GRUNGE DIES, HOOTIE LIVES
THE RISE, FALL AND RETURN OF HOOTIE & THE BLOWFISH
Five years ago, The LA Weekly published a piece titled “10 Reasons Why 1994 Was the Best Year for Music,” touting that year for the birth of Britpop, the breakouts of Green Day and Weezer, the emergence of Notorious B. I. G. and Lauryn Hill, and the vibrancy of Lolla types like Pavement.
Debut- wise, it deemed 1994 as second only to 1967 — the launch of David Bowie, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and The Velvet Underground — in producing Weezer, Outkast, Beck, B. I. G., Jeff Buckley, Marilyn Manson, Oasis and Korn, among others.
Of course, 1994 was not without its bad news. The music world lost the most anguished voice of a generation, if not THE voice of a generation, with the death of Kurt Cobain. Couple that with Pearl Jam’s career-stalling blood feud with Ticketmaster, and 1994 could be pegged as the beginning of the end of grunge.
Nowhere to be found in the LA Weekly’s ode to ’ 94 is a mention of Hootie & the Blowfish and “Cracked Rear View.”
The band, bringing its reunion tour to KeyBank Pavilion in Burgettstown on Sunday, debuted with what would become the biggest- selling album from that year and one of the biggest of all time.
The birth of ‘ scrunge’
Hootie & the Blowfish were on the ground floor of what SPIN would call the “scrunge” era. In Darius Rucker, we had Eddie Vedder lite, a singer with a similar grungy, angsty bravado applying it to rousing adult contemporary pop- rock.
Labels desperate for a more palatable grunge also unearthed Bush, Candlebox, Collective Soul, Better Than Ezra, Sponge, Hum, Silverchair and, eventually, the fab four of Creed, Nickelback, 3 Doors Down and Puddle of Mudd.
Hootie was the oddball in the mix. It formed, taking the nicknames of two friends, back in 1986 at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S. C., as a nondescript band with an anti- rock- star- ish black singer to play covers at frat parties.
“R. E. M., Replacements, Ramones,” Rucker says in a phone interview, recalling their setlist. “We played Dumptruck, The Reivers. We probably had four Reivers songs in our set. We thought they were great, and we figured everyone knew who they were, but no one did.”
Despite becoming a bar- band sensation across the South, there was no bidding war for Hootie and not much help from the industry.
“We never got invited to SXSW,” Rucker says. “For us it was crushing. Eight years in a row we sent in a tape and never got invited. But we got over it.”
Ultimately, the labels couldn’t ignore Hootie, which had an indie EP, “Kootchypop,” with 50,000 sales and a potential hit with “Hold My Hand.”
“Soni brought that to the band,” Rucker says, referring to drummer Jim Sonefeld. “We were auditioning drummers, because our original drummer left, and Soni was like our fifth drummer who came in. I remember that day. He comes over and we’re jamming, and he says, ‘ I got this song. I’ll play it for you.’ It was [ expletive] rad, and we didn’t say it because we had a couple other guys to see, but when he walked out, we said, ‘ He’s in. With that song, he’s in.’”
Rise and fall of Hootie
Alongside the many outsized acts of 1994 — from Nirvana to Manson and Nine Inch Nails to Outkast — Hootie & the Blowfish was a celebration of the ordinary. Just a few months after Cobain was screaming “Rape me!” — to much confusion and consternation — Hootie came along with a soothing “Hold My Hand.” And then “Let Her Cry” and “Only Wanna Be With You.”
There’s no better invitation for derision than earnestness and a goofy name, and so, while Hootie was referenced in an episode of “Friends” and declared the host’s favorite band on the “Late Show With David Letterman,” the hot new group was slagged by critics.
“It probably started with the name,” Rucker says. “It didn’t help. And the fact that we were putting out this pop- rock record in the middle of grunge. We always think about the first couple reviews, like the Rolling Stone review, that were raving reviews: ‘ A breath of fresh air’ we were called. Then you started getting some success, and the other stuff happened. Who cares? We sold 20- some million records. We’re good.”
The blows came from fellow artists as well. In a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone, Trent Reznor explained that he got into bands like Kiss and The Clash because “rock & roll should be about rebellion. It should [ anger] your parents, and it should offer some element of taboo. ... That’s why I applaud — even helped create — bands like Marilyn Manson. The shock- rock value. I think it’s necessary. Death to Hootie & the Blowfish, you know? It’s safe. It’s legitimate.”
The headline on that story: “Trent Reznor: Death to Hootie.”
“Oh, I remember it,” Rucker says. “Reznor was being a stud, showing how cool he was. [ Expletive] him, too.”
