As the jamband scene blossomed in the early 1990s, one of its original artists broke out, achieving success based on units sold as much as touring miles traveled. With constant MTV and radio airplay, the Spin Doctors crossed over into the mainstream with the irresistible hits “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes.” The band’s major label debut, Pocket Full of Kryptonite went on to become an international sensation with more than 10 million copies sold worldwide.
The success didn’t put a salve on strained band relations nor did the added tour dates to support the album’s growing momentum. It wasn’t much of a surprise to find lineup changes occurred several years later. The original members – Chris Barron, Eric Schenkman, Mark White and Aaron Comess — did come together for one of the final concerts at Wetlands Preserve. That led to sporadic appearances before and after a new studio effort, Nice Talking to Me, in 2005.
Now, the Doctors are back in the house as they celebrate a 20th anniversary re-issue of_Pocket Full of Kryptonite_ with a tour that finds the quartet playing the album in its entirety as well as surprising longtime fans with some of the bluesy material that they used to play during their New York club days. Not only does the release find the music aging surprisingly well but it includes a second CD that features the cassette-only demos “Can’t Say No” and “Piece of Glass.”
My conversation with vocalist Chris Barron which began with the two of us comparing notes on remembering people’s names quickly shifted gears into the time period of Pocket Full of Kryptonite and how a band that jams became a favorite act for little kids. Later, it detours to the effect his vocal cord paralysis had on his outlook in life and performing for the American troops and Iraqis as a music ambassador.
JPG: Looking back at some of your initial national touring with the Spin Doctors, I saw you twice at Blossom Music Center. One of the bills you were with Soul Asylum and Screaming Trees.
CB: Yeah, we were headlining.
JPG: That was near the end supporting the Pocket Full of Kryptonite album…
CB: It was the tail end of the MTV Music Nation, some name like that [It was the MTV Alternative Nation Tour].
JPG: And according to the online info I found, it was July 20, 1993.
CB: I think we toured all summer like a bastard. That might have been smack dab in the middle of it.
JPG: I was going to say that that time you seemed like a band that had been on the road for two years and just wanted to go home and sleep in your own bed. I felt bad for you because it seemed like you were just running on fumes. Then, the next year, I saw you at Blossom supporting Turn It Upside Down and it was early in the tour and the band was on it that night. You were out in the middle of the pavilion, walking on the bar that separated the box set section.
CB: Oh yeah, my tightrope walking phase. That was like my thing for awhile. It’s really good exercise.
JPG: I know that all the touring helped make Kryptonite such a success but in hindsight would you do it the same way?
CB: No, we were overworked. We didn’t pace ourselves very well. We were trying to capitalize on everything that was going on. The offers were there, and it was really hard to turn everything down. We would set off time to take off and the five insane things would come in. It would be like we’d have 10 days off and we’d get an offer to do Letterman and some huge gig and some radio thing where they were guaranteeing us heavy rotation if we would do this thing. So, all of a sudden 10 days off turned into a day-and-a-half off.
The band wasn’t getting along great, which was sapping our strength, too. So, there was definitely heavy burnout. We really weren’t emotionally mature enough at the time to be able to bear up under all that pressure. It was definitely like a marathon, endurance game at the time.
I don’t what we could have done anything…There’s two answers to that question. Back then, it might have been cool to do things different. But, from my perspective now I’m pretty content with the way things turned out. We had an amazing run. We, maybe, could have handled it better and capitalized better and paced ourselves better and, maybe, had a longer run and, maybe, been on top of the world ‘til this day, some kind of Titanic crap like that. But considering I’m pretty happy with what I got, what we got.
JPG: With the re-issue of Kryptonite are you ready for success in ways that you weren’t before?
CB: Yeah, we would definitely be. The band’s getting along great. We’re all a lot more mature. It’s funny, I don’t think of it in those kinds of terms. I emerged from that odyssey like a guy who’s pretty much likely make a good living playing music for the rest of his life. I’m really happy with that. And if the band gets bigger and better gigs as a result of this 20th anniversary thing that would be really nice, but I’m not like…From the outside people tend to assume that bands just want to get as famous as they possibly can and that there’s a tremendously high bar that everybody’s trying to leap over. From the inside I don’t see it that way. I see myself as a career musician and a guy who just loves to play. And I have a very nice life. I walk down the street and a couple people might recognize me, but by the time they recognized me I already walked by. I can have dinner at a restaurant and not have 20 people come up to me and ask for my autograph.
