Barnabas Monkeypants

(I’m trying something new. This post has nothing to do with Henry, our life with Henry, funny noises coming out of Henry, or anything parent-y. So, if you’re not interested in my life at all — and who can blame you, really — stop reading here and come back Tuesday where there will be fun baby-related things. There is a Henry picture at the end, so you’ve got that.)

In my life, I’ve met my fair share of famous characters. (By famous, I mean anyone who is known by at least 25,000 people.) Many of them have been in the comic book field (although a lot of the more famous people there are at the low end of that number), but I’ve shaken hands with and had short conversations with authors, athletes, and musicians.

For example, I once tried to tell a joke to the ex-Senator and basketball player Bill Bradley. It went something like this: I was working at a Borders store in Princeton when we got a call that the Senator (who was at the time considering a run for the presidency) was in the area and was going to stop in and autograph his recently published book. He arrived at the store, flanked by a couple of Secret Service agents, sat down at a table where copies of his book were waiting for him, and started to sign. I went up to him, looked at him very seriously, and said, “Sir, if you’re going to write in those books, you’re going to have to pay for them.” He got this very concerned look on his face, began stuttering that he was the author, that he was Bill Bradley. I smiled at him, revealing the joke, but he continued to try and explain what he was doing. No sense of humor that Bradley.

He never did run, and if he had, I wouldn’t have voted for him.

Anyway, the most famous person I’ve ever met — the person who is most well known throughout the world — is someone who was, at one time, also one of the most annoying. Who is this man?

Let me go back a ways to the spring of 1992. School had finished up for the year, and I moved back home for what was the last time. I was working at the local comic book store, and, because I was a glutton for punishment, I would listen to the local rock station, WZZO. (I later became friendly with their afternoon drive disc jockey, Blake Dannen [not his real name]. But I digress.)

Anyway, one of the big songs of that summer was the Spin Doctor’s annoyingly catchy “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” If you’re between 30 and 40, you’ve likely heard this tune about seven million times, and, if you’re anything like me, you despise it. (Even more, you despise their more-popular follow-up, “Two Princes”. That song actually makes me bleed out of my ears.)

Of course, I know now how bad a song that was, but the first three, four, or five (okay ten) times I heard it, I thought, “Huh, this is catchy. It’s got a nice hook.” But then, after listen number eleven, it dawned on me: this is just not a good song at all. Of course, before realizing this, I had made the terrible decision to actually purchase their debut CD (Pocket Full of Kryptonite) and give it to my then girlfriend. (Is it surprising at all that she broke up with me two weeks later?)

It seems that the summer of ’92 was owned by the Spin Doctors. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing one of their songs, and that album ended up selling more than 5 million copies. (Most, I assume, have found their way into the sale bins of used CD stores.)

Their second album, Turn It Upside Down, came out in 1994, but, thankfully, by that time I was so entrenched in uber-hip indie music that I missed it completely. (It sold only 2 million copies. Only.) Their third record, though, sold a measly 50,000 copies (a great number if you’re a band on the rise; a terrible number when you consider what they once sold), and they briefly disbanded and the various members went their own way.

How do I know all about this, you ask, if this is a band I hate so much? Well, because, one Saturday evening in the spring of 1998, I had dinner with (a tasty meatball sandwich) and watched perform in a small cafe in Clinton, New Jersey, in front of twelve people, Chris Barron, the Spin Doctors’ lead singer. At the time, I was working at a small, university-based publisher where my fellow associate editor was high school friends with Barron (as well as the lead singer of another band I don’t much care for, Blues Traveler).

Barron played for about 90 minutes, much of it from his recent solo album that nobody there knew existed. The crowd (if you could call it that) did get into it when he played some of those Spin Doctor hits, but then he quickly went into some morose tune about lost love that was not catchy nor ended up on the radio 18 billion times.

Here’s the thing: he was a really nice guy, if a little ungrounded. He was loaded (selling many millions of records meant that he was not hurting for cash), living in New York City, and and he told us he would spend his days walking around the city, sitting around cafes and people watch. He had stopped writing songs and the little show in Clinton, New Jersey, was the only one he would play that year. He even shaved his scraggly beard and cut his hair (if you know the band, you can picture him in your head), but quickly regrew them once people stopped recognizing him without them.

After the show was over, Chris, my co-worker, and I all said our goodbyes, and I drove back home. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Chris Barron was the most famous person that I’ve ever met. I mean, millions of people around the world knew who he was, knew his work, could sing his songs. Sure, most of them didn’t know his name (he was, I’m sure, that scraggly looking guy from that Two Princes band), but he was known.

And after this realization, I became a little sad. He had no handlers. No bodyguards. Nobody tried to kiss him or steal his hankerchief (ala Elvis).

Because I have a huge ego, I’d like to be famous some day. (For what, I have no clue.) I wonder if I’ll be as normal as the Spin Doctors guy. Just with better grooming.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Off Topic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.