Winamp Wednesday: No Future or Family Tree
Time to learn what a prince and lover ought to be...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
All right, let’s get all the razzing out early. We probably still haven’t gotten to the point where this song isn’t a lame relic of the Early 90s in the court of popular opinion, but I straight-up love this band. So let’s put on a little English to doctor this spin. It’s…
Spin Doctors, “Two Princes”
The first record I ever bought for myself was a Spin Doctors disc, but it wasn’t this one. Young like I was I just wanted a copy of “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”, so I bought the single. That one netted me a twenty-minute live set at Wetlands as the b-side, so I can’t be mad at it. The live version of “At This Hour” absolutely annihilates anything else they put to tape, and it shows why the Spin Doctors were so heavily hyped during the long promotional and radio life of Pocketful of Kryptonite. These guys had the chops and could write songs that were playful and quirky enough for both record execs and an adoring public. At his best Chris Barron was one hell of a lyricist.
Which means, of course, that the band’s greatest hit would be the one where he repeats the same phrase twenty-eight times in three minutes. And it worked! Yes, the lyrics occasionally de-bib-i-dip into half-scat absurdity and sometimes it’s all too clever, what with rhyming “big seal upon his jacket” with “got that princely racket” like that’s anywhere near normal. But even until today if someone mentions anything from around 1993 my brain screams back “JUST GO AHEAD NOW”! Companies spend centuries trying to build that kind of brand recognition. Coca-Cola could never.
That’s what propelled this tune like a (he wants to buy you) rocket up the Hot 100, becoming Spin Doctors only Top 10 hit leading into the Summer of 1993. Looking back this tune either becomes the last gasp of the Early 90s—Zubas, American Gladiators, slap bracelets—or the first herald of the Mid 90s, the prime 90s that seems to be the sluice box for the nostalgia that’s forthcoming. The song and the image and especially the music video collide in this melange that gives us flannel and leather jackets and experimental film, hope for the future and beautiful people and exultation of nature even within the city. Make the band a little less goofy and they could have fit right in with their later contemporaries. But sometimes you need goofy. Sometimes goofy is the point.
I can see the inflection point coming in that summer. I’d go into June listing Spin Doctors as one of my favorite bands, but that placement would soon be ceded to a weirder looser band out of Charlottesville that the older kids were getting super into, the kind of band that could Remember Two Things. And what was Dave Matthews Band other than an Eeveelution of Spin Doctors? Longer songs, bigger arrangements, even crunchier lyrics. That warning-snap drum that starts “Ants Marching” is just the stoner’s groove to the thunder-dance roll that begins “Two Princes”. Apparently we weren’t allowed to have more than one band who was known for their jam. Or maybe their follow-up album was just that bad. Whatever, I like “You Let Your Heart Go Too Fast” and Turn It Upside Down is only…well, yeah, it’s trying too hard and doesn’t know where it’s going. Don’t start your album with a song called “Big Fat Funky Booty” no matter how fun it is to perform live.
They were never fully retired from my collection but Spin Doctors definitely took a backseat after that summer. I had to give equal time being obsessed with House and Rap and Industrial and nothing but The Beatles for a while. What brought me back to “Two Princes” out of nowhere? I’m sure its inclusion in MTV 25 Lame had something to do with it, one of a smattering of the “twenty-five worst videos” in MTV history that had no business being there. (“Maneater”? Guess you couldn’t put Eddie Murphy on there twice.) I had a lot of thoughts about lists created by voices of authority back then; how could they get something so important so wrong? Listening to whatever it was I was mad about more was my act of personal rebellion.
But I think the real reason was that it was April in Manhattan and I could download whatever I wanted and I needed music that reflected how incredible it felt to be out in the city when it was warm again. The tune reflected a nostalgia I had for being very young and small and protected in this terrifying world, but I could look back at the music video and see the bits that had become my world over the past seven years. Oh damn, look, it’s Bethesda Fountain! I love Thoth! (And even more than that I was in the midst of an obsession with The Manchurian Candidate, yes I was very popular in high school.) Is that Jones Diner? I’d just spent days after happy days rehearsing down the street, and the diner became an indelible part of all our lives. The final point of any work of art are the signifiers that we bring to it. In my head this music video was both a time capsule and a prophecy. I’d finally matured into the New York City to which the Spin Doctors wished to introduce me.
“Two Princes” remained a very heavy jam all the way into the summer of 2000. Back in Charlottesville that July, surrounded by those who knew what a prince and lover ought to be, I took a walk down to Plan 9 Records and found Pocketful of Kryptonite for all of three dollars. That purchase was a no-brainer for me and a point of some scorn for my hipper friends. Didn’t I know that three dollars could have gone towards one-fifth the price of a heinously unlistenable new release? I didn’t care, and I immediately became that person who extolls all the virtues of these late-stage album tracks, spending the rest of the year jamming through song after song, memorizing every bit of the album until my giant teenage emotions could live outside in the melody to give them space. How wonderful it is to be in love like “More Than She Knows”, how horrible it is to fall into heartbreak like “How Could You Want Him”, how beautiful it is to figure out who you are while New York pulses around you. Hey…What Time Is It?
I love this band and I love this album and I’ve never really cared how lame that makes me look. You gotta love what you love. I’ve met my fair share of great artists and incredible people who have told me that “it’s just ah-early, early, early”, so I’d like to think I’m in good company. “Two Princes”—maybe the worst song on the album, even for all its joy and wonder—was the key that opened the door for me. The sound it creates is more than the band or the record or even the one image it conjures. If you want to hear the 90s, just go ahead now. That’s not nothing.
And how do the Doctors sound in the 2020s? Let’s take a little trip down to Shinbone Alley and see…