Spin Doctors were known for their two huge hit
songs in the early 90’s ‘Two Princes’ and “little miss can’t be wrong.’ Both singles were top
20 hits on the billboard hot 100 charts, But, whatever happened to the group? That’s what
were going to discuss in today’s video. Born in Hawaii, frontman Chris Barron
would spend the early part of his life growing up in Australia. His parents
would divorce with his father remarrying and he would move Chris back to America with him
to Princeton, New Jersey. Barron would attend high school in Princeton and by his own
admission was and i quote “a weird, freaked out artist kid.” His early musical influences
would include Buddy Holly and Bob marley. And attending the same high school would be
future blues traveler frontman john popper. Popper played the part of older brother
to Barron and even wrestled against him. After graduating from high school barron would
spend a year studying poetry at Bennington College a liberal arts school in Vermont. He would
eventually find his way to New York City and study music at New School
of Jazz and Contemporary Music while also bunking with John Popper
and playing solo shows around the city. Barron’s future bandmates in Spin Doctors would
hail from Canada and other parts of the states. Guitarist Eric Schenkman, grew up in Toronto,
Canada coming from a musical family. He was already an accomplished guitar player by the time
he was 10 and by the time he turned 21 he would move to New York and study arts at New School.
Also attending new school was drummer Aaron Comess who originally hailed from Dallas..While
the trio wouldn’t form a band just yet, Barron and Schenkman would team up with John
Popper playing in the group Trucking Company. But the group was short-lived as Popper soon
left to devote more time to his own band Blues Traveler . This would lead to the remaining pair
of trucking company to up with Comess and this would result in the birth of Spin Doctors.Barron
would reveal in the book Jamerica the common thread between the members saying “we were alway
really interested in improvisational music.” The group would play the first show at a frat
house at Columbia University. It was following that gig that the band decided to go all in with
Barron recalling to Rolling Stone “After that gig, Eric got back to his house at 9:30 in the
morning,” “We carried his amp to the top of the stairs. And he lived on the fifth floor.
When we got to the top, we just laid down on the landing. Eric’s like ‘Look, man, this
is the way it is. Do you want to do this?’ And I just started laughing. It was 9:30 in the
morning. The sun was coming through the window. And it was definitely gonna be work, but it was
real. So I was like “Yeah, man, let’s do it.” Bassist Mark White, wouldn’t join the band
until a few months after the band’s first gig. By the time he auditioned he was working
in a mail room and was several years older than the other members. He had
already played with Aaron Comess in several other New City bands including
one called Spade. He would admit to the Morning Call newspaper that he turned down
an opportunity to audition for Living Colour. Spin Doctors would cut their teeth playing live
gigs in new york and the surrounding areas. All of it wouldn’t have been possible without
Barron’s dad who helped cosign a loan for an econonline f-250 which shuttled the band’s
equipment to clubs and college campuses. Barron would tell Diffuser “we just kept going
back. We were also a really good live act. We would go to a new town and play for the
bartenders and servers and 3 or 4 people. Then we’d go back and play for 15, the next time
we’d play for 45 people. By the third or fourth time we’d pack it. Also helping build their live
audiences was word of mouth and bootleg tapes, which they encouraged amongst their fans. Spin Doctors seemed to be initially labeled a jam
band frequently compared to groups like Phish, The Grateful Dead with no two live shows
being alike and with fans taping their shows. But at the same time Jam Bands weren’t
exactly tearing up MTV so it was a difficult balancing act. The orlando sentinel described
Spin Doctors crowds in 1993 as being “tie-dyed hippified audiences who also frequented Phish
and Blues Traveler concerts. But bassist Mark White brushed off some of these comparisons
claiming he had never heard the grateful dead until he joined the spin doctors and cited his
influences of Isaac Hayes and the Jackson 5. The band gigged relentlessly playing 250
dates a year including playing the new york club nightingale’s a whopping 57 times with White
recalling to the orlando sentinel “we had all the people coming down night after night. There
was an endless supply of people coming down. They would bring their friends and they would
bring their friends..We always had a crowd.” Epic Records head Richard Griffiths signed
the band after seeing the band play a show at the Wetlands, a small new york city club.
