
Spin Doctors Still Rocking and Rolling with New Album and Bassist
Season 2024 Episode 18 | 26m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
Camden County Free Summer Concerts, Spin Doctors, Downsizing Designer & More!
Next on You Oughta Know, check out Camden County’s free Summer Park Concert series. Meet the Spin Doctors and hear what they’ve been up to in the studio. Find out how to live more with less with the “Downsizing Designer.” Discover clues to the past from a famous shipwreck. Visit a local mushroom farm that harvests diverse varieties year-round. See Patrick Stoner’s Flicks featuring Kevin Costner.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
You Oughta Know is a local public television program presented by WHYY

Spin Doctors Still Rocking and Rolling with New Album and Bassist
Season 2024 Episode 18 | 26m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
Next on You Oughta Know, check out Camden County’s free Summer Park Concert series. Meet the Spin Doctors and hear what they’ve been up to in the studio. Find out how to live more with less with the “Downsizing Designer.” Discover clues to the past from a famous shipwreck. Visit a local mushroom farm that harvests diverse varieties year-round. See Patrick Stoner’s Flicks featuring Kevin Costner.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(upbeat music) - Next on "You Oughta Know," We learn how this family operated farm keeps producing a variety of mushrooms year 'round.
Plus, the remnants of a British warship that sank off the coast of Delaware helps provide answers.
And their nineties hits kept us grooving.
Find out what the Spin Doctors are up to.
(upbeat music) Welcome to "You Oughta Know," I'm Shirley Min.
Camden County New Jersey is well-known for its beautiful parks and waterways, which are enjoyed by residents all year.
Each summer the commissioners gear up to present a full musical lineup for their free concert series at various venues.
Here's what's on tap this year.
- Welcome, Commissioner Al Dyer.
Come on up out, Al.
(audience laughing) - Good evening, everyone.
Good evening.
Welcome to Jack Curtis Stadium.
We have a great show lined up for you tonight.
(upbeat music) There's over 2,700 acres of parks that we use in Camden County, especially here for our venues.
You can expect this year as every other summer, the diverse bands, the different genres of music, and just the excitement of people coming to a free venue to get a great acoustic sound from great bands.
We're here at Cooper River, which is a great ambiance for a great outing.
We have the Dell in Haddon Heights, which is a great, great venue.
And then we have the Rolling Trainer stage in Wiggins Park in Camden.
(rock music) - [Al] We have to make sure that these venues are nice and the green spaces are utilized.
And I think one of the things that we make sure that it's not just the band, it's a great experience.
You're coming out here, the grass is cut, everything is looking nice and we just want people to have a good family experience with our summer concert series.
It's a free concert for folks.
It's gonna be safe and people just having fun and we do a great job with these concerts and it's great for us to be able to have this for residents in Camden County, for surrounding neighbors to (indistinct) states, yes.
(rock music) - All four members of the Spin Doctors have lived in New Jersey at one time or another.
Today, they are rocking harder than ever with brand new songs and a new bass player.
We caught up with them recently during their performance at the Camden County Summer Concert series.
(upbeat rock music) - Hey, I am Aaron Comess and I play drums.
- Hi, I'm Jack Daley and I play bass.
- Hi, I'm Eric Schenkman and I play electric guitar.
- Hi, I am Chris Barron and I sing.
- [All] We Are The Spin Spin Doctors and "You Oughta Know."
♪ Little Miss, Little Miss, Little Miss Can't Be Wrong ♪ - [Shirley] The Spin Doctors' First Studio album, "Pocket Full of Kryptonite" was released in 1991 and certified five times platinum, selling over six million copies worldwide.
It remained on Billboard's Pop Chart for 115 weeks.
This album includes the American Rock band's Mega Hits, "Two Princes" and "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong."
♪ If you'd like to call me baby ♪ ♪ Just go ahead ♪ ♪ And if you'd like to tell me maybe ♪ ♪ Just go ahead ♪ - I always say like when you're young, you like learn to rock and you get older and you learn to roll.
You learn to kind of sit down in the song and kind of pull back a little bit and play with more like authority.
- You know, you go through cycles as a band.
I think we've, you know, different moments in our history, but I feel like now we're all better musicians than we were then.
You know, we're sort of more mature and we don't let the little things get to us anymore.
So I think we get along a lot better.
We've become good friends through this experience.
- Jack Daley on the base, Jack Daley on the base.
- [Shirley] Jack Daley, world class bassist, is the latest edition to this legendary ensemble.
