Quick Stats: Chris Barron, lead singer, Spin Doctors
Daily Driver: 2018 Subaru Impreza (Chris’ rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: See below
Favorite road trip: Spin Doctors’ first national tour
Car he learned to drive in: Ford Econoline van
First car bought: 1993 Subaru Legacy
Spin Doctors’ lead singer Chris Barron used to own police cars, but when his wife and daughter suggested something more current and passenger-friendly, he chose to go back to a familiar brand—a 2018 Subaru Impreza.
“I’ve always loved Subarus. I loved that independent four-wheel drive. I leased one of those, a 2015, [and when the] lease ran out I just went right back and got another one. It’s small enough to be able to park it in the city if you need to,” says Barron, who lives in New York City. “I used to have a ’42 Ford wood-paneled wagon, but it wasn’t my everyday driver.”
Barron gives the Impreza a perfect 10. He calls it the “Nighthawk” and gets extra coverage on his leases. “It’s my little pal that I drive around in. I’m a musician, so I’m always driving around and I need a little extra space. For a car of its size, it’s enormous. I moved my daughter home from college and she acquired so much stuff, and it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’ll fit this stuff in here.’ We totally did,” he says with a laugh. “We put the seats down, and it was nuts. I totally moved her home from college. It’s got personality. It’s an inexpensive, fun car that you’re never going to get stuck anywhere. It’s a mountain goat. I never worry about it.”
When he was in northern Maine in February, even when the roads were icy, he never worried with the Impreza. “It’s a trusty car,” he says, adding that he’s been happy with his local dealership.
Before the Impreza, he had a 2004 Crown Victoria he bought after he ran his 1997 Crown Victoria “into the ground,” as he says. “They’re both Police Interceptors. The first one was my favorite. It had the old body style, the back end of it looked like a gigantic bar of soap,” Barron says. “I could always see it in a parking lot.”
The car still had features from when it was a police car. “It had the trunk release. Cops had put in this big trunk release button right in the middle of the dashboard. When my daughter was small, I used to call it the history eraser button because I didn’t want her to press it. The trunk would just open up,” he says. “It had a roadblock in it. The trunk would come up and it had a lighting rig, it was like two big brake lights that would just flash left-right, left-right.”
Barron loved how his Crown Vic made other cars around him react. “That car was amazing,” he says. “You’d pull up aggressively behind somebody in the left lane, and you could see them see you in the rearview mirror, because the whole car would do this sudden shimmy. And you could see their hands tighten on the wheel and the whole car would do a little wiggle and immediately the blinker would come on and they’d get out of your way.”
Barron’s dad, automotive journalist Ken Gross, was the person who suggested it. “My dad was like, ‘You should get a Crown Victoria.’ We’re Ford people. He’s not a Chevy guy, so no Impala. I immediately loved the idea,” he says. “It was really no frills; there wasn’t even a mirror in the visor. It was fast as hell, it had the good old cop shocks, cop struts, the big engine. It was just a freaking awesome car.”
Barron said it was a perfect daily driver for New York City, although he drove it all over the country. “People are going to scratch the car, it’s going to get dinged and bumped, and I didn’t care,” he says. “Driving in New York City is like a big game of chicken, but the person with the worst car wins. I’m driving this $9,000 huge Crown Victoria, and you’re going to come at me with your Mercedes? I don’t think so, I’m going first. People see a car like that coming and they just get out of the way in New York City.”
First car bought
Barron bought his current Impreza because he liked his first car a lot. It was a 1993 Subaru Legacy wagon, which he bought with money he made from the Spin Doctors. He got inspired to buy that car from his best friend in college.
“My pal from Bennington College always had a soft spot for these Subarus, and we had lots of adventures, those crazy college adventures,” he says. “He was this punk rock guy, and he had a really old maroon Subaru. His was super beat up, the paint was all worn down, and he wrote or painted on the side ‘The Piece of Work.’ So I always had a soft spot for the Subaru wagon.”
He drove his Subaru around Washington state. “The one little moment in my life that I didn’t live in New York City, I lived in Washington,” he says. “And I spent a year there, I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ And I moved back to New York City because I’m just a New York City guy. I’m a Northeastern guy.”
What clinched his brand loyalty to Subaru was the time he was on a snowy road in the mountains east of Seattle. “I took that car up into the mountains right when I got it and I drove onto this road and the road turned into a dirt road and then I got way up into the mountains and it got snowy and there was nowhere to turn around so I kept going and going,” he recalls.
The road just ended at a certain point and he got a bit worried when he had to turn around. “I had to do a K turn with a huge cliff behind me on this snow. I was like, ‘Damn, I’m going to die here.’ … There was that one moment where I had the brake on, put it in drive, and I was like, ‘Am I going to slide backwards over this cliff, or am I going to go forward?’ And I went forward and I was like, ‘F–k this, man, Subarus are the best cars in the world,’” he says, laughing.
