Spin Doctors: “My stepmom used to tell me that I was gonna play guitar for the rats in a basement…”
via V13
Spin Doctors frontman Chris Barron is gearing up for a busy summer as the band continue with their extensive tour in support of their latest album Face Full of Cake (out now via Capitol Records).
Having hit the scene in the 90s with their breakthrough album A Pocket Full of Kryptonite, life on the road for the band is something Barron and his bandmates are accustomed to however it doesn’t mean that the life of a touring rockstar doesn’t come with its downs as well as its ups.
In our latest Cover Story, the Spin Doctors frontman discussed the realities of touring, life off the road, and the creative process behind the group’s latest release Face Full of Cake.
Let’s start with the new single which talks about the transient nature of life as an artist. For a band that’s been doing it for a number of decades now, does it get any easier?
“Modern technology makes it a lot easier. It’s so much easier touring now when you can just text your loved ones and be like, I miss you, wherever you are. When we were touring back in the late 20th century, you had to find a phone booth and get a bunch of nickels and dimes and quarters and sit in a phone booth and like, you know, be like happy birthday. I found a phone booth. It was tough back then so just the fact that there are phones everywhere like right in your pocket, before you had to wait, you’d be sitting on a tour bus and then you had to wait until you stopped at a truck stop or something like that, and find a phone or wait till you got to the hotel.
You’d be on a 12-hour drive and could not contact anybody while you were there. It was just you and the band. It’s certainly gotten easier from that standpoint, and we’ve all gotten older and more mature and a week, a month or a year seems like a much shorter time when you’re further along in life. You also learn to work smarter. How to plot your day. Then, after a while you sort of realize you’ve done this a million times, gotten through it, and it’s gonna be fine. You learn to work smarter and not to grind yourself down mentally.”
Going back to the start, especially around Pocket Full of Kryptonite, that album started as a slow burner for you then your profile picked up, the album went gold, you had the hit singles. What was that transition like from being a kind of relatively new act to a new act then that had a huge profile worldwide?
“It’s really funny because, for one thing, we were busy from shortly after the band started. We were living in New York City and we’re playing New York City like six nights a week. We would do a stretch where we’d play 12 nights outta 14 or something like that. It was just nuts and, because people went out a lot back then, we would play a different set list every night. We still play a different set list every night. People knew they could come and see us multiple nights and the show would be different.
There was no internet and people were going out all the time. I was thinking about this the other day about how, and I do this too, you’re going to meet somebody and you’ll say ‘I’m leaving the house, I’m around the corner, I stopped to tie my shoe,’ every micro thing, ‘I’m at the door. I’m inside. I’m sitting here.’ Back then you would just go out. It’s Friday night. Joey Miserable and the Worms are on at the Nightingale. You just go and, then, from there you would meet up with people.
We were playing all the time. We were touring all the time and then things picked up and we were super busy, but we’d been pretty busy all along. It was pretty crazy. You’re doing Saturday Night Live, which is a popular American show and the guest is Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. I just remember looking at them, and I’d never seen anybody that famous before. I’d never seen somebody as famous. I’d never seen somebody like Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, who I’d watched their movies. We used to watch those movies obsessively on the bus, and then that’s Robert DeNiro. He’s three feet away from me. That’s fucking crazy. It was an adjustment, but it was a lot of fun.
Remember too, this is what we were going after, this is what we’re trying to do. On one hand, that’s what we wanted but, on the other hand, our early stated goal was just to make a living, playing music and, if all that stuff happened, it was gonna be the icing on the cake. It was very exciting. It was sometimes a little nerve-wracking. A lot of high-pressure situations, like being on these evening television shows and stuff like that. You quickly got used to the next level of pressure and it was a lot of fun. Playing Glastonbury was cool. Those kinds of shows where you walk out. I always tell people when people ask what that’s like, to imagine you go to the beach and you look out at the ocean and it’s just this massive thing that stretches on and on and on to the horizon. Imagine that’s people and you have to sing for them.”
What did you take from that whole experience when your profile exploded?
“It was gratifying. I’m learning disabled, and I’m dyslexic. I grew up in a very difficult situation. My home life was hard. My stepmom used to tell me that I was gonna play guitar for the rats and I was gonna be a janitor. There’s nothing wrong with that but, in her mind, it was a terrible thing to be a janitor to work at my high school, live in the basement next to the water heater and play guitar for the rats. So, for me, there was a lot of personal gratification. I grew up in an affluent, upwardly mobile town with a prestigious university and some prestigious public schools. There was the equivalent of a Harrow or an Eton in our Lawrenceville.
Growing up I got really bad grades because I was learning disabled but I did well in music and acting and people used to ask what I was going to do with my life as my grades are really bad. I’d tell them I was gonna be a rock star. I was just saying it to wind people up. I was taking the piss out of people who were bound to go to these posh universities. I’ll be a rockstar and they would tell me your chances are one in a million. No, your chances are one in a million, I can do this. I’d say my chances are one in 125,000, and I’ll take those and I went for it.
For me, there was a lot of personal gratification. There was a lot of ‘See, you’re not an idiot. You are good at this.’ I grew up feeling like I was stupid and chasing a dumb dream that was never gonna go anywhere. I had faith in the guys around me, Aaron, Eric, and Mark, three of the best musicians of their generation. We had this vision and this idea and we worked hard. We just worked our asses off so there’s a sensation of it all paying off.”