Spin Doctors’ Chris Barron “still can’t listen to Pearl Jam” after “maddening” ’90s label rivalry

Spin Doctors frontman Chris Barron has admitted he can’t listen to Pearl Jam due to issues with the two bands sharing the same label in the 1990s.

Speaking in the latest episode of the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Barron said he feels some resentment from their early days on labelmates on Epic Records, because they didn’t get the same level of promotion as Eddie Vedder‘s band.

He said the label favoured the Seattle group even before his band’s debut album ‘Pocket Full Of Kryptonite’ was released in 1991, which spawned their hit single ‘Two Princes’.

That same year Pearl Jam released ‘Ten’ which proved to be one of the most iconic records of the grunge era, selling over 13 million copies in the US alone.

“I still can’t listen to Pearl Jam,” Barron said. “No offence to anybody who likes Pearl Jam, but I just can’t do it.

“We would get to a town and back then they had these like little newspapers, the local rag and I’d open it up and there’d be like a full page ad of Pearl Jam’s gig and Pearl Jam’s record. And you couldn’t find the Spin Doctors anywhere. You’d go to the record store, it’d be a big Pearl Jam display and one copy of our record. It was maddening.”

It comes after Bill Burr recently revealed that he told Eddie Vedder that he once hated his band at Saturday Night Live‘s 50th anniversary show.

As a hair metal fan in his teens, the arrival of Pearl Jam was admittedly not welcomed by the comedian: “Pearl Jam, that was the band that made me realise my youth was over,” Burr told Seth Meyers.

“And then Nirvana came in, and I was like, ‘What’s this?’ They always say, like, Nirvana knocked [the hair metal] out. It was Pearl Jam. When Pearl Jam came, that was another one of those grunge Seattle bands. And that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This isn’t ending.’ Like, this is just gonna keep coming.”

“And then all my bands, Skid Row and all of them, were gone. And it was just these sad guys singing about being under a bridge and not being happy. And I’m like, ‘What happened to nothing but a good time and ignoring all your problems with cocaine, right?’ Like, that was all over.”

Burr went on to say that he got to sit next to Vedder at SNL50 and settle the score. “I did it in good nature,” Burr said. “I was like, ‘Man, I hated your band. You ended my thing.’

“And he was cracking up. I go, ‘Do you know how long it took me to admit how great a band Pearl Jam is?’ Because now I love ’em. But it was like 20 years where I just, like, ‘I’m not listening to those guys.’”

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