Hootie & The Blowfish is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its smash album “Cracked Rear View” (1994).
You can celebrate with the band this Saturday at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, not far from where lead guitarist Mark Bryan grew up listening to WTOP.
“I recognize those call letters from my childhood actually,” Bryan told WTOP. “I grew up in Bethesda and Gaithersburg, Maryland, so WTOP sounds like home. … Thirty years is a good time to honor what has been a really important part of our lives, so the set leans heavily on ‘Cracked Rear View.'”
Bryan and his future Hootie bass player Dean Felber both graduated from Seneca Valley High School in Germantown, Maryland, before meeting lead singer Darius Rucker at the University of South Carolina.
“When I got down to South Carolina, I was on the fifth floor of what was called Moore Dormitory and Darius lived down the hall and then Dean was on the sixth floor,” Bryan said.
“By spring of our freshman year, Darius and I were doing a bunch of acoustic shows as The Wolf Brothers and we decided to turn it into a band and come up with the goofiest name of all time with Hootie & The Blowfish. … We were kind of living the dream from (age) 18 or 19 on.”
Their breakthrough album “Cracked Rear View” featured the upbeat leadoff single “Hold My Hand.”
“It was doing very moderately well on the radio, so it was just plugging along for a new band that not a lot of people had heard of yet, people liked the song, but charting very low,” Bryan said.
“When Dave Letterman heard it and had us on the show and held the CD up and said, ‘If you don’t own this, something’s wrong with you,’ we went from selling 4,000 copies a week to 17,000 that week and it just kept going up from there — and radio, too.”
They followed up with the Grammy-winning tragedy “Let Her Cry.”
“[Darius] was like, ‘I want to write (The Black Crowes’) ‘She Talks to Angels’ for Bonnie Raitt,'” Bryan said.
“He was drunk at the time, but he was in love with those two artists in that moment and that became his muse I guess and he wrote that song late at night. … The next day we had a show at the brewery in Raleigh and he was playing it at soundcheck and we were like, ‘Hey, man, play that again,’ and we all started playing along. It was magic.”
The album’s most mature, thoughtful and daresay transcendent song was “Time.”
“It was us at a young age sort of thinking big — and I was all for that,” Bryan said. “I stayed out of any lyrics on that, I think Dean did too. Sony kind of brought in the concept and we let Darius do his thing with it. It’s a fine piece of music too, man, it’s fun to play, it’s a well-crafted song, a great arrangement, just everything feels right.”
Of course, the album’s biggest hit was “Only Wanna Be With You,” making Miami Dolphins fans cry.
“I just remember slapping a capo on my guitar after being around Dillon Fence,” Bryan said.
“I remember trying to make it like ‘Pinball Wizard’ and you get like 1/16s or whatever you call it. I remember Darius hearing it and saying it reminded him of a Dillon Fence song, so he added that lyric, ‘Put on a little Dylan sitting on a Fence.’ He was talking about singing a Bob Dylan song, but he gave Dillon Fence a little props there, which I thought was cool.”
They next recorded a cover of “I Go Blind” by the Canadian band 54-50 for the soundtrack of TV’s “Friends.”
“Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry came to see Hootie at The Greek Theatre in L.A., came backstage, shook hands,” Bryan said.
“Months later, we got this note, ‘Hey, ‘Friends’ wants to do this episode about going to see you.’ … We also met Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox at a party in L.A. My baby girl Marley was 3 months old, her pacifier fell out of her mouth into Aniston’s wine. Aniston picks it up, sticks it back into her mouth and says, ‘Nap time!'”
Hootie’s second studio album “Fairweather Johnson” (1996) could have never reached the heights of “Cracked Rear View,” but the sophomore effort still included underrated tunes like “Tuckerstown” and “Old Man and Me.”
“That’s us trying to take a step and experimenting musically and lyrically,” Bryan said.
“We didn’t want to make ‘Cracked Rear View’ again, we were in a different place, we were older, times had changed, the world had changed, life had changed and we were trying to adapt. You can hear that on there, I obviously don’t think it had the broad mass appeal that ‘Cracked Rear View’ had, but we didn’t know that was gonna happen with ‘Cracked Rear View.'”
He promises to sprinkle in some deep cuts and even a few songs from Rucker’s solo country career.
“We’ve been doing ‘Alright’ and then of course ‘Wagon Wheel,’ which is of course a cover but from Darius’ world,” Bryan said. “I’ve gotta give D-Ruck a lot of credit, man, every night when we start that song he yells at the top of his lungs, ‘The Old Crow Medicine Show!’ while we’re kicking it in, so he knows how to give credit where it’s due.”
Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below:
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