Spin Doctors‘ first album out in 12 years, Face Full of Cake, is a fun surprise — and frontman Chris Barron is ready to look back at his band’s ups and downs. In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, he talks about Spin Doctors’ Nineties adventures, making the new album, why he doesn’t envy Phish, and much, much more.
To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or press play above. Some highlights follow:
The band worked on their new album in Phish bassist Mike Gordon‘s studio. “Mike is like, ‘you guys have, like, 350 million plays on Spotify — that’s crazy,’” Barron recalls. “And we’re like, ‘you guys do 13 nights at Madison Square Garden!’” But Barron ultimately doesn’t envy Phish’s brand of touring success: “You dream about, like, ‘I would love to be playing 13 nights at Madison Square Garden,’ but what other thing would that come with?… I live in a two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Drive my Subaru. Got a 26-year-old daughter. I’m super-happily married. I got two cats. [The band are] some of the best musicians of the Nineties. And I get to sing ‘Two Princes,’ which is a really good fucking song, man. And ‘Little Miss Can’t be Wrong.’ I love singing those tunes. People go nuts when we play them.”
He acknowledges that releasing the jazzy “Cleopatra’s Cat” as the first single from the band’s second album torpedoed the band’s commercial momentum in the Nineties. “We got too fucking cute,” he says ”That was a funny call, but I was really young…, I just kinda, like, went along.”
Barron admits he can’t stand to hear Pearl Jam to this day — their mutual Nineties label, Epic, blatantly favored them over Spin Doctors before their debut album started selling. “I still can’t listen to Pearl Jam,” Barron says. “No offense to anybody who likes Pearl Jam, but I just can’t do it… You’d go to the record store, it’d be a big Pearl Jam display and one copy of our record. It was maddening.”
His high school classmate, future Blues Traveler frontman John Popper, was an obvious star even back then, inspiring Barron’s own ambitions. “John is just one of the most remarkable human beings that it’s possible to know,” he says. “He’s like Moby Dick meets like a five-leaf clover. There’s nobody like him. As a result of John Popper, and that window that he opened, I was like, ‘I’m gonna be a rock star’… They’d have an assembly, and the vice principal would come out and be like, ‘John Popper’s gonna play. Everybody has to stay in their seats or we’ll stop the assembly,’ because kids would actually climb the walls.”
“Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” was written while Barron was scamming food from a college cafeteria. “My stepmom spent all of my college money… I had no money,” he says. “I’m sitting there eating my ill-gotten pancakes, and a young woman, presumably a Brown student, came in… I looked over at her and I was like, ‘she looks like Lois Lane.’ My songwriter mind was like, ‘well, in this scenario I’m certainly not Superman. Who would I be?’ And I was like, ‘I’m Jimmy Olsen in this picture.’”
“Two Princes” came from a random conversation when Barron was 19. “I got a phone call at work from a young woman who I’d had a crush on,” he recalls. “I ran into the big brother of a guy I grew up with… I was like, ‘I just got a phone call at work from this chick I like.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, just go ahead now.’ And I was like, ‘But I think she might be mad at me.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, well just go ahead now’… He just kept saying ‘go ahead now, go ahead with it.’ And I just went home and I was like, ‘go ahead now,’ and that was it. And now I’ll never have to work a normal job again!”
Barron was high constantly during the band’s heyday, but quit weed for his daughter’s sake. “I was baked outta my mind high 24/7, man,” he says. “I was high from the age of, like, 14 to 30. I stopped when my daughter was born. I wasn’t together with her mom. And I had this epiphany of like, ‘if I’m getting high all the time, this is an avenue for my kid to be taken away from me.’ … I think nowadays I would’ve been medicated, on antidepressants. … That was me taking care of my head, you know, and trying to quiet down the voices in my head.”
Barron sees the career-threatening vocal paralysis he overcame as psychosomatic. “I’m very much a believer in the mind-body connection,” he says. “Both times I lost my voice, I was extremely stressed. And I think it was my body’s way of being like, ‘Listen man, if you’re not gonna open your mouth and advocate for yourself and create boundaries, then you’re not gonna say anything. You’re not gonna sing, you’re not gonna talk, you’re not gonna do anything. I’m not gonna let you actually vocalize again until you’re ready to say what you need to say.’”
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