Live Review: Gin Blossoms and Blues Traveler w/ Spin Doctors @ Wolf Trap –8/11/26
There are concerts that remind you of a particular period in your life, and then there are concerts that seem to reconstruct it around you.
For anyone whose college years overlapped with the early 1990s, Tuesday night’s gathering of Gin Blossoms, Blues Traveler, and Spin Doctors at Wolf Trap’s Filene Center offered plenty of opportunities for the latter. These were bands whose songs once seemed unavoidable, pouring from dorm-room stereos, college bars, car radios, and MTV at roughly the same moment alternative rock was becoming mainstream enough that nobody quite knew what “alternative” was supposed to mean anymore.
But the most satisfying thing about this three-band bill was that it did not feel like three groups arriving separately to cash the same nostalgia check. The connections between them run much deeper than a shared decade, and over the course of the evening those relationships became part of the performance itself.