- Jack's an incredible bass player and he's got a huge catalog of records and discography of people he is played with from Bruce Springsteen to Lenny Kravitz to Little Steven to Beyonce so we're lucky to have him.
He's one of the best out there.
The thing that's so cool about Jack, he brings his own unique thing to the band, but you come hear the band and it's like, we sound like Spin Doctors with Jack.
It's great.
(upbeat rock music) - We have like kind of a combination of personalities too.
Eric and I, we have a lot of trash in our playing and we make mistakes, but they're good mistake.
And then these guys are just like super on top of it and like laying everything down.
- A lot of the best rock bands, the rhythm section's rock solid and the rest of the guys are just sort of floating around.
(band laughing) It's sort of hit or miss, but it works.
- Slipping and sliding and you know.
Hey!
♪ Boom box, boom box ♪ ♪ Baby boom, boom ♪ ♪ My baby had a boom box back in 1983 ♪ ♪ And if I asked her nicely ♪ ♪ She would loan her box to me ♪ - [Shirley] The band is currently on tour across the US and Canada in support of their brand new album, which is set to be released by year's end.
♪ She produced a funky sound ♪ ♪ Boom box, boom boom ♪ ♪ And it played a funky tune ♪ - Making this new record was really, really great.
We were out in Asbury Park at Jack's Studio.
Jack's Studio's just really awesome.
When we first got together, Aaron was like, we should do songs with different tempos, different rhythms and different like chordal colors, you know, like songs that are happy and sad, different emotional colors and we was like, yeah, that's such a great way of putting it so we're not boring.
♪ I can tell a Bible from a bottle of rye ♪ ♪ I can tell a (indistinct) from the mud in your eye ♪ - We kind of said out loud like let's write some songs.
- We did like a song a day at Jack's Studio for like, right?
- Yeah, about two weeks, right?
- We're sort of in this jam band world, but I have always felt like we were a lot more song-oriented.
(rock music) ♪ Munching leaves like a caterpillar ♪ ♪ You want King Kong but you got Godzilla ♪ - Especially with a band like us that have been together 35 years, having a creative burst, it's timing.
You know, the atmosphere at Jack Studio was amazing.
He brought this freshness to the band and incredibly easy and great to work with so it was just fun, you know?
- Kind of the closest vibe to kryptonite like that we've had.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
♪ I got a pocket full of kryptonite ♪ ♪ I got a pocket full of kryptonite ♪ - And the vibe was just right, you know, and it was just like pretty, it was just super easy and fun and effortless and fresh outside of being able to write music or write lyrics or collaborate is I think being all at the same time into it together, you know?
- It's gotta be vibing, especially when it hits the tape, you know?
- Yeah.
♪ Hey, ho, you don't love me anymore ♪ ♪ She don't love me anymore, anymore ♪ ♪ She don't love me ♪ (audience cheering) - [Chris] Thank you!
- My guest today took a long hard look at her life and what she found led her in a new direction.
Here now is author, speaker, and interior designer, Rita Wilkins, known to many as "The Downsizing Designer."
Rita, welcome to "You Oughta Know."
- Thank you.
- [Shirley] Thank you for being here.
- Glad to be here.
- Let's talk about this "Downsizing Designer" title.
What does that mean?
- So it's a title I never knew I would have.
I'm an interior designer for 40 years.
I've had a company and it was only after I downsized eight years ago, I downsized by 95%.
I gave away 95% of my stuff and I now live with 5% of what I once owned and I've never been happier.
And the downsizing designer moniker was one that I didn't initially embrace, but I thought, wow, so many people are asking like, "How do you downsize?"
They saw that I had downsized by so much and was so much happier, I was free.
And that's when I started accepting that and now it's become a national brand and I speak to people all over the country about downsizing, decluttering their lives, living a simpler life with less.
- How did you make this transition from interior designer to downsizing designer and what was the impetus for that transition?
- Okay, eight years ago, my younger son was in the Peace Corps.
He was serving in Senegal, West Africa and invited me to come and I went to visit him for a month in his tiny little hut.
And I had never experienced people who have nothing, but they were happy.
And on arrival, the village elder handed me a live chicken and I'd never held a live chicken before, but I knew how valuable that little chicken was to them.
And that evening, that little chicken sat on a pile of grains and my son's African mother pushed the better parts of the chicken towards my son and myself.
And that moment changed my life because I realized these people have nothing but they're happy and they're generous.
And I'm thinking her kitchen table is the ground.
My kitchen table back home in my 5,000 square foot designer home sat 16 people.
