Spin Doctors’ Chris Barron Was ‘High 24-7’ for 16 Years

Spin Doctors frontman Chris Barron said he was high on weed during the entirety of the band’s most successful years.

He reported that he only stopped when he became a single parent to his daughter as he looked back on the ebbs and flows of his band’s big era in the ‘90s.

“I was baked outta my mind high 24/7, man,” Barron told Rolling Stone in a new interview. “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.’”

He added: “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.”

As they tried to achieve success, the Spin Doctors found themselves placed head-to-head against Pearl Jam by their mutual label, Epic. “I still can’t listen to Pearl Jam,” Barron admitted.”You’d go to the record store; it’d be a big Pearl Jam display and one copy of our record. It was maddening.”

He recalled that his band’s biggest hit, “Two Princes,” came out of a phone call when he was 19. “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!”

How the Spin Doctors Fell From Grace

The band fell from grace when they chose “Cleopatra’s Cat” as the lead single for their second album. “We got too fucking cute,” Barron reflected. ”That was a funny call, but I was really young … I just kinda, like, went along.”

The Spin Doctors have just released Face Full of Cake, their first album in 12 years, which was produced by Phish bassist Mike Gordon. Barron explained: “Mike is like, ‘You guys have, like, 350 million plays on Spotify — that’s crazy. And we’re like, ‘You guys do 13 nights at Madison Square Garden!’”

The singer admitted that lifestyle once appealed to him, but it didn’t any more. “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.

“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.”