Does Spin Docs’ Success Mark Start of New Era?

When the Spin Doctors made the cover of Rolling Stone last month, it was clearly the mark of a new phase for both the band and the magazine.

For the 4-year-old New York-based quartet, it was a symbol of recognition and renown far ahead of schedule.

For the magazine, it was an overdue change of focus with an emphasis on new music rather than veteran stars.

But to hear singer Chris Barron talk, the whole thing took on a different slant. He views it as symbolizing the start of a whole new era for humanity.

“With a new millennium coming and a new century, we’re sure to be facing a new epoch,” Barron said by phone from an Atlanta hotel before a recent concert. “We and people like us are surely the bloom on the end of the branch of the epoch.”

He’s not taking credit for launching an Aquarian age, just stating that the Spin Doctors’ success signals the arrival of a new generation--and he’s not talking about the fortysomething couples who just moved into the White House.

“Look at our generation,” he says. “I’m 25, I grew up in a really repressed time . . . it’s been really uptight. Yet we grew up with parents who had these tales of the good old days of the ‘60s. There was a beautiful time, at least to our little minds from the stories we heard as kids.

“Now we’re grown up and see nuclear proliferation decline, no arms race between the superpowers. And you take those children who are now adults and that’s going to lead into the third millennium.”

The sights and sounds of a Spin Doctors concert--examples of which will be at the Whisky on Wednesday and the Wadsworth Theatre on Thursday--give weight to his claim. Critics have not embraced the band, often dismissing its music as a recycling of the likes of Steve Miller. The group’s “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong,” a recent Top 20 single and MTV favorite, is a virtual sound-alike for Miller’s 1976 “Take the Money and Run.”

The group is one, and so far the most successful, of several young bands that have sprung from a new generation of, for lack of a better term, hippies, who adhere to the tie-dye fashions and communal ideals of the original Summer of Love.

But for all that, Barron has experienced a few more tangible effects of the ascendance represented by the Rolling Stone cover--though even that is something he thinks of in fairly cosmic terms.

“That and MTV have really changed things for us,” he said. “MTV ruins all your clothes. The cow shirt I wore in the ‘Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong’ video is my favorite shirt, but I can’t wear it outside anymore without people noticing it and bothering me. But every time someone asks me for an autograph or wants to talk I say a little prayer of thanks. You’ve got to be grateful, otherwise Providence comes and takes it away from you.

“Any time you get to a new level of press attention, I find the next time standing on stage I’m facing this greater presence, quantitatively. I mean, if there’s three people at a show you try to have the same artistic integrity if it was 300,000, but in terms of shear impact on the soul and the intellect, the bigger the crowd, the more awesome it is to your own individual self.”

One of the strangest things about the band’s new renown is that it’s based on material that for them is old news. “Little Miss” comes from an album, “Pocket Full of Kryptonite,” that was released in the summer of 1991, but didn’t start climbing the charts until after an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” last October.

That album doesn’t really prepare new fans for the band’s live approach. That style, emphasizing give-and-take blues-rock jams between singer Barron, guitarist Eric Schenkman, bassist Mark White and drummer Aaron Comess, is better captured on the recent “Homebelly Groove . . . Live” album, combining a 1990 EP with newer recordings.

The Spin Doctors have been developing that jam-based style since forming in 1989 in New York, inspired and encouraged by Blues Traveler, another jam-oriented New York-based quartet made up of high school pals of Barron’s from Princeton, N.J.

Barron says that playing nearly every night on the Manhattan club and bar circuit, both bands worked to make sure that each show was a different set and songs were never played the same way twice, to keep people coming back.

“We still do this,” said Barron. “One time we’ll play all new weird material and next play stuff from ‘Kryptonite.’ We change the show all the time. That’s the real key to our success. If we catch your interest, we give you plenty of surprises to wonder about.”

The problem of the long-building success and of seemingly endless life on the road is that it’s been hard to prepare a follow-up to ‘Kryptonite.’

“I’d love to go home soon and write songs,” Barron said. “But all things in due time. We’re doing this tour now, then going to Europe extensively for the first time and then we’ll finish our next album in April. Then we’ll take a breather and get ready for a really cool, big, glorious summer tour.”

Barron says that the album, being produced at Memphis’ famed Ardent Studios by Jim Dickinson, who has worked with artists ranging from the Rolling Stones to Alex Chilton, will probably be released in November. And then, after New Years, it’s back on the road.

Barron knows that’s a grueling pace, but he said he’s intent on enjoying it while he’s young. He can’t see himself keeping it up too long, unlike those now-graybeard godfathers of hippie-rock, the Grateful Dead. Instead, he holds a different hippie dream.

“I wouldn’t mind having a farm some day,” he said. “And when I’m an old man of a farmer, I don’t want to pretend that I’m still a young gallant rock star. I’d rather be honest with this while I’m doing it, but in some ways it’s a young person’s game.”

McCartney Flap: MTV has deleted one Paul McCartney song from a taped concert special scheduled for 10 p.m. Wednesday. The problem, according to the cable channel, is the repeated use of a common obscenity in his vocal on a new song, “Big Boys Bickering,” a commentary on the failure of governments to do more to protect the environment. The language is “is not consistent with MTV’s standards, or the standards of any other TV network,” according to a channel spokesperson.