When we were, technically, at our most successful it was very inconvenient. Touring constantly, the band wasn’t getting along very well. We were selling 50,000 records a week and making a lot of money but if I went into a mall to buy underwear I ended up signing like 300 autographs, being mobbed by kids and stuff like that. I love the fans, I love everybody who ever bought our record or bought a ticket or just had something nice to say about us or even just got a smile out of one of our tunes. I am eternally grateful to anybody who ever had a kind thought or word about the Spin Doctors, but it was a bit of a pain in the ass not to be able to walk around or eat a dinner without having to sign a million autographs. I don’t crave that kind of fame again for the rest of my life.
I see this 20th anniversary thing as a really great opportunity for the following. We were a band that emphasized musicianship and songwriting, and we jammed but we came from the jazz tradition where these guys were improvising over the greatest songs ever written. And it was about improvising but it was also about improvising over a very beautiful and very interesting and fascinating structure of a great great song. So, we were always about a high level of musicianship and improvising over great songs.
When “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes” became hits, which is something that was a great thing in my life, I’m not saying I wish they hadn’t happen by any stretch of the imagination. But the effect was we had these crazy college kids who were really into the band because of a lot of the same reasons that people are into bands like the Allman Brothers and Phish and the Grateful Dead, for the musicianship. We had them coming out, and then they were looking next to themselves at 10 year old kids who Pocket Full of Kryptonite was the first record that they had ever bought and they had seen us on MTV. I love all those kids as well but what happened was those stoned, tripping hippies were like, ‘Whoa! This isn’t my scene anymore.’ The 10 year olds moved on to something else and the whole thing became disjointed, and we became a band that was more about these two songs that had become huge hits.
Now, people are coming out and this 20th anniversary thing is an opportunity for us to get a little attention and have a terrific opportunity to talk to guys like you about what’s going on. People are coming out and seeing us, and the old guard fans are just psyched that we’re playing again and they’re like, ‘You guys are as awesome as ever.’ And the people who like 10 back then and bought the record, and it was their first record, are coming out and they’re like 30 now and they’re like, ‘I loved your band, loved your record, and I didn’t realize you guys were such awesome players.’
I’m extraordinarily gratified that 20 years later I was part of a record that anybody gives half a crap about still. And in the early 21st century music tableau that really seems to be a rare and special thing, and extraordinarily gratifying. It’s cool that people are looking at Pocket Full of Kryptonite now as a record and not just a delivery system of these two hit songs. And it’s giving us an opportunity to go out and play our guts out and really lay it on the line. We’re going to be performing Pocket Full of Kryptonite in its entirety in order. We did this in England and we were doing deep cuts in the encore. We were playing old blues songs that we wrote before we did Pocket Full of Kryptonite, stuff we never recorded before. And the tapers are all crapping their pants because we haven’t played these songs live in like 15 or years. We’re reaching back into these deep cuts and the stuff that we were jamming on back before Pocket Full of Kryptonite was made and back when “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes” weren’t hit songs. They were just really really good songs that made your girlfriend want to make out with you.
JPG: I’m thinking of that time period and interviewing bands, Phish, for example, that were trying to figure out how to make a studio album versus just documenting a live performance in the studio, and I could tell that they were kind of torn up as far as making a concise song. They went one way success-wise whereas Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler were accepted by the mainstream with commercial success. But, then, like you said, you lost your core audience and the fickle tastes of the mainstream left you, too. It must feel special that now everybody comes together.
CB: It’s a great moment for us and I tremendous admiration, particularly for the way Phish has conducted their career. I know those guys personally and, in particular, I’m friends with Mike Gordon, an extraordinarily dear fellow. And Trey is a really, really interesting guy. They’re all deeply devoted musicians. They’ve just done a great job of communicating with their fans and staying very true to their mission statement and just being freaks, and keeping it really interesting and being so creative at the shows and offering their fans so much more than any other band has ever done before because they have these tools at their disposal with the internet and stuff like that. They’ve just been able to be on the forefront. What they’ve done is fantastic.