Hootie released “Cracked Rear View” on July 5, 1994, and made its Pittsburgh debut that September at Graffiti. When the band returned in June 1995 for a much bigger show at Riverplex at Sandcastle, it was the setting for a Rolling Stone cover story called “Sex, Golf and Rock & Roll.”
It talked about how bassist Dean Felber, who was a finance major, formed the band as a corporation that withheld taxes and supplied health insurance — the kind of thing that wasn’t happening in Marilyn Manson.
“Darius and the rest of us are breaking ground by being normal,” Sonefeld told RS. “In rock ’ n’ roll you’ve got to do something whacked to be different, and now, being ultranormal is the most whacked thing of all.”
“The critics always like the most tragic stories,” guitarist Mark Bryan noted. “We’re breaking ground by being smart as a band. We’re sincere about our music and have it together. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I do think it’s why we get some bad reviews. Like this guy in Pittsburgh who said we deliver grunge without the teen angst. That’s because we’re not a grunge band, and we’re not angry.”
That was a reference to the Post- Gazette’s review of the Riverplex show — titled, um, “Hootie delivers grunge without the teen angst” — that opened with the line, “I suppose it was only a matter of time before the post- Nirvana generation spit out its very own Huey Lewis .…”
Ultranormal was a winning formula, earning Hootie & the Blowfish two Grammys in 1996 ( including best new artist) and more than 21 million in sales for “Cracked Rear View” — making it the biggest- selling
album of 1995 and the 10th biggest of all time in the United States. In ’ 96, Hootie packed the Star Lake Amphitheater with 22,000 people.
But ultranormal was a two- edged sword. There was an onslaught of post- grunge ordinary in 1995- 96 — Matchbox 20, Gin Blossoms, Goo Goo Dolls, etc. — and no one was particularly amped for a second helping of Hootie. Can anyone remember the single from “Fairweather Johnson”? Or from “Musical Chairs”?
“It was the backlash,” Rucker says. “When we went in to make the second album, I told the guys, ‘ You know this [ stuff] isn’t going to happen again. This was an anomaly.’ We weren’t that good. I mean, the album was great. We were selling a million albums a week. It is what it is, man.”
Rock artists who were THAT good, from Dylan to Bowie to Springsteen to Prince, will change things up when it gets stale, but Hootie muddled through with the same sound for five albums before shutting it down in 2008.
“We were never that band,” Rucker says. “We were never great enough musicians to say, ‘ Let’s write a hard record, let’s write a country record, let’s write a freakin’ pop record.’ We just wrote songs and played ’ em and didn’t think about, ‘ Does it sound like this, does it sound like that?’ We were just writing songs, man. We never thought about things like that: ‘ Are we going to make an experimental record?’ It was like, ‘ Let’s go make a Hootie record.’”
Post- Hootie
Rucker, who had released an R& B album in 2002, added some twang and oldtime instruments and went country in 2008, becoming the first black artist to top the Hot Country Songs charts since Charley Pride in 1983. He’s sustained that with seven more Top 10 country hits since then and millions in sales.
Surprisingly, the Blowfish guys weren’t hounding him to get back together.
“Oh, not at all,” he says. “Nobody said anything like that to me. When we decided to take a break, it was a break. We weren’t planning on playing at all. Everybody got into their lives, so it wasn’t like, ‘ I need something to do.’ It was just, ‘ We’ll do it when the time is right.’”
Hootie & the Blowfish regrouped for various charity gigs over the years but held off on a full- fledged reunion until this 25th anniversary of “Cracked Rear View.”
“We talked about it a couple times,” Rucker says. “We talked about it five years ago. It just didn’t seem right. My career was going great, and everybody had their lives. Nobody was excited about it, and then we talked about it again, and everybody was excited.”
A new album is on the way on Rucker’s label, Capitol Nashville, which will include collaborations with other songwriters, like Ed Sheeran.
“I love it. I can’t wait for people to hear it,” Rucker says. “We wrote a bunch of songs with some cool people. And we tried to do some different things, but every time we tried to do something, it kept sounding like Hootie. It has some different stuff on it, but it just sounds like Hootie & the Blowfish doing different stuff.”
It arrives in the wake of a recent New York Times story headlined “Hootie & the Blowfish, Great American Rock Band ( Yes, Really).”
Asked if that’s the long- awaited critical validation for Hootie, Rucker is low- key on that.
“It was cool,” he says. “That’s only one guy’s opinion. He’s not going to change the view of everyone in the world. It was good to see that one guy got it. He got it.”