The capacity of the venue is 300 people, the night he witnessed the band playing
there were 600 people in attendance. He would tell the chicago tribune how he found
something different about the band saying “it wasn’t a rock audience, it wasn’t
punk, it was a different type of audience. It looked like college kids. The next day
i told the manager i wanted to sign them.” Epic Records plan was to release a EP in early
1991. The original idea for the EP was to be a studio effort consisting of the tracks Two Princes
and the combo of Shinbone Alley/Hard to Exist” that would setup their future LP Pocketful of
Kryptonite that was scheduled later that summer. Their plans would change though as Comess would
reveal according to Diffuser “we thought we’re this live band and we have a great reputation
as a great live band so let’s put out a live EP and hold off on more studio recording.”
To capture their live EP the band recorded a September 1990 show at the Wetlands Club
in Manhattan. It was a venue that the band performed at frequently and it was a special
because they allowed bands to perform the entire night. The band ended up renting a
mobile recording truck to capture that gig. The band soon turned their attention to their
first full length studio Pocket Full of Kryptonite enlisting the same producers who worked on their
EP. Barron would look back at the group’s first LP telling diffuser "We didn't want to go in and
make some overproduced record. We wanted it to represent who we were. And you can feel that:
The basic tracks are a live band on the floor. We did some overdubs … but we didn't get carried
away with it at all. So when you hear the record, it just sounds like a four-piece band."
“We were this really weird jam band who happened to have great songs,”. “And a couple
of our songs were so great they ended up being hits. ‘Two Princes’ wasn’t a hit when we
wrote it. It was just a really good song that made your girlfriend want to bone you.”
According to Comess who wrote in the liner notes in the 2011 anniversary edition of pocket
full of kryptonite “at the time that they made a demo of it (referring to two princes). “We
consciously made a decision to slow the tempo down and let the groove fatten up [on
the album version]. I honestly think if we hadn’t made those changes, it
wouldn’t have been the hit that it was.” Also appearing on the album was longtime
friend John Popper who played harmonica on the track more than she knows and earned
a co-writing credit on hard to exist. Released in August of 1991, the initial sales of
pocket full of kyrptonite were relatively small moving around 60,000 copies by the end of the
year. Those sales came on the back of the band’s live gigs. By the end of 1991 the label wanted
to leave the record behind and move forward. They pushed the band to get off
the road and hit the studio again, but the band refused to stay out on the road.
Barron would tell Diffuser “Sony who owned Epic, was way more into Pearl jam and michael jackson
when we signed. We were the redheaded stepchild of the label, even though we were signed personally
by the head of Epic Associated. We toured really hard. They wanted us to come home and make a
record and we decided to stay out on the road. For the first part of their career The Spin
Doctors were living in the shadow of Blues Traveler. The group frequently opened for Blues
Traveler and stole some of the group’s fanbase, but at one point Spin Doctors
label even sought advice from Blues Traveler’s label on how to break the band. It was a difficult existence for the band with
Barron recalling how the band put on brave face telling Rolling Stone “A lot of the time
we hid from Epic how hard this stuff was,” “We’d be like ‘We’re out in the van! It’s no
problem at all!’ We put up a front because we wanted to be their badass band. But the
van was death, man. A slow form of death.” Frank Larocka who was instrumental
in signing the band from Epic Records had some people at the company calling for
the band to get a makeover telling Rolling Stone magazine “There have been some complaints,”
s ‘They don’t have any tattoos! They don’t have any weird-colored hair!’ People said: ‘Try to
get them to dress up for Saturday Night Live. Despite the lack of album sales to their name, the band members saw their audiences growing
and felt a buzz around the band by the new year. As the buzz was growing the band tried to push
their label to release singles from the album with Aaron Comess recalling to diffuser “i
remember specifically us saying. Why don’t you try two princes or little miss can’t be wrong or jimmy
olsen blues. And their response was nah, those aren’t hits. You guys don’t have enough tattoos or
it’s not grungy enough or whatever the crap was. “ The album took nearly a year to break. By the
summer of 1992 things finally started to shift the band’s way.. Comess would tell diffuser
“A station in Vermont called WEQX — this guy named Jim McGuinn, great guy — started playing
'Little Miss,' Comess remembered. “And it went to No. 1 on the station. And he hand-wrote
a letter to the president of Epic, saying, 'You guys should really go after
this band. You'd be crazy if you didn't. This is an incredible
reaction we're getting here.' "That's what lit the fire. And then [Epic] put
it on rock radio; they made a video; they got behind it. And then everything blew up, and of
course they were like, 'We knew it all along,'" Of course the record label claimed this was
there plan all along. Grifftihs who signed the band would tell the Chicago Tribune “rather
than bang radio over the head i made a decision to pull back. So we made a video that we never
submitted to mtv and kept them out on the road. Then a couple of radio stations in vermont
picked up the record and started playing it to an incredible response..In all honesty i
thought it would take a lot longer than it did for them to make it. I was only planning
on selling 50,000 copies of the album and i would have been happy but the public spoke.