To go back to your other question, it would have been nice to have maybe handled things a little more along the sort of Phish’s line of handling things. At the same time we instinctively, and also through study, we did a pretty good job in the studio, particularly Pocket Full of Kryptonite. We managed to make a record that has stood up really well over time. I wouldn’t trade that. I wouldn’t change anything ‘cause things have worked out.
JPG: I don’t know if they’ve ever admitted it but I believe it was around the time of Rift where the idea of making a studio album was discussed. I hate to use the word ‘envy’ but I’m sure there must have been some degree at that time among your peers of ‘How did they do that?’
CB: While we were really successful, I think those guys were definitely looking over at us and being like, tremendous amount of mutual respect between the two bands. But, I don’t know. I think that, maybe, things could have worked out better. Could have worked out worse.
JPG: I’m not saying it worked out bad for anyone; just interesting the two different directions. Now, before all this happened you attended the New School Jazz Program along with John Popper. Let me see if I get this right because I was a little confused when reading the band’s history. You got together with Eric [Schenkman]. And it was Aaron [Comess] and Mark [White] who were in the funk band, Spade.
CB: Yeah. Eric and I sort of started the band, and then Eric heard Aaron practicing.
JPG: And then Mark came in after that…
CB: Yeah.
JPG: What I was getting to with all that, was it a conscious thing as far as writing hook-filled songs or was it the elements coming together but due to the jazz background there was a desire to tweak the material a bit?
CB: I’ve always had a real hooky sensibility as a songwriter. Growing up, we were all writing songs — me and my friends — and so it’s funny, I got in trouble because I like to make fun of people’s songs. I’ll be on the road and I’ll sing a filthy or stupid version of their song. First it sort of hurt, but where I grew up we would all write songs and play ‘em for each other. When somebody started singing your song the grosser and iller they started doing it the more you knew they had it stuck in their head. So, it was like a badge of honor. Somebody would be singing a filthy version of your tune. ‘Ha, ha, ha…you’ve got it stuck in your head.’ It was like a compliment.
I wanted to write people’s favorite songs. I was, obviously, very psyched with the idea of writing hit songs.
JPG: Catchy tunes. It reminds me of a description of how at its core Beatles music was like children’s music because it contained hooks that would grab you at an elemental level. With “Two Princes” it’s almost like a nursery rhyme as far as how the melody moves along and sticks in your head.
CB: Yeah. I just wrote that way because I was trying to write stuff that I liked. Like I said, I just wanted to be a career musician. I wanted to write songs, and my objective as a songwriter was to write people’s favorite songs. So, I was trying to come up with a unique and cool perspective and I always liked stuff that was rhythmically captivating. It brought me to writing hooky kind of stuff like that. Then, Eric and Aaron and Mark are all infectious players, too.
It wasn’t a conscious thing but another dynamic was that we were playing these clubs in New York and the proprietors were like literally saying to us, ‘Play funky music and make people dance and make them drink a lot or you’re fired.’ So, we were coming up with tunes like “Big Fat Funky Booty.” You’re always writing to this imagined audience. Our imagined audience was drunk people in bars that were partying their brains out. We were also writing tunes like “Shinbone Alley” and crazy whacky stuff like that. But it all had to have a beat. It all had to have something that you could focus in on. At the end of the night we were told how much booze we had sold and compare it to Blues Traveler who were working a lot of the same bars with us. They would be like, ‘Good job. You guys sold $6,500 worth of booze tonight. Last week the Blues Traveler sold $6,900. You’re still behind them.’ There was a friendly competition. We never beat Blues Traveler. They always sold more booze than us.
JPG: Listening to Kryptonite and then going to the demos on disc two. I found it interesting that the versions aren’t very different. Is that a result from all the live dates, a strong vision or A&R support that allowed you to go in and not drastically change the material?
CB: The songs were pretty fully-formed by the time we went in to make Pocket Full of Kryptonite. We definitely played those songs hundreds of times before we recorded them. We never rehearsed a lot. There was a lot of stuff that just got worked out in the gig and funny little bits that crept into the song, all kinds of little hooks and things like that. It evolved as we were playing them live.
