Ten years after

Ladies and gentlemen, the Spin Doctors have reunited.

It's hard to imagine that they were actually once a jam band that prompted hardcore fans to drive around the country and tape all their shows. They blew their shot at maintaining a Phish-ish or Widespread Panic-like audience by having big radio hits that were popular on lite-rock, "at-work" stations. My amigo Eric calls it "failure by success": the shark-jumping career pattern when everyone loses interest in you because you're overexposed, and you lose both your original fan base and your newly acquired fans.

Cracker failed by succeeding too, and they're still together -- touring incognito from time to time, no less. I suspect that most rock bands find it easier to quit (i.e. break up and/or move on to other projects) than to keep making music when 90% of their fans have stopped listening -- even if they still have something to say musically.


FMFM: The tense, exploratory Filles de Kilimanjaro