By Steven P. Wheeler

1994. Grunge rock had broken into the mainstream only a few years earlier with the major label success of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Nirvana, after its cultish flowering in the Pacific Northwest. A plaid-covered hybrid of Seventies-styled sludge rock and punk abrasion, the media and recording industry couldn’t seem to get enough of what they branded grunge; establishing and celebrating a loosely unified movement of disaffected youth.

It was also one without a goal nor a clear destination. Or as some detractors dubbed the largely angst-filled music: “whine rock.” It was largely art formed from middle-class disillusionment and wrapped in social disgust. Long before social media, “First World Problems” became a cult phrase amongst those who didn’t take to the constant onslaught of anger and dissatisfaction found so often within those first few years of mainstream grunge.

In April of ‘94, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain committed suicide and for a brief time, the genre’s popularity grew even more as the media’s legend of Cobain went on unabated.

It’s not surprising that this timeframe also saw a rise in the popularity of country music, which, in many ways, was nothing more than Seventies-styled pop-rock with a hat. In short there was an obvious opening for a new rock band to fill in a major hole among a new generation of rock fans who lived largely outside the world of grunge. No one, however, could have predicted that this void of melodic rock with a more upbeat message would be filled by a mixed-race quartet from South Carolina with the unlikely name of Hootie & the Blowfish.

Cracked Rear View

Twenty-five years ago on July 5, Hootie & the Blowfish released their major label debut album, Cracked Rear View, which has since gone on to sell an astronomical 21 million copies (tied with Garth Brooks Double Live as the #9 Best Selling Album in history, according to the Recording Industry Association of America’s Certifications).

The band—singer-songwriter Darius Rucker, guitarist Mark Bryan, bassist Dean Felber and drummer Jim Sonefeld—is currently in the midst of their first full-fledged reunion tour to celebrate the anniversary of their debut release, with a slated new album coming out later this summer.

For the past ten years, the band has been on hiatus—aside from some annual concerts for charities—as the band’s focal point Darius Rucker has pursued a very successful career over in the world of country music. With a slew of #1 country hits spread out over his four solo albums, Rucker is back with the band he started all those years ago in 1986.

When They Were Young

Back in ’94, I sat down with a 27-year-old Darius Rucker, at a time when his band Hootie & The Blowfish were just getting their first taste of success. Their debut album with Atlantic Records had just cracked the Top Ten, but the surprising mega-stardom level that first record would attain was still a year away.

Formed in Columbia, South Carolina in ’86 as a way to pass the time while the four part-time musicians finished their studies at the University of South Carolina, the band first made their name playing countless gigs in and around campus with a steady supply of cover tunes as they slowly began working in their own originals.

But what’s with that name?

Rucker explained it all had to do with his penchant for passing out nicknames to students around campus: “People are always expecting this great funny story, but it’s actually pretty boring,” he said with a laugh. “There was this one guy who had really big eyes and wore glasses, so I called him ‘Hootie’ because he looked like an owl. This other guy was really fat and had big cheeks, so I called him ‘The Blowfish.’ One night we were at a party in South Carolina, and these two walked in together, and I said, ‘Look, Hootie & The Blowfish’.”

With name in hand, the next logical step for a band looking for a record deal was to get the hell out of Dodge (or in this case, South Carolina) and try to gain attention in the music meccas. However, these four took another tact, which was quite unique at the time, and that was to try and be a big fish in a small pond.

“Actually, that’s the very reason we didn’t move after everybody got out of college,” the singer said. “We were very content with where we were, and we figured that if we were good enough, somebody would find us in Columbia. If you go to New York, Atlanta or L.A., you can get lost because there are 62 million bands in those places. We just decided to stay home, and if someone wanted us, they could find us.”

Entrepreneurial Rock

The band did attempt the tried and true method of trying to get music industry attention by sending out demo tapes, but they had more of a business plan in mind. “We did send out demos to record companies,” Rucker admitted, “but we never called people a million times. We figured that if it was gonna come, it would come; and if it didn’t, we’d have a blast for a few years and then get real jobs.”

Instead of begging and pleading for attention—like a majority of bands—and also not getting much response from the record labels who were looking for the next grunge band instead of a harmony-laden melodic rock band, these four musical entrepreneurs decided to create a business and go it alone, along with their manager Rusty Harmon.

As their regional following continued to grow down to Georgia, “we were making pretty good money from shows and also with merchandising,” the vocalist explained. Next up was putting their education to good use, especially from the band’s bassist Dean Felber who was a financial marketing major: “Dean had a lot to do with setting everything up,” Rucker continued. “Dean knew all about the S-corporations and the C-corporations and all that crap, and he knew people at the university who were glad to help out with things. There were a lot of people who helped us out for free, which was really cool.”