He would go on to say. “There were only a few believers in the company,”. “The Spin Doctors
couldn’t have been less trendy if they tried. They had nothing to do with the Seattle thing,
and we were concentrating very much on Pearl Jam. So I made a conscious decision not to
oversell them to everybody in the company. The band soon landed a spot on Saturday Night Live
by the fall of 1992, they appeared on the howard stern show and were featured in Rolling Stone. And
things only further blew up from there. Radio and MTV started playing Two Princes and Little Miss
Can’t Be Wrong both of which became top 20 hits on the pop charts and at the end of the day the band
sold six million copies of their debut record, Epic added new tracks to the group’s first EP
and re-released it as well. The track Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong would be written by Barron
in response to his stepmother who he referred to as and i quote a “malignant narcissit” who
never believed in Barron’s career aspirations. But Barron had some regrets with the band’s new
found fame at the time recalling to Rolling Stone: When I wrote ‘Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong,’ I never
dreamed it would be on hundreds of radio stations several times a day. So then you get to thinking,
‘Okay, what is a song like mis doing to people?’ One of the things I really admire about Bob
Dylan is that he wrote great pop songs that were constructive. I don’t want to sing a song that
degrades people who are traditionally degraded.” Despite the band’s new found success some
markets were less than eager to embrace the band.. Sometimes they’d play to theatres
packed with thousands of people, while other times not many people would show up. Barron would
admit to the morning call “The stupidest place we played was harpos in detroit, michigan. This
heavy metal place where they had these megadeth videos and hundreds of people screamin. They
had a t-shirt and a wet willie contest before we played with all these naked dudes on stage and
by the time we came on everyone had cleared out. In the summer of 1992 the spin doctors would
reconnect with John Popper as Blues Traveller had put together a music festival that would
be inspired by Lollapalooza which debuted the previous year. The tour would be known as the
HORDE festival, which stood for horizons of rock developing everywhere other groups on
the bill include Phish, Widespread Panic, The Samples and Aquarium Rescue Unit. And HORDE
would prove to be a success and would carry on for the next seven years and it would also gave
the spin doctors a massive publicity boost. The Single Two Princes would be nominated for
a grammy and become the #1 rock single of 1993 outpacing other tracks by other mega artists
including Aerosmith’s Livin on the Edge, Duran Duran’s Come Undone and
Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box. Frontman Chris Barron became known for his clever
lyrics telling AXS Online in a 2018 interview I work really hard on the lyrics. I slave over
them I practice the way a runner would run. It doesn’t have to be clever necessarily.
It just has to be right. I always point at the song Louie Louie. Nobody knows what
the f that guy is singing but it doesn’t matter whatever he’s singing we know it’s the
right thing for him to be saying on that song. In addition to MTV and rock radio heavily playing
the band’s music hollywood came knocking as well. Their cover of the song that’s the way i like
it was licensed for the space jam movie in 1995 and there song Two Princes was widely licensed
m even being featured in an episode of south park in season 21 and the tv show sesame street.
