The Spin Doctors, who are in the middle of an international tour (before returning to the U.S. and a September 4 appearance on Conan), reflect on their new blues album If the River Was Whiskey.

New, Old Songs

CHRIS BARRON (Lead Singer): We recently played Pocket Full of Kryptonite in its entirety, on tour for its 20th anniversary, and we’d get requests for our encores. These longtime fans in Europe requested this old bluesy song “So Bad,” which we hadn’t played since about 1991. They knew more about what we’ve played than us! I wasn’t sure about a lot of the lyrics but they had a recording, so I listened to it on my headphones before the show and we played it that night. After the show, we were hanging out at the merch table and everyone kept saying, “Great new stuff, man!” So every night for the rest of the tour, we’d try to work it in, and, finally, we were like, “Fuck it. No one’s buying records these days anyway, let’s just make a blues record.” Artistically, it pushed our buttons so we moved in this backward, retrospective trajectory.

Baby Pictures

CB: The basis of the material on this record dates back to the start of the band. Our initial objective was to make a living playing music and not have a day job – not to have a hit. So, in order to break into all of these New York blues clubs that paid well, we wrote all these original songs that sounded like old, crusty blues songs. We passed these songs off like covers and no one said anything about it. We were all into blues at that point, except our bassist Mark White, who was a disco, punk guy. It was a Beatles-in-Hamburg, all-night-gig situation.

ERIC SCHENKMAN (GUITAR): Those songs are some of my favorite tunes that the band has ever done. And the fact that these tunes have so much history makes it so deep for us. All of our songs stay on my mind, but these songs from our early club days are always just running through my head.

Like Riding a Bike

CB: Once we decided to resurrect all these old songs for our new album, they came together in no time. We only played some of them a few times back in the day – we never had the musical maturity to pull them off. Then, we wrote two new songs.

AARON COMESS (DRUMS): With the exception of a couple of those songs that we only played a few times, we played some of these songs 100 times or more – even though it had been a 20 year gap since we last played them. Chris had to go on the Internet to find the lyrics he wrote 20 years ago and we had to find old tapes of ourselves. But, for the most part, it was like riding a bike.

ES: A third of them are really old – ‘86–‘88 – and a third of them are middle-aged, ‘89–‘92. They’re Chris’ old stories from when he was a kid, which is an amazing thing to me. It’s so bizarre that a kid that long ago wrote those songs. It speaks a lot to the consistency of the group’s voice. When we play these songs live, they’re fun for us, but there’s a lot of depth.

Jamband Legacies

CB: Our strong point as a band is that we had raw chemistry and, though we had this happy vibe, there was an underlying aggression to the music. We were also super focused on our songwriting. We didn’t want our songs to just be the platform for soloing, though there was a lot of improvisation. But we didn’t set out to write a hit – we just wanted to have catchy songs in the repertoire. When some of those songs became hits, we had this moment in our career where all of a sudden these dready college kids came out to shows, looked to their left and saw these 10-year-old kids who had seen us on MTV standing there with their parents. It was a clash of the ideologies and our grassroots following said, “I don’t know if this is my scene anymore.” And, of course, the 10-year-old kids grew up and moved on to other things. What’s cool is that now, 20 years later, our old guard fans are interested in this blues record.

AC: What I love about this record is that it’s so honest. After you have a big hit, whether you admit it or not, there’s always going to be that pressure put on you to relive that – mostly because of the record company people. And the great thing about this record is that nobody’s doing that and there’s no intention of having a hit song.

ES: These songs are our roots. We are turning 25 as a band this year, too. We got to celebrate our 25th anniversary with a new kind of record that also looks back on our earliest days.