And it wasn't a happy home necessarily.
This was happy.
And all I knew is that's what I wanted.
That simple joy-filled life with less.
And so when I went back home, I walked room by room in my house and it was like the lights went out for me.
Nothing meant anything to me anymore.
It was just stuff.
And that was such a revelation to me.
So at that moment in time I said, you know, something's happened here.
What do I really want?
I wanted that simple life.
How do I get it?
And that meant I had to declutter, downsize my life.
It took one year to downsize from 5,000 square feet to 867 square feet.
- Wow.
- And I gave away 95% of my stuff to people who wanted it or needed it.
And frankly, I've never been happier.
- So your perspective shifted, but how did you even get started?
- Yeah, well, I thought I could do this all by myself 'cause I'm a designer and we do big projects and big buildings.
Well, for one month I did try to do it by myself.
And guess what?
I cried a lot.
(both laughed) And I was so overwhelmed just like anyone else starting out this project.
And so all I did was I called my two sisters one day and I said, "Please help me."
They said, "We'll be right there."
So they live in Rhode Island, they came down for the weekend and that was the magic is that you get a team.
And also I had a vision.
My vision was I wanted that simple life.
And as a designer, we do big projects.
So, okay, well it's just this by this by this.
It was having a plan.
But what I was missing was a team, a team that I could work with, a team that I could laugh with, cry with, whatever.
And my sister certainly understood.
So my entire family, at one point or other over the course of the year came down to help me.
And it was very cathartic, but I had a little rule.
And that rule was we're only gonna work for four hours and we're gonna work on that one corner of my basement and then after that four hours, we're gonna go have fun.
- Oh, I love that.
- So it was not all about work, but it was- - It's approachable.
- Oh my goodness.
It was manageable.
Correct.
- Hmm hmm, hmm hmm.
When you're working with clients, do they have a team they work with, with you?
And what questions are you asking to kind of get that ball rolling?
- Okay, so we do a certain amount of downsizing directly with clients, but most of our work is done nationally.
And I have over 800 blogs, 800 videos on YouTube.
It's about how to downsize, how to declutter.
And then I do a lot of speaking and writing.
And when I'm working one-on-one with a client, number one, we have a plan.
Number two, we talk about, you know, what do you wanna accomplish?
Let's say in this particular room today, what do you wanna accomplish?
And so we have a plan and then just, it's really drawer by drawer, shelf by shelf.
And it's a matter of sorting.
So you know, this one is trash, this one is to donate and this one I'm going to keep.
And so it is a methodology and it is a process.
- And I think probably for anyone looking to declutter, maybe start with something small.
- [Rita] Yeah.
- Like a junk drawer.
- For sure.
For sure.
- Okay, and your clients, the feedback has been largely positive?
- Oh my goodness.
So many of them will say, "Why didn't I do this sooner?"
Other feedback is, "I have a whole new life.
I had no idea that I had so much stuff."
There's a certain amount of remorse maybe that I collected so much stuff.
And you know, I get that from people.
But on the other hand, what's done is done and now, look forward.
- I love it.
Rita, your book is called "Downsize Your Life, Upgrade Your Lifestyle," and it's filled with lots of insights.
Thank you for being here to share some of them.
- Thank you.
Thank you.
- With us today.
You can learn more about Rita and pick up her book on her website.
This next story is about an historic relic, the H.M.S deBraak.
The famous British warship sank off the Delaware coast more than 200 years ago and left behind clues to life aboard the ship.
(majestic music) - History is alive in Lewis, Delaware.
In Lewis's 300 years of history, there's been over 300 shipwrecks off of our coast.
We are still, to this day, one of the most dangerous navigable waterways in the country, with water known as underwater over falls.
They're fast moving water where the current picks up.
We have the shoals, the shears, the shifting sandbars.
But one of the most famous shipwrecks were indeed treasure as we think of it, has really been found is a colonial period shipwreck, the Faithful Steward.
And it was a story of tragedy.
Some of the first Irish immigrants were coming across, they were caught in a storm.
They were bringing their livelihood and records shows that a estimated 300 barrels of Irish hopper pennies went overboard through the early 1900s, what was called Coin Beach, where you could find those coins, that treasure.
Around that same period of time, one of the most famous wrecks and legends in Lewis is the H.M.S deBraak.
A sudden Gale turned the ship and more than half of the crew were killed, including its captain.
By visiting the Zwaanendael Museum, is some of the true treasure, the archeological finds that were discovered and today are housed in that state museum.
