A snapping turtle is possibly alive in Rye today, thanks to a seven-year-old boy named Chris Barron Gross, who grew up to be the front man of the Grammy-nominated rock group The Spin Doctors.
Barron’s first brush with fame, though, came years earlier when he was bouncing a tennis ball with his friend Steven Shleppe outside his home at 8 Loewen Court in Rye. The ball ricocheted off a manhole cover and disappeared down a storm drain. Steven shrugged and went home for dinner. Chris, determined to get his ball back, peered into the darkness.
“As my eyes adjust, the whole bottom of the sewer kind of moves and I’m like, ‘what is that?’” Barron recalled. “I look again and it’s a giant snapping turtle. I figure it’s hungry. My grandparents were visiting, and they’d given me a plastic bowling set and some sneakers, so I go home, [get them,] and drop them in the sewer for the turtle to eat.”
When he later told his mom what he’d done, she marched him outside in his pajamas to prove the turtle was real. Within minutes — at least, as it plays in his memory — the head naturalist from the Rye Nature Center arrived, joined by men in hazmat suits.
“They pulled this snapping turtle out of the sewer, and by now it’s dark out,” Barron said. “I remember riding with the turtle in the back of the Nature Center guy’s station wagon — and then the newspaper showed up!”
Barron was on the front page of the Rye newspaper with the headline: “Boy Finds Turtle in Sewer.”
“The guy from the Nature Center’s holding the turtle, and to me it was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle,” said Barron, who at the time attended Midland School. “When you’re seven and on the front page of the town paper, you’re famous. No wonder I ended up being a lead singer — I got my head turned around at a very young age!”
Barron, now 57, is making news these days for other reasons. In April The Spin Doctors released their first full album in a decade. He describes it as a joyful, spontaneous project full of camaraderie born of the pandemic.
“After everything the world went through, it just felt good to be in a room together making music again,” he said.
With Barron on vocals, the band features drummer Aaron Comess, guitarist Eric Schenkman, and bassist Jack Daley. They recorded the album at Daley’s studio in Asbury Park with engineer Roman Klun.
The Spin Doctors broke through in 1991 with the album “Pocket Full of Kryptonite,” featuring “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong,” written by Barron and Schenkman, hits that peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at number seven and number 17. The band has five studio albums, four live albums and several compilations. Barron has also done solo shows and is known for performances that combine music and storytelling.
That’s not surprising considering Barron had a nearly endless supply of stories from his childhood in Rye where he and his younger brother were just two kids living in a simpler time.
“I don’t know if it was because it was the ’70s or because it was Rye,” he said, “but we’d just ride our bikes around, go to the beach — it was totally chill. There was a cobbler where my dad brought his shoes, and I used to stop in every morning. He’d be speaking Russian, I’d be speaking English, but we’d have a little visit. I guess even as a kid I was a front man — I’ve always liked people.”
He even remembers teaming up with his second grade buddy Marcus for the annual Halloween Window Painting Contest.
“Marcus was an amazing kid — he had this fully realized personality and was good at things like art, and I wasn’t. I tried to paint a bat, but I totally [messed] it up — it was just a blob — but then he turned it into an acorn. The acorn was way too big, but whatever…it worked.”
The next day, Marcus’s family moved to Switzerland. When the winners were announced, the bat-turned-acorn mural took first prize.
In 1977, Barron’s father took a job in Australia, and the family relocated for three years before returning to the U.S. and settling in Princeton, N. J., where Barron wrote some of the songs that would become his future band’s biggest hits. But first Barron spent several teenage summers back in Rye, visiting his mother’s friends and rediscovering the familiar streets, the beach, and Playland (to which he brought his friend from New Jersey, John Popper, the future lead singer of Blues Traveler).
“One summer I worked at the American Yacht Club, but one summer I didn’t really have anything to do. I just hung out at the beach all day alone, writing in my notebooks, reading “Shōgun” and other James Clavell sagas, eating boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate-chip cookies, and not gaining any weight. It was great,” he said. “During the day I’d be at the beach, and at night I’d hang out with my friend Brian Sullivan and his crew. You don’t realize what you have when you’re a kid like that — that summer was endless and peaceful.”
His career seems endless, too. Of his new album, he said, “We thought we were just cutting demos, but the vibe was so good, we realized, this is the record. You can really hear the fun we were having — a lot of those takes are literally the first or second time we ever played the song.”
The title “Face Full of Cake” comes from a lyric in the song “Double Parked:” “I took off my shoes and stepped on a rake / Foot on the brake and a face full of cake.” The line “made us laugh — it felt perfectly Spin Doctors,” Barron said.
The band has been touring with the new record, including a summer run with his old friend Popper and Blues Traveler and Gin Blossoms, and experimenting with covers. Their take on Prince’s “Purple Rain” has already racked up more than two million views online.
“I never wanted to sing that song because it’s sacred,” Barron said. “But it turned into something really emotional.” And different. “We’ve always been old-school — handmade music, played live. Now we really are old school,” he added with a laugh. “But that connection — seeing all these young people light up at the shows — that’s what it’s all about.”
These days, Barron lives in New York City with his wife, Broadway actress Lindsay Nicole Chambers. He has a 26-year-old daughter who is a visual artist.
As for the snapping turtle, it was released into the wild.
“Snapping turtles live, like, 80 or 120 years — so yeah, that dude might still be out there somewhere,” Barron said with a laugh.