JPG: By the way whose idea was it to put out a 20th anniversary re-issue?
CB: I’m not exactly sure where the initial impetus came from. I think that it was Jason Richardson who is like our assistant manager, sort of like a fifth member of the band back in the day, who was like, ‘Hey, you know the 20th anniversary…’ or Eric. I think it came from inside the band or the band organization but then we approached Sony about it and Sony was totally into it. Legacy Records was into doing a re-release and putting some thought and resources into it and getting creative with it, adding some extra stuff. Everything fell in. It was really nice how much affection there is out there for the Spin Doctors and for the record. We went over to England. The people were so excited to hear the record played live.
The band, everybody’s musically at the height of their powers now. We’re all playing together really well. It’s really nice to have everybody working so well together. And the thing about the Spin Doctors, and the reason we’ve been around, stayed around, is we just have this wonderful musical chemistry. None of us can explain it. None of us can understand it. We’re all very different people and there’s been times we have not gotten along very well, but we’ve all gotten to a point now where a great thing about this 20th anniversary mark with the record is that it worked out. Timing is very good for us personally because we’ve all gone and done solo things and we’ve all made projects on our own and they’ve been very gratifying. We’ve all come full circle and we’re just like, ‘Wow! We’ve been out there doing this stuff for awhile and none of us has encountered this kind of chemistry outside of the Spin Doctors.’
There’s something about the four of us. When we start to play there’s this magic thing that happens. Impossible to explain but it feels amazing to be a part of it and, you know, when we started listening to things and live stuff, it was just really fun how good everything sounded and how powerful it was. I was driving a car in Swampscott, Massachusetts where my grandparents had lived and there was some classic rock station and they played “When the Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin, on the radio and right after a live version of “Shinbone Alley.” It sounded really good. It held up. I was like, ‘Wow! I heard “When the Levee Breaks” and our stuff came on and it didn’t sound like pukey and insignificant after John Bonham, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones.’ I’m not saying we’re as good as Led Zeppelin. It’s just nice to be in a band that you feel really proud of. We’ve come full circle. We all had our different stuff, but now we have laughed everything off and we just see how valuable the chemistry is. Everybody has traits that annoy the other ones but now we know how to work together to get around that stuff and place the good of the band ahead of the stuff that really was burning us up back in the day when we weren’t getting along.
JPG: Everything’s going so well. I don’t know if the upbeat attitude is due to the situation now or you’re a generally upbeat person or because you had a major health scare with your voice. I know it happened a decade ago but for someone who always wanted to be a musician it’s something that can change one’s outlook in life.
CB: Wow, man. It was really a scary moment I had week where I had a very, very dark week and then ‘cause I had a 50/50 chance of ever singing again I kind of realized maybe I’m looking at the wrong 50%. There’s a 50% chance of never singing again, but you have a 50% chance of singing again. So, I had a year where I couldn’t talk, let alone sing on a professional level. It was frightening and I guess my attitude during that time was probably 50/50. Half of the time I was really worried that I would never sing again and half the time I was hopeful that I would sing again. There were no guarantees. But, I learned a lot from that period of time, especially I’m glad the outcome was what it was.
I did get my voice back. I almost said I did get my song back, kind of a cool way of putting it. The two main things I got out of it were — on a very personal level when you can’t talk, you have locked inside your head all the things you want to say and you really start listening. When you’re just talking you’re not always listening to what you’re saying. When you can’t talk you’re stuck listening to the things you want to say. You realize that 90% of the stuff that I wanted to say was either to make me look smart or to be funny. And I also realized that most of what people say to each other is not an exchange of novel information but more like assuring each other that the world is the same world that we are all used to. It’s a lot of, ‘How are you?’ ‘Oh, I’m fine.’ ‘Gee, how about this weather we’re having?’ Mostly people being, so and so is still a jerk, and this other person is still awesome and the world is still going around and we’re still, everything is still normal and we’re hanging around together. We’re not going to fight or steal each other’s food supply. It sounds sort of jaded, but from the perspective of somebody who couldn’t talk and couldn’t participate in that exchange, I found it profound and beautiful and sort of balletic that we’re all doing this dance with each other that’s finely choreographed. A wonderful ritual that we don’t necessarily know we’re a part of.
