to shake things up. When the Spin Doctors released their first studio album, Pocketful of Kryptonite, in August of that year, Poison had just kissed the Top 40 goodbye forever (with Mí¶tley Crüe soon to follow suit) and the big bang of Nirvana‘s Nevermind was still a month away.
Maybe that’s part of the reason Kryptonite and its first single, Jimmy Olsen’s Blues, didn’t end up hitting the charts until well into 1992. It was out for about a year and a half, says Spin Doctors singer Chris Barron of the album. The record company wanted us to come home, and we didn’t, we stayed
out on the road, we switched from a bus to a van, we did another 50,000 miles in vans, before a guy named Jim McGuinn, who was a DJ at WEQX in Vermont, wrote this impassioned letter to Sony saying¦ ‘You guys are nuts, this is one of the best bands in America right now, why aren’t you pushing them?’ We had built a critical mass, packing clubs around the country, and had this grassroots following, but that was enough to kind of push it over the edge, and Sony turned on the big Sony machine, and six months later we were Platinum.
Once the masses truly got a taste of the Spin Doctors’ singular brew of funk grooves, bluesy riffs and pop hooks, the struggling New York City quartet’s rise to the top was a fait accompli. The singles Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong and Two Princes were as ubiquitous on TV as they were on the airwaves, and by January of ’93, the band had the coveted cover spot in Rolling Stone magazine.
In the midst of a tour to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Kryptonite”recently given a deluxe reissue to commemorate the occasion”Barron recalls the band’s beginnings in a late-˜80s/early-˜90s NYC club scene that also birthed Blues Traveler, among others, but has never really gotten its historical due. There were some great bands back then that never got the attention they certainly deserve. Guys like Jono Manson and Kevin Trainor and Joe Flood and George Breakfast, all these amazing characters, and fantastic bands like the Five Chinese Brothers, Mumbo Gumbo, Surreal McCoys, there was such a vibrant scene. I wish that more of the bands had gotten some more attention, because the world would have been a better place if more people could have heard the music those guys were making.
Barron characterizes the scene as a real throwback to old-time songwriting in a very rootsy, classic rock & roll sense, very blues-based, very song-oriented. It also provided education via endurance, not unlike the marathon sets of The Beatles’ early-˜60s Hamburg apprenticeship. Playing at Mondo Cane, Mondo Perso, these little blues bars, it was your job to play all night¦you’d be working until 2:30 or 3:30 in the morning. Playing four or five hours a night like that definitely makes you better.”
The harsh realities of gin-joint commerce had as much to do with the development of the band’s sound as anything else. Barron recalls, The people who were running these bars were like, ˜Get onstage, play music that makes people want to party and drink, and sell liquor or you’re fired.’ Blues Traveler always sold the most liquor. We were tied second with [bluesman] Johnny Allen¦that was our job, to get people drinking. Our stuff was written with a noisy, smoky bar full of drunk people in mind.
Of course, most of the Spin Doctors’ songs ended up as much more than just party fodder. I was really into Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, says Barron, lyricists that really had something to say, and I was interested in poetry and literature. I’ve taken a lot of care with the lyrics. I could get away with talking about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [˜How Could You Want Him (When You Know You Could Have Me)’] because there was that funky backbeat going on. The city itself seeped into the Spin Doctors sound too, says Barron. New York City can be a pretty hostile environment. But it was cool, because the older guys were so nice to us, the Surreal McCoys and [Joey Miserable &] The Worms would have us come up and sit in with them. But we were coming from a crap-ridden metropolis that was in the throes of this crime wave and this crack epidemic, and we were right in the middle of that, it was surely reflected in our music.
The band’s time at the top didn’t last forever, though; Kryptonite follow-up Turn It Upside Down didn’t do anywhere near the business of its predecessor. I don’t think our second record is as focused as the first, Barron assesses. I think we needed a rest, we went into the studio too soon. I think we should have taken six months or something, and maybe gotten some group therapy [laughs], because the band wasn’t getting along as well. And I think we put the wrong single out, we put out ˜Cleopatra’s Cat’ and people were like, ˜What?’ The downward sales trend continued throughout the decade, and the ˜90s ended with an extended Spin Doctors hiatus, but Barron remains philosophical about fortune’s fickle favors. When you look at the panoply of people with musical aspirations, he says, how many even get remotely as far as we got and have even one successful record, so what are the chances of having a string of successful records?
Having had some time in the spotlight, Barron relishes his freedom from celebrity’s shackles. I walk down the street and I’m just a normal guy, and I’ve been around while my daughter has grown up¦who knows how it would have turned out if the rest of the records had been hits? Maybe I’d be fucked up on drugs. I’ve had enough success that I have nothing to prove to anybody, and I lead a very interesting life. One thing that keeps Barron engaged is his Norway-based side project, The Canoes. I’ve got, like, a supergroup with these three Norwegian guys who had really big bands in Norway in the ˜90s. We call ourselves a ‘man band,’ as opposed to a boy band. We’re just about to finish this record, we’ve been accepted to the Eurovision songwriting contest” it’s as big as American Idol in Europe.
The Spin Doctors have toured sporadically since reuniting in 2001, and their anniversary outing marks a rededication of their energies towards bringing the band a second wind. They’re considering cutting a new album, containing the blues tunes they wrote in their early days. In New York, we were playing in Mondo Cane and Mondo Perso, they were blues bars, so you had to play the blues. We have all these old blues songs that we wrote from that period of time. We’re gonna write some new stuff for that record as well. We’ve actually got a new song that we’re working on that we think will be the title track of this new record, it’s called ˜If The River Was Whiskey.’
Meanwhile, the band continues to play sold-out shows to a mixed crowd of old and new admirers. We get young fans who are like, ˜Your record was the first record I ever bought,’ says Barron, and then older fans. And then there’s kids who are like, ˜Oh, my dad turned me on to you,’ they’re little kids, and they’re into it. People tell us ˜Your record is the record we can put on in the car because everybody likes it.’ I guess we touched on something universal.
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