Both two princes and little miss can’t be wrong would also show up on the rock band video game
franchise as well . The band even contributed theme songs for seasons 2 and 3 of the TV Show
spin city. But things seemed to slow down for their 1994 sophomore record aptly titled turn it
upside down would The album was a modest success selling a million copies. . The track you learn
"You Let Your Heart Go Too Fast" was the most successful single off the
album, but it wouldn’t even be a top 40 hit, while the album peaked at number 28 on the album
charts. The band would appear at woodstock 94 and the glastonbury festival the same year But the
stress of pushing hard over the last couple years would cause friction in the group. On the eve of
a series of South American stadium dates opening for the Rolling Stones, the band’s guitarist
Aaron Schenkman quit. Barron would tell the LA Times “It was frightening at the time,”“It was a
really big wake-up call, it led to a lot of soul searching and made me grow up a bit and not take
things for granted. It was an incredible lesson.” Schenkman would tell the sagharborexpress I
felt like it had stopped being what I thought it was,” he “so I just got off the train.” But
there were warning signs as Barron would tell LA Times that the group’s second album was and
i quote “a painful album for me. It has a lot of painful personal references to me. It’s hard for
me to be objective about it as a work of art.” Under pressure from their label to write another
hit album the band initially threw out a whole set of tapes and came up with another full of set of
songs, but it proved futile with Barron telling the same publication“We weren’t communicating.
There wasn’t a dialogue going on,”. Thankfully for the band they still made their tour
commitments but with a replacement guitarist. The group soldiered on working on their third
album titled ‘You’ve Got To Believe in Something’ which came out in 1996..For the new record,
Barron shaved his beard and cut his hair as it hadn’t been cut since publicity photos were
taken for the first album. It was partially done in response to critics who prejudged
the band with Barron telling the Times “I guess I was wondering if people would
still call me a hippie if I cut my hair off, you know,”. “I never knew where the
hippie thing people kept saying came from. And I felt it was from fashion. Also, I
really had to do a lot of soul searching to find myself in the process of doing a
record. It starts with checking out my face.” By the time of the third album for the band
it was do or die. Retailers would take a wait and see approach with the band but the record
label touted to billboard ahead of the album coming out that the band still had an active
following on the internet and that while the first album spoke to the mainstream, the group’s
second record spoke to their core audience. The record label. The band also appeared on Howard
Stern’s radio show in 1995 ahead of Stern’s book “Miss America’ and performed a song with the
same title even though it wasn’t on the record. The label even procured videos from film students
for their music video “she used to be mine” But the effort proved to be futile as the
group’s third album sold even fewer copies than it’s predecessor and the band soon lost
their recording contract with Epic Records. This was a challenging time for the band with
plenty of highs and lows. In a 2002 interview with MIT’s newspaper the Tech online Barron
talked about where the band was at in this point in time saying “it’s more of a matter of
getting back into where we came from rather than developing. We started out as this bar band this
nightclub type of band with this meteoric rise. i think right now were sort of getting back
to rocking audiences as hard as possible but he would also admit in the same interview that
he still loves singing the band’s biggest hit Two Princes. Ahead of releasing their fourth album
Here Comes the Bridge in 1999, the band inked a new new deal with Universal, but several weeks
ahead of the album coming out Barron lost his voice due to a rare form of vocal chord paralysis.
The medical condition was so severe he was given a 50/50 chance of being able to speak again let
along sing. Keyboardist Ivan Nevile would take over singing duties for a few months But there
1999 tour would end up being scrapped anyways. Barron’s voice would return in 2000 and he spent
his time without his voice writing new songs with his old friends from Blues Traveller. And the spin
doctors would take a year off but the news that the wetlands was closing to make room for a condo
development brought them back together. Schenkman would rejoin the group during th This was the
place where they recorded their first EP and they played a successful show on September 7, 2001
during the last week the club was open.Schenkman would rejoin the group in 2001. The band would get
a bit of a boost when their 5th album nice talking to me got radio play with the tracks can’t kick
the habit which was also featured on the movie soundtrack for Grandma’s boy and the tracks
margarita and nice talking to me . From 2008 onwards the band resurfaced to play one off live
shows and the members explored other Projects. In 2011 the band geared up for a & UK & US tour
to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut record. . In 2013 they released their latest
and 6th studio album If the River Was Whisky. A few years ago rolling stone magazine would
publish a readers poll of the worst 90’s bands and the Spin Doctors took the number
8 spot, but surprisingly nirvana was