(riveting music) - The Zwaanendael Museum was built by the state of Delaware in 1931 to commemorate the first permanent European settlement that came to the state in 1631.
And that was the Dutch colony, Zwaanendael, who are here to establish a whaling and trading port.
We opened to the public in 1931 as a museum with exhibits on Lewis and Delaware history and that is still what we have on display today.
(stately music) One of our most popular exhibits currently in the museum is on the H.M.S deBraak.
The H.M.S deBraak was a British Sloop of War that sank off the coast of Lewis in 1798.
The deBraak was part of a merchant convoy so it had traveled from England to the rendezvous point here off the coast of Cape Henlopen.
While the deBraak came across the Atlantic, they had captured a Spanish merchant ship, the Xavier, with copper and cocoa on board.
The deBraak unfortunately sank off the Delaware coast within view of the town of Lewis.
But what resulted from that sinking was a rumor that the deBraak had sunk with thousands of dollars of Spanish gold on board.
That rumor essentially kicks off almost 200 years of salvage attempts until finally in 1984, a salvage company successfully located the deBraak using sonar technology.
They then spent the next two years essentially vacuuming the ocean floor, pulling everything they could up from the deBraak in hopes of identifying and finding this legendary gold.
But what they did find was something of huge historic value.
They found everything from the plates that the British sailors were eating off of to personal items, their shoes, their rings, their clothing fragments.
Essentially the deBraak collection is one of the most complete examples of life onboard a British ship in the 18th century.
Eventually the entire collection was turned over to the state of Delaware's Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs to care for.
The historic value of that collection cannot be overstated.
(stately music) - You often very much like to tell folks that when you come to Lewis, remember we're not just a town with a beach, we're a town with history that happens to have a beach.
(stately music) - Today, we're introducing you to a new series from the producer of "Check, Please!
Philly."
Over the next few weeks, Gianna Kelliher gives us an intimate look at local farmers and food producers from our area.
To Leonardville, Pennsylvania we go to meet the family behind Primordial Mushroom Farm.
- I'm Jesse Tobin and I'm one of the two partners of Primordial Mushroom Farm.
- I'm Matthew Sicher, I'm one of the two partners of Primordial Mushroom Farm.
- We moved here in 2010 and then we, after that year sort of spent it dreaming and thought, okay, I guess we're gonna do this.
So 2011, we started building, we had a legit barn raising.
We went live in officially January 1st, 2012.
I don't know when we harvested our first mushroom, but it was pretty close and it's been quite a ride since then.
- So we grow currently, what?
13 varieties, I guess.
The thing that we often tell people at market again and again is don't get yourself intimidated.
Don't think you have to do anything terribly extravagant.
Just let them stand out on their own, saute butter, garlic, salt to taste and like go from there.
But leave it simple.
And they all really do have interesting flavor, texture, aroma on their own.
The way that I'll often address it is, you know, I'll often go over our pioppino, maitake, shitake, generally as, I often phrase it as red meats, red wines.
You can put it in a red sauce with pasta and it won't disappear.
Then I'll reference like our oyster, our gray oyster, yellow oyster, black pearl, trumpet mushroom, to my palate I think of it as like poultry, fish, cream sauce pasta, scrambled eggs, omelets, like lighter fair, right?
We grow golden enoki which are long and stringy.
Think like noodle dishes, like ramen style dishes, you know, texture like a noodle and good in noodle dishes.
And lion's mane, what I think is like a magic combo with seafood in general.
You can shred them like a faux crab cake texture.
You can do kind of faux fish tacos, kind of feel.
And then speaking of all the interesting ways of applying, for instance lion's mane, that's one of the things that I think is really cool about the whole mushroom kingdom, the fungal kingdom and mushrooms in general is like you can do just such fascinating fun like faux meats as it were.
You can do, and I think they can add something to a meal that no other food group can.
The pungency of the umami is just like earthiness to a dish that I think nothing else can touch.
Our whole, all the cultivated varieties of mushrooms that we have, they're all indoor cultivated.
So a brief whirlwind tour of indoor mushroom cultivation 'cause it's really quite different from other types of food production.
There's interesting overlap I think with breweries, interesting overlap with cheese making, with wine making, this kind of thing.
So that said, all the varieties we grow are on sterilized sawdust, oak or poplar sawdust are two that we primarily use and then they're mixed with other amendments, mixed with soybean hulls or wheat brand.
We add limestone powder to bring it to the right pH neutral, get it to the right moisture content.