In 1990, the band released the first of their three self-released EPs, and by setting up the business of the band, they were able to run things like a small business as Rucker explained: “Most bands just split the money at the end of the week, but we didn’t want to do that. What happened if I blew my knee out or something, and we couldn’t play for a month. I wanted to make sure that I’d still get my weekly paycheck, so that’s how we set it up; with a payroll. I think more bands should start looking at it that way, because this is a business. Even though it’s great fun, it is a business.

With their own release of the 1993 EP, Kootchypop, Hootie & the Blowfish had become a truly independent musical force. Between 1990-93, the band played on average 250 gigs per year, a throwback to the bygone blue-collar work ethic started by the likes of Bob Seger or Bruce Springsteen. Regularly playing 2,000 seat halls, Hootie managed to sell 60,000 copies of Kootchypop; no easy feat in the days before file sharing and social media.

Atlantic Comes Calling

Enter Atlantic Records’ A&R rep Tim Sommer, who signed the band to the legendary record label. “We started getting reports that this self-made record, with no record company affiliation, from a band in South Carolina, was outselling Pearl Jam in that entire state,” the long-haired exec told me during our conversation. “Why I think it was a good signing is, despite the trends that come and go, people of all ages really like Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, Tom Petty and early R.E.M. It didn’t take a genius to see that if you could find a band that espoused those values and wrote quality songs and had the same vibe as a Seger or a Crosby, Stills & Nash or a Mellencamp, but were 20 years younger, you were going to have something special.”

“Right before Hootie’s album came out,” continued Sommer, “I remember Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits album was in the Top 20 on the Billboard Charts. What the hell was Seger’s Greatest Hits doing in the Top 20? You had to figure that everyone who grew up with Bob Seger already had his records. The fact is, there were 16, 18 and 20-year-olds buying Seger’s Greatest Hits. We’re not talking about older guys in pickup trucks in Des Moines. We’re talking about kids in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, really hip kids who are also buying Hole and Weezer.”

It became so obvious to Sommer, he remarked: “Signing the band was so logical that it amazes me that more labels weren’t seeing it, especially if you take into account that Hootie was doing six-figures in merchandising before we even signed them. This is a band that no one had heard of outside of North and South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia and Georgia. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to see it—even though they were not courted by other labels and were basically signed for nothing.”

Still, despite what Hollywood movies would have you believe, national success never happens overnight and there was also a potential issue with Darius Rucker being the frontman.

Some Peace & Some Harmony

It wasn’t always a easy road for the band or their African-American frontman, as Rucker made clear during our time together. “Early on, there were clubs that our manager, Rusty, would say, ‘I don’t think we can play there,’ and I’d ask why, and he’d say, ‘Well, because you’re black,’ So it was like, ‘Fuck ‘em, I don’t wanna play there anyway.’

“I’ve probably experienced some form of racism every day, in one way or another,” he added, “and I think playing in a band with me has opened the other three guys up to things that they would have never thought of. It’s amazing, because I deal with things like that by letting it go, but if one of the other guys hears something [racist], it’s like fisticuffs, and we’re in a big brawl somewhere [laughs].”

So when it came time for their major label debut, the band thumbed their noses at any possible image issues by hiding all four members in silhouette. They wanted to stand on their music and nothing else.

“That’s it exactly,” Rucker said in answer to my question about the now famous album cover. “If you see three white guys and a black guy, people will usually think that it’s either a funk band or a hard-core band. The black guy must be the bass player or the drummer, right? [laughs]. To your point, we just didn’t want anyone to have any preconceived notions. Plus, we’re not very attractive. I didn’t want to look back on this album cover in ten years and say, ‘God, we were dorks!’ I mean, we are dorks, but we can hide it a little.”

Recording A Classic

During the six months of recording Cracked Rear View, Atlantic Records had brought in veteran producer Don Gehman to helm the project. Known for his multi-platinum work with John Mellencamp, as well as shepherding R.E.M.’s classic Lifes Rich Pageant, Gehman spoke to me about his recollections working on one of the biggest selling albums in music history.

“I’ve gotta say that this was probably one of the most charmed projects I’ve ever worked on,” said Gehman. “Of course when I started out on the Hootie project, I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is gonna be just an okay little album,” the producer explained. “But as we went along, I became more and more excited about it, and by the time I was mixing it, it was like, ‘Wow!’