One day, after seeing a BMW 325i convertible, he gave the Subaru to his brother. “I started making some money and thought, ‘I’m going to get a sports car.’ I got a BMW and I just never vibed with that car. It’s funny, to this day I think people who drive BMWs drive really badly,” he says, with a laugh. “I’m always like, ‘What is this guy doing?’ Oh, it’s a BMW. Of course they’re cutting me off, of course they’re tailgating me. I don’t know what it is about BMW drivers.”
After always worrying about the BMW getting dinged and scratched in New York City, it finally got stolen out of his garage and kept in a lot by the FBI for six months.
“All they could say was, ‘It’s in an evidence lot.’ When I got it back I just didn’t want it anymore. It just didn’t feel right,” he says, adding that’s when his dad suggested a cop car.
Car he learned to drive in
Barron didn’t get his driver’s license until he was in the Spin Doctors. “One of my really famous songs is ‘Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.’ People think it’s about an ex-girlfriend or an ex-wife, but it’s actually my dad’s ex-wife. I grew up in a household where my dad’s ex-wife kind of hated me. I got grounded and I wasn’t allowed to get my driver’s license, so I was like ‘the hell with this,’ and I didn’t get my driver’s license when I was a kid,” Barron says.
After rebelling by not learning to drive, Barron was in the band when he finally decided he wanted to start driving. “[When] The Spin Doctors went on the road, we did 50,000 miles in vans. We had two vans—a ketchup-red Ford Econoline 250 and a rented 15-passenger Econoline—and we went all around the country in those two cars for two years and when I felt like it, I would just drive,” Barron says. “So I learned to drive in those two vans driving across the panhandle of Utah at 100 miles an hour because there’s no cops out there and the road just never turns.”
Barron also drove that passenger van around in New York City a lot. “I hated that van because I’d been stuck in it for a year and I kind of wanted to crash it. So I learned how to drive in that passenger van driving like a maniac in New York City because you sort of have to drive like a maniac in New York City,” he says.
But being on tour has its advantages when it comes to having time to practice driving and parking. “One night in Mt. Kisco, we got there early, had nothing to do all day, and I just practiced parallel parking with that gigantic van for hours. Just unparking and parking that van because there was nothing to do,” he says, laughing. “So I’m pretty good at parallel parking.”
Barron finally got his license at 22 or 23 and aced the driving test after all his practice. “A lot of my early driving was in New York City. In New York City you’ve got to learn how to drive 50 miles an hour 10 inches away from all the other cars,” he says.
Favorite road trip
The first time the Spin Doctors toured the United States, it was in a bus.
“That first tour on that bus was amazing. We were on a 1967 Eagle bus—that’s the old school buses that all the old country guys would tour on. That bus, Bruce Springsteen was on it early in his career. It was called Champagne,” he says, laughing. “It was a janky, funky old bus and it’s still my favorite bus I’ve ever been on. It had this great paint job that was yellow and orange—it looked like one of those orange Creamsicles. On the side it had Smokey and the Bandit cursive lettering ‘Champagne’ on the side of the bus. That was a great trip.”
It was the band’s first national tour. “There’s definitely a sensation of, ‘Wow, we made it.’ But of course we were playing for 20 people every night because we were playing in places we never played before,” Barron says.
One of the things that made the road trip great was their driver. “When you’re on a tour bus, the driver is your tour guide and spiritual adviser. They decide where you’re going to eat,” Barron says with a laugh. “He’d been on the road his whole life and he knew every stretch of road in the United States. It was amazing having a guy like that. I’d sit on the little staircase that went down to the doorway, next to him.”
The driver would talk about the geography of the country. “I’d just never seen the country from that standpoint. I learned about the Continental Divide in geography, but the way he explained it was like there’s a high point in the country and all the water that falls on the east heads east and all the water that falls on the west falls west,” he says. “Having him explain the whole thing, I got a sense of the continent, as a contiguous piece of land that was connected by these roads that I was on. It made me feel like a blood cell flowing through the veins of the country along with a lot of other cells, like all the other cars and all the other trucks.”
They also had a CB radio so they could hear trucks talking to each other as well as converse with them. “I was young and I’d never done that before. It was just an adventure every day,” he says.
They started in Toronto and drove south to Nashville, where Barron had never visited. “To wake up in Nashville, I’m like, ‘Is there somewhere to eat?’ They’re like, ‘The Elliston [Place] Soda Shop.’ I now consider a visit to Nashville wasted if I don’t go to the Elliston Soda Shop,” he says.
They drove through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Chicago, the East Coast, and back to the South, and around the country again. “In that period of my life, we were out from [the time I was] 21 until [I was] 27. I don’t think I was home for more than a week,” Barron says.
Spin Doctors 30th anniversary and solo album
The original members of the Spin are together, celebrating their 30th anniversary and playing tour dates this year. Barron also has a solo album he’s proud of called Angels and One-Armed Jugglers, which he’s doing solo dates for.
“It’s critically the best-received album I’ve ever done. I definitely think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “I lost my voice right before I made it, and when my voice came back, I just pulled out all the stops and dug really deep and I just made the album of a lifetime.”
For more information visit thechrisbarron.com
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