From there we run it through a big mixer, get it to be uniformly mixed, uniform moisture content, put it in autoclavable bags.
Those autoclavable bags, we then load onto racks that go into a big pressure vessel we have, think like a giant pressure cooker.
Steam sterilize the substrate, cool it down, then at that point we cool it down under laboratory conditions.
So 0.3 micron HEPA filtration, positive pressurization.
Then we offload it into our laboratory, cools down in sterile condition and then we inoculate it the next day and we inoculate with what's called the spawn.
So a spawn is like the mushroom mycelium sort of kind of the mushroom roots as it were.
So we have two little laboratories on site.
One for cloning and petri and culture work.
One for what we call bulk inoculation where we're inoculate in the grow bags.
After we inoculate in the laboratory, then we move them from there up to our incubation buildings.
They incubate at stable warm temperatures in low light levels for X amount of weeks, dependent on variety to get them all to transition from mycelium growth phase or colonization phase to mushroom growing or fruit body formation phase.
And then we harvest.
Then from there we pack customer orders for restaurants, small groceries, CSAs, and distribute from there.
Every 52 weeks a year, we are at farmer's markets and then we sell to a number of restaurants in Philadelphia, little Nona's and Barbuzzo, for years and years.
We've been selling to Suraya for years and to Kalaya for years as well.
Northside provisions, pandemic entry, you know, picking it up, you know, we've been doing this for 13 years so we lose track of a chef contact, pick it up again, lose track of a purchaser contact, pick it up again.
But we're able to provide consistently, which is part of the benefit of growing indoors year round.
And I think, you know, there's something ephemeral and fleeting about mushrooms.
Our business name is Primordial Mushroom Farm because primordial is the tiniest beginning growth of what will become the mushroom, right?
And it's kind of a philosophical stance, right?
Like this is the primordial, this is like maximum potential energy.
If we're paying attention, if we're attentive and focused and working hard, it can become abundance.
If not, it's expensive compost.
And that's a lot of up to us and how focused and how capable we can become.
(bright music) - Kevin Costner sits down with Patrick Stoner to talk about his latest project "Horizon, An American Saga."
(dramatic music) (objects banging) (child screaming) (dramatic music) - [Hayes] Get 'em outta here!
- Get in, quick.
Quick.
- [Hayes] Come on.
- It's all right, I'm gonna be with dad.
- No, no, no!
(dramatic music) - [Patrick] Suppose you were a chef and you created a four course dinner and everybody ate the appetizer and said, "That's not enough," went home or you wrote a book and after the first chapter, people just put it down.
That's what happened with the film "Horizon" with Kevin Costner putting $38 million of his own money into it.
I talked to him about it.
- I have funded a majority of it.
- I kind of suspected that you had and the distribution then, did you run into any problems?
- Warner Brothers has come into distribute.
- It's an awful lot that you... Did the conversations go on a while or were they on board pretty soon?
- They weren't on board in the beginning, but they really became great partners to distribute the movie.
But now, yeah, this is, I've put almost everything I have into this.
This is as much a novel as it is a saga, a novel is, there's that hundred pages that gets you established.
Sometimes you don't like 'em.
Then you say all of a sudden, "Oh!".
It really clicked in after those first hundred pages.
Well, why do you think it clicked in?
'Cause those first hundred pages were there.
- You're quite right.
And what can very often happen in a film is they want to get right to the grabby action.
They want to get right to the something and the thing I like about your character, of course, is this is somebody that we're pretty darn well convinced can handle himself in any situation.
- But he can be spooked by this character that has just murdered someone, been humiliated by his brother, has basically a blood lust.
And is chosen to bother me.
- [Patrick] That particular- - [Kevin] He's a wonderful actor.
His performance in seven or eight scenes is Oscar worthy.
- Yeah, I bought it.
I'd be terrified of this guy.
Not quite sure what he's doing, but he clearly is capable of doing anything.
- Oh no, he's bullied a hundred men.
It just was the wrong guy.
- You also have in the background and several shots, hail John Ford.
- [Kevin] I do a little nod to John Ford and two, I do a little nod to Lawrence Kasdan, and- - [Patrick] Silverado.
- And also James Harrison, the writer.
So I give a little nod to the Victor McLaughlin characters, you know, just because they were meaningful to me.
I wasn't looking to copy anything, but it's my own nod to who they were, what John Ford was to me.
- Kevin, thank you so much.
- You're welcome.
- And that's our show!
Thanks so much for spending your time with us.
We hope you come back next week.
Goodnight, everyone.
(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)
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