Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
He’s best known as the lead guitarist of Hootie & The Blowfish. This Saturday, Mark Bryan rocks the Weinberg Center in Frederick, Maryland, alongside the Screaming Trojans, a collection of his buddies from Seneca Valley High School and Gaithersburg High School.
“I’m a Seneca Valley Screaming Eagle and a couple of my best buddies are Gaithersburg Trojans, so we mixed the two mascot names,” Bryan told WTOP. “We’ve been doing it the last decade or so, and a bunch of our friends from growing up show up. It’s really cool to play with guys who I grew up with who are still really talented musicians. It’s been a blast.”
After high school, Bryan and bass player Dean Felber attended the University of South Carolina, where they met singer Darius Rucker to form Hootie & The Blowfish. The band’s breakthrough album “Cracked Rear View” (1994) became one of the top-selling albums of all time after performing “Hold My Hand” on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”
“That’s when [Letterman] held the CD up and said, ‘If you don’t own this, something’s wrong with you,'” Bryan said. “It blew up!”
The band’s second single was the Grammy-winning tragedy “Let Her Cry.”
“[Darius] came home drunk one night,” Bryan said. “He had heard ‘She Talks to Angels’ for the first time. He made our buddy, the bartender, play it again and again and he was like, ‘That song’s amazing.’ He got home and said, ‘I want to write ‘She Talks to Angels’ for Bonnie Raitt and ‘Let Her Cry’ is what came out,” Bryan said. “I think that’s a good story!”
Of course, the band’s biggest hit was the chart-topping “Only Wanna Be With You.”
“I remember when I was writing the lick I was like, ‘I wanna get the energy of “Pinball Wizard” into this,’ like that double-time strum,” Bryan said. “Darius didn’t think it should be on ‘Cracked Rear View!’ He thought it was too cheesy or something, so he was trying to vote to get it off. … When it became one of the biggest singles, he was like, ‘I was wrong!'”
Bryan says you’ll hear all the Hootie hits on Saturday, including the transcendent “Time.”
“I love playing that song because it’s powerful live,” Bryan said. “Pipe in on my [social media] and tell me what songs you want to hear. That will help me put my set list together.”
Bryan will be performing with Rick Slezak on drums, Steve Lipton on bass, Kevin Heister on guitar and vocals and Scott Tucker on guitar and vocals.
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
