Pocket Full of Kryptonite
Spin Doctors
1991
Sometimes I'll wonder, in the course of listening to the albums for this blog column and writing about them, whether a hit song from that album sounds "different" from the rest of the album, and why. You tell me—listen to Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and tell me where "Two Princes" fits in here. It's right on the fence between "makes sense in this context" and "total outlier." And I wonder whether that's because of the song, or it's because I have heard this song so many more times than the rest of the songs on the album that my brain just classifies it differently. There's nothing I can do about '90s rock radio whipping me with repeats of "Two Princes" in my youth, so it's probably a question I'll never be able to truthfully answer.
Kinda becomes a moot point when "Two Princes" kicks ass and the rest of Pocket Full of Kryptonite also kicks ass.
Pam knew Spin Doctors as soon as I put them on for the first time this week (which is honestly always a good sign). She said that she had a vague recollection of a TV or movie character saying something along the lines of "Spin Doctors are poets." Just because nothing turned up on Google doesn't mean she was misremembering. And I think even if she is misremembering, then it's worth mentioning anyway, because it sounds like a quip from a comedy show that ends up being poignant the more time that passes. I guess Spin Doctors might have been passé in the 2000s, but we're easily at the point where we can start considering Pocket Full of Kryptonite to be an incredible artifact worthy of praise.
The songs that aren't "Two Princes" (which, by the way, has appeared twice on this blog already) are a bit more, err, jammy, I guess you would say. It's funny, in trying to procrastinate writing this blog post, I saw that Stereogum had posted an article about "No Rain" (members only, sorry doods), and it gave a shoutout to Spin Doctors as being part of the same scene. I.e. technically "alt rock" but only in the sense that "alt rock" could literally mean anything. It was in the context of how these proto-jam bands existed in their own little world of '90s-era hippiedom, but that, every once in a while, one of their songs would cross over anyway. E.g. "No Rain" and "Two Princes" (other songs implied in that article: "Run-Around" by Blue Traveler (who will be mentioned in the next paragraph, and covered in aYoBS soon enough) and "Send Me on My Way" by Rusted Root).
Okay, so this is jam band music, basically. Which is cool. I've never said anything horrible about jam bands on this blog, and I'm not gonna start now. I actually do think that it's fascinating that the term "jam band" is a relatively new term, and grew from bands like Spin Doctors, who were literally up there just jamming on stage. Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler shared a lot, including high school alma maters for the frontmen, music in that John Popper shows up on multiple songs on this album, and also plenty of tours together in the 1990s. It's said that the transition from whoever opened to whoever was closing the show would involve an hour of both bands just jamming together. After hearing Pocket Full of Kryptonite, I think that makes a lot of sense. I also saw in a google search a reddit post on the Phish subreddit that was like "Spin Doctors was my starter jam band," which also makes a lot of sense.
When I first downloaded the album, I saw that the last song was listed at twelve minutes long, and went, "uh oh." Mainly because a lot of these CD-era bands would tack on "secret tracks" to the end of the album, and so the final track would be the "final song," and then ten minutes of silence, and then the actual final song. Which is annoying in the iPod era (I am still in my iPod era). So I checked, just to make sure that I didn't have to use Audacity to splice out a bunch of nothing. But no! Spin Doctors sincerely put a full-on twelve-minute song at the end of their album! Which is so cool, and which also shows commitment to the craft, ya know? They aren't fucking around. The songs are important. This isn't a joke. But also... it really is just for fun too.
When I first downloaded the album, I saw that the last song was listed at twelve minutes long, and went, "uh oh." Mainly because a lot of these CD-era bands would tack on "secret tracks" to the end of the album, and so the final track would be the "final song," and then ten minutes of silence, and then the actual final song. Which is annoying in the iPod era (I am still in my iPod era). So I checked, just to make sure that I didn't have to use Audacity to splice out a bunch of nothing. But no! Spin Doctors sincerely put a full-on twelve-minute song at the end of their album! Which is so cool, and which also shows commitment to the craft, ya know? They aren't fucking around. The songs are important. This isn't a joke. But also... it really is just for fun too.
I think there's a lot to be said about a bunch of dudes just up there having fun. Maybe it only works if the quality of the music is there, though. E.g. how small is the gap, genre-wise, between Spin Doctors and Sophistafunk, and yet how large is the gap in quality? This album is catchy as hell, and full of ideas, and full of energy and grooves, and so, I say again, what's the matter with an album that exists just for the fun of it?
Unfortunately, most of the albums that I cover in this column that have "the big song" also feature a bunch of other songs that are overshadowed by that big song. Occasionally, though, you come across an album that features a fucking great song that simply serves as an easy gateway to a handful of other, equally worthy songs. That song on Pocket Full of Kryptonite being, of course, "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong." Kidding! Though maybe I should've worked that song into this blog post a little better. Anyone else not really remember this one? Pam said it was their other big hit. At this point, it doesn't fucking matter. Give me the whole album, hits or no hits. Give me that good '90s alt-rock jam.
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