Now, I must admit that this is a bit of a joke record. Or at least it is in my social circle. I was a fan of Two Princes when it came out – my Dad had the single on cassette (or on ‘cassingle’ to borrow a term that never really caught on) – but it was before I felt the real flush of music grab my veins, so it didn’t change my life or anything.
Fast-forward a decade or so and long-time friend and housemate Moo, in jest, regularly quoted a lyric from this – ‘What time is it? / Four thirty! / It’s not late / It’s early!’ – while walking around the house. I don’t think I had even heard that song at the time, but it stuck and for some reason my girlfriend and I incorporated it into our vocabulary. Some twenty years later, and now married, we still jokingly recite that lyric. We’ll pass it onto our daughters soon, and they’ll pass it onto their children, until all meaning behind it is lost in the annals of time.
Looking back at POCKET FULL OF KRYPTONITE, the Spin Doctor’s 1991 debut album three decades later, I’m amazed at how similar it sounds to another band from around that same time, a much bigger band that history has bestowed with far greater credibility. I do remember thinking back in the early ‘90s that the Spin Doctor’s sounded like grunge-lite; I do think they’d have been more successful even five or six years later when alternative rock was a bit more accepted on a mainstream basis. To follow that train of thought, they’re not too dissimilar to a band like Collective Soul who seemed to hit much harder when it came to success just a few years later. Maybe the Spin Doctors were held back because people didn’t like the singer’s ‘Shaggy from Scooby-Doo’ facial hair? It could be as simple as that…
But the band they remind me of the most is Pearl Jam; obviously not the vocals (although they’re not too different in terms of how they fit into the music, apart from Eddie Vedder’s affected phoney vocal style), but musically the interplay between guitar, bass and drums sounds like it could be from those first few Pearl Jam records. Just listen to that first instrumental break of Jimmy Olsen’s Blues (at 01:18); it sounds exactly like the kind of thing Pearl Jam would do. But could Eddie Vedder ever write lyrics with the quality of ‘I’m quite contented to take my chances / Against the Guildensterns and Rosenkrantzes’…
I’m not trying to rewrite history and claim that the Spin Doctors are some long-lost forgotten band in mainstream American rock music, but it all goes into the mix, doesn’t it? Maybe there was just something in the air when the late ‘80s dissolved in to the early ‘90s, a bunch of similar musical influences floating around, and production techniques catching both bands making a comparable sound?
This album is best known for its singles Two Princes, Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong, Jimmy Olsen’s Blues and, of course, What Time Is It?.
Hit: Two Princes
Hidden Gem: Forty Or Fifty
Vinyl Stylus 