DOC'S WHITE MORE 9-TO-5 THAN TIE-DYE July 16, 1993 - Pittsburgh Post Gazette by Ed Masley The HORDE was more like a laid-back, wishy-washy, easy kind of thing, you know what I mean?" Spin Doctor Mark White is comparing this year's MTV Alternative Nation tour to the summer of HORDE, a gathering of the tribes that brought his band, Blues Traveler, Phish and Widespread Panic to a nation of Nouveau Deadheads looking to trance. "All you gotta do is watch the people who are in the audience, and they usually do those little twirl dances," White says. "And this tour, judging from the other two bands, is gonna be more hard-hitting, I bet." Though he remains friends with the other HORDE bands and even jams on off nights with Blues Traveler John Popper, White thinks seven or eight straight hours of solo-happy groove rock may have been a bit much for some folks to take. "I like jamming, but I don't like listening to it," he says. "People need something to relate to, and they can relate to a song more than people jamming and stuff." Song-oriented bands like Screaming Trees and Soul Asylum may be more to White's liking, but some young twirlers aren't about to swallow. "I'm sure some people are pissed off, but I'm sure those people won't be at the show," he says, "which will be great 'cause then I won't have to hear anybody complain." The oldest, most conservative Spin Doctor, White signed on a few months after the group's first frat gig, having recently quit Spade, a Fishbone-esque funk outfit which at one time also included the fast-talking bassist's current bandmate, drummer Aaron Comess. "When I got into that band, I had some hope because we were definitely great," White says. "And then we had an audition and Aaron came down, and me and Aaron completely changed the sound of that band." Together again in the Spin Doctors, the White-Comess rhythm section kicks out a funkier groove than any other retro-jam band. In fact, if it weren't for Chris Barron's fashion sense and trippy between-song banter, it would be hard to imagine the band making much of a splash in hippie circles. Their breakthrough single, "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong," sounds more like Huey Lewis doing a Steve Miller song than anything remotely psychedelic. White, for his part, doesn't worry too much about losing the tie-dye vote. "I'm not a hippie," he says. "I never ever lay out in the meadow in Central Park unless there's a blanket." A corporate-minded computer enthusiast, White wears his influences on his bass - that's where he keeps his Apple sticker. He said he couldn't get mad at Coca-Cola "'cause to me it's not a huge thing run by aliens, it's just a business run by people," he says. "And if I wanted a can of Coke, I'm not gonna go out there and make my own Coke, so I pay somebody else to make it for me." Even the Spin Doctors are a corporation these days, says White, who's now mapping out his own computer company from a midtown apartment. He can't live in the Village, he says, because "it's mostly artists and vagabonds and bohemians and that kind of stuff. "My building is all 9-to-5 people," he says. "I could never live around artists - they're too noisy and they're too sloppy." One corporation White definitely has no problem with is Sony, the label that took nearly a year to break the Doctors' debut studio effort, "Pocket Full of Kryptonite," prompting speculation that maybe they weren't trying very hard. "People always complain about their record company, but a lot of times it's the artist," he says. "If you have a record out and it doesn't sell, chances are it's just a bad record."