Photos and Review by Jeff Palmucci
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a 6:00 p.m. rock show: usually the opener plays to a half-empty room and a lot of people are still stuck in traffic. That is not what happened at Leader Bank Pavilion last Friday. By the second Spin Doctor’s song, the tent was packed, telling you something about how this particular triple bill is being received.
The date was the Boston stop on the Blues Traveler / Gin Blossoms co-headlining summer tour, with Spin Doctors opening — a 35-date run that started July 6 in Grand Junction, Colorado and wraps September 19 in Traverse City, Michigan. It’s the second year of this package; the 2026 leg was routed specifically to hit the cities the 2025 run missed, Boston among them (Consequence).
Spin Doctors
Fifty-five minutes is not a lot of time, and Spin Doctors spent most of it on Pocket Full of Kryptonite — “What Time Is It?”, “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues,” “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong,” “Two Princes” (setlist.fm). No complaints there. “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” got the crowd going early, and by “Two Princes” the whole tent was singing it back at them, which is roughly what you’d expect from a song that’s been in constant rotation on Boston radio for three decades.
They did make room for two songs off Face Full of Cake, last year’s album and their first in twelve years — “Still a Gorilla” and “She Stands Alone.”
The other surprise was a Prince cover — “Purple Rain,” dropped in right after “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” And they closed with “Hard to Exist” joined by Blues Traveler, with John Popper’s harmonica doing the heavy lifting. Per setlist.fm that was a tour debut for the song, so Boston got something the earlier stops didn’t.
Blues Traveler
Popper opened the harmonica showcase immediately after, working “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” into the second slot — the Charlie Daniels fiddle part played on harmonica, which is exactly the kind of stunt that either falls flat or brings the house down. It brought the house down.
“Run-Around” came third and got the crowd on its feet, which is fair enough: it’s the song that won the band a Grammy in 1996 for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group and became one of the longest-charting singles in Billboard history (Wikipedia). From there the set ran through “Funky Bitch,” “But Anyway,” “Regarding Steven” and “Carolina Blues” before closing on “Hook” (setlist.fm).
An honest note: eight songs in sixty-five minutes means a lot of jamming, and there was a stretch in the middle where it felt like more than the material needed. Your mileage will vary — this is a band with deep roots in the jam circuit and a crowd that partly showed up for exactly that. Whatever the jams were doing, the songs still had the room.
Gin Blossoms
The headline slot went to Gin Blossoms, and they took the longest set of the night — 75 minutes, walking on to DEVO’s “Uncontrollable Urge” over the PA (setlist.fm).
They opened with “Follow You Down” rather than saving it, then went deep early: “Hold Me Down,” “Learning the Hard Way” and “Mrs. Rita” before “Lost Horizons.” The back half was the run everyone came for — “Found Out About You,” “Allison Road,” “Hey Jealousy,” “Til I Hear It From You” — with “29” and a cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” as the encore.
Blues Traveler’s Ben Wilson came back out to play on “Hands Are Tied,” so the cross-pollination ran both directions on this bill. And “Til I Hear It From You,” the set’s closing punch, isn’t actually from a Gin Blossoms album — it was written for the Empire Records soundtrack in 1995 by Jesse Valenzuela and Robin Wilson with Marshall Crenshaw, and it went to No. 11 on the Hot 100, the band’s biggest pop hit (Wikipedia).
Wilson has been candid about why a band three decades in keeps doing this. “I really enjoy the reciprocal energy between myself and the audience,” he told The Pop Break earlier this month, framing the appeal as the songs having been absorbed into other people’s lives (The Pop Break). On a Friday night in a full 5,000-seat shed on the harbor, that’s not a hard case to make.