The other thing that I got out of it was there was this outpouring of sympathy, which was very nice. Also, this outpouring of dismay that I might not sing again. People were genuinely dismayed that I wouldn’t sing any…I realized that singing is this thing that I had always felt like I had gotten away with. Hey, I didn’t happen to have a day job. I ended up be a singer. I’m in a band. I get to rock ‘n’ roll and ride around the country and fly around the world and do music is what I want to do for a living. What I realized is that my singing is something that meant something in the world, had made people happy. People would consider it a sad subtraction if I never did it again. That filled me with a sense of gratification and also responsibility. I felt like if I did get to sing again, I would forever be more in tune with using it as a contribution to the world and using it to make the room I was in a better place at least for a couple minutes at a time.
JPG: An example of that idea of making a contribution, you played for the troops back in ’09.
CB: We do it because it’s something that we really want to do, but we also do it because we have the desire to play for people who most need the entertainment and most need distraction. I jumped at the opportunity. As soon as I found out I was safe…I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t going to go over there if it was likely I was going to get my ass shot off or something like that. There’s a big, big difference between a guy like me and the men and women who are serving over there. They have made this commitment and are over there honoring this commitment that puts them in tremendous physical jeopardy. I want to make it very clear I was never in any particular danger going over there…at all. They kept us very, very safe. Any time we weren’t on a heavily fortified base, we were in some kind of a convoy that was tremendously, heavily armed. We were never in any danger.
It really was meaningful for us to go over there and bring people a little slice of home, and also we got to play for some of the Iraqis, which was really cool, too. There were people there who had never seen a rock ‘n’ roll song performed. So that was really neat, that we were bringing a slice of American culture to where it had been suppressed in the past. I’m, hopefully, some kind of an ambassador of this form of music, of rock and roll.
JPG: Was it you solo or did you have a backing band?
CB: it was me and the Time Bandits. Me and the guys I’ve been playing with. I went over there both times with three musicians — John Loyd, piano player, Phil Simino, my drummer and John Palmer. He’s a piano player, too, but he was playing bass with me.
JPG: Last thing, is there a future for the Spin Doctors past touring behind Kryptonite ?
CB: Right now, I’m really into the Spin Doctors. This 20th anniversary thing is a lot of fun. In England, we were delving back into the blues material. We used to have to perpetuate that we were like a blues band in order to work the clubs that paid in New York. They were all blues clubs. So, we wrote a bunch of original blues material and everybody in the band has a tremendous reverence for the blues. Everything the Spin Doctors have ever done has somehow had some kind of reference to that music. It’s truly the basis of all good rock ‘n’ roll. It’s somehow traceable back to that classical cadence and these chordal structures and pentatonic melodies that are the blues.
We’re gonna ride out the 20th anniversary thing as long as we possibly can. We’re talking about going and making a blues record, which is a fun and exciting project. These days nobody buys records anyway. So, if you can make a record, if you’re luckily enough to make a record, which most people can these days — not that hard to get into a studio — you might as well make stuff that really knock out your fans. This music really showcases the musicianship in the band. Eric is such an incendiary blues guitarist. He plays in some really good blues bands up in Canada anyway and he’s always just a great player. Aaron’s from Texas and he’s got such a fat shuffle. Mark uses his incredible skills, brings them there in this material.
Actually in high school I had my friends do an intervention because I was writing nothing but blues songs. They were like, ‘You’ll never be anything if you stick with this blues stuff. You’ll never be anything but a white guy playing the blues so you might want to branch out.’ I knew instinctively that I was just in a phase. I was exploring that music because it’s just so important to have a grasp of it if you’re going to play rock ‘n’ roll. I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever. I’m not going to be writing this stuff forever.’ But I do fall pretty naturally into that idiom. I’ve been kicking around a couple of ideas for a couple of new songs. Like I said, we’ve got a lot of older material. But the opportunity for us, to go back to “Pocket Full of Kryptonite” and instead of leaping back forward, continue backward in the trajectory and delve even further into our roots. Make a record based on that.