“Some bands are almost anal and very protective, questioning everything,” the studio captain said. “And then there are bands like R.E.M. and Hootie who somehow seem to skate along on top of all that. They’re just very willing to let whatever happens happen, and they go with it.”

“This wasn’t like making a record,” agreed Rucker. “It was like five guys sitting around, burning candles and incense, reading runes and just chilling out. Don made it so relaxing and so cool that if he suggested something, we’d try it.”

That’s a far cry from Rucker’s attitude before they entered the studio. “I was always saying, ‘We’re just going to do the songs as they are, and then we’re just gonna let it lie.’ But Gehman had a soothing way of saying, ‘Let’s try that shorter, let’s do this.’ He definitely shortened some of the songs and made them more radio-ready.”

The modest producer concurred, saying, “Most of the work that I contributed was really just editing things down a little. Because they are such a strong live band—used to playing club gigs and stretching things out—the songs were a little long. I think I chopped a good minute out of most of the songs because they had an extra verse or they’d repeat the first verse or the chorus again, so they weren’t really radio-ready to my liking. And the band was very willing to make changes.”

Never Say Die

With the album done, it was now time for Atlantic’s promotion team to get the word out and it was a very long road. A road that many labels may have cut short. Enter Atlantic Records President Val Azzoli, who also sat down for an interview with me to discuss the Hootie story: “We knew that radio wouldn’t be enamored by this band out of the box, because it really doesn’t fit a format. Is it alternative? Not really. Is it pop? Not really. Is it AOR? Not really. Is it AC? Not really.”

“We figured that we’d just try to create a buzz and not worry about what type of station played it,” the label president, who once managed Rush, explained, “let’s just worry about a station playing it. So we toured and we did press, we toured and did press, toured and did press, and we slowly got a little buzz going. Then we started to get a little bit of AOR airplay—not a lot, but they did start to play it. And what happened was, everywhere it got played, it began to sell records. There was a direct correlation, which is not always the case.”

Two months after the release of Cracked Rear View came the first big turning point in the band’s fortunes. Everyone involved in the Hootie saga agrees that the incident involving a certain late night talk show icon changed the trajectory forever.

“The play of the game in the life of this record,” explained Azzoli, “was when David Letterman was driving home one night and he heard ‘Hold My Hand’ on WNEW in New York. He immediately said that he had to have this band on his show. They played the Letterman show the very next week, and things really started to turn around at that point.”

An Alternative Message

The band’s reputation as an excellent live band also helped matters, as Azzoli made clear: “We also did a lot of in-store play and that worked because it’s a magical sound. I always felt what this band did and why people like it is that it’s a straight-down-the-middle rock & roll band. It didn’t go left, and it didn’t go right.”

At a time when “dread” and “darkness” was permeating the rock scene, Hootie & the Blowfish signaled a much needed ray of sunshine. “After you see these guys in concert, you feel happy,” Azzoli said matter-of-factly. “You don’t feel like you wanna kill somebody, you don’t feel like you wanna do drugs, you don’t feel like you regret being alive. You just say, ‘I saw a great band playing great music, and life is okay’.”

Rucker seemed to agree when he pointed out the obvious when it came to their long road to success: “For years, no one wanted a band that sang with harmonies or played with an acoustic guitar. No one wanted anything to do with us.”

Of course, with such a massive success, as came with Hootie & the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View, the haters can be unmerciful and, in the case of Hootie, very loud. Rucker has had to deal with it in his own way: “While things have changed, it’s still hard for a band like us to get respect. We just wish people would take our record as a Hootie & the Blowfish record and not worry about what everybody else in the music business is doing.”

Loaded with four massive hit singles—“Hold My Hand,” “Let Her Cry,” “Only Wanna Be With You” and “Time”—Cracked Rear View has aged well. Much better than most of the albums from that era have, and even former haters have come around to the band all these years later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi62jaKjBd0

25 Years Gone

Following Cracked Rear View’s astonishing success was never going to be easy and with a media and critical backlash accompanied by boisterous Hootie haters, the band’s sophomore effort Fairweather Johnson in 1996 sold three million copies. A major success for any band, but in the shadow of their debut’s unparalleled numbers, the media took its potshots. Their third album, Musical Chairs, in 1998 also managed to go platinum, but the days of massive sales were gone forever as the new millennium brought in file sharing, online streaming radio and other sales killers. This was not unique to Hootie.

The band released three more studio albums between 2000-05, before Rucker embarked on his current and successful solo career. But, as noted previously, this summer Hootie & the Blowfish are back on tour with a new album slated for release in the months ahead.

Twenty-five years after it all first began, there’s something to be said about a band who just makes you feel good about life… ya know, just good… with a little peace and some harmony.