← Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
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Chris Melanfi
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Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One series. On our last episode, we talked about the South Carolina band Hootie and the Blowfish and their exceptional lead singer, Darius Rucker. His potent baritone was key to the band's sound and their arrival as the top selling band of 1995, at a moment when alternative rock was turning into jangly pop. After selling more than 12 million copies of their debut album, Cracked Rear View, Hooty now had the awesome challenge of following it up. Just how big were Hootie and the Blowfish in the closing months of 1995? How about a whole episode of the top new sitcom on television revolving around them? Thing was, we were going to go see Hootie and the Blowfish.
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Hooty and oh my, I can catch them on the radio.
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In its second season, NBC's Friends, already one of the three biggest shows on TV, devoted large stretches of the plot of the one with Five Steaks and an Eggplant to three of the Friends yearning to see Hooty in concert. And what happened when they went backstage.
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That was amazing. You guys want to meet the.
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Yeah, we do. Come on.
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Is that a hickey?
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Where'd you get the hickey? You partied with Hootie and the Blowfish? Yes. Apparently Stevie and Hooty are like this. Who gave me that hickey? That would be the work of a Blowfish. The band members politely declined to appear in this Friends episode. They were just too busy. But they did give the show a leftover track from the cracked Rear View Sessions, a cover of an obscure Canadian alt rock song called I Go Blind. That Hoodie had been performing in concert for years on Friends. Chandler, Ross and Monica jammed to it at the Hoodie show. When I Go Blind appeared on the Friends soundtrack CD in the fall of 95. That album went platinum and the song reached number 13 on Billboard's Radio Songs chart in 1996. That's how big Hoodie were at this time. Not only was Courtney Cox pretending to Mac on them, their leftover tracks were becoming hits.
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I don't know.
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By the time Darius Rucker, Mark Bryan, Dean Felber and Jim Sony Sonnefeld showed up at the Grammy Awards in February 1996, Hootie and the Blowfish seemed unstoppable. No one was surprised when they took home the Best New Artist award. They beat a murderer's row of Brandy, Alanis Morissette, Joan Osborne and Shania Twain and Let Her Cry took Best Pop Vocal Performance by a duo or group. Performing live on the Grammy telecast, Hoodie were confident enough to treat their fans to a deep cut I'm Going Home. Anyway.
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In just one year, they've gone from bar band to stadium band. Tonight they've asked to perform a song that has never been released as a single or a video. They wrote it after lead singer Darius Rucker lost a close member of his family singing I'm Going Home. Please welcome Hootie and the Blowfish.
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For a band seemingly at the top of their game, however, Hootie were restless. They had been performing the songs from Cracked Rear View for half a decade. Some of them dated as far back as 1990, and they insisted to the label and their management that they wanted to finish their follow up album. Atlantic would have been happy to keep milking Cracked Rear View for singles. Just two months after the Grammys, however, Hootie dropped that second album and they were at first greeted with a hero's welcome. A brief Sidebar As I explained two years ago on our AC DC Rule episode of Hit Parade, follow up albums are funny things because their chart performance is actually a referendum on the previous bestseller. They may open big but then ultimately fail to live up to the slower growing predecessor album. Hooty and the Blowfish's Fairweather Johnson was a prime example of the ACDC rule. Again, all the signs were promising. The first single from Fairweather Johnson, the Old man and Me, parentheses When I Get to Heaven, was yet another road tested track from Hoodie's early days. It had even made the independent coochie pop ep the Old man and Me was embraced by radio stations right away. Within two weeks it was already in the top 20 at pop radio. When the single arrived in record stores. It sold well enough out of the box that Old man debuted on the Hot 100, all the way up at number 28, the fastest opening for a Hootie single ever. That was the week Fairweather Johnson arrived in record stores, and the album's debut was a monster 411,000 copies in its first week. That was more than twice as big as any sales week Cracked Rear View had pulled in any of its eight weeks at number one, But both the album and the single peaked quickly. By May, the Old man and Me topped out at number 13 on the Hot 100 and Fairweather Johnson was out of the album charts top 10 by July, it was instantly certified double platinum. But then it held there. It eventually very belatedly went triple platinum. Remember, this was the immediate follow up to an album that had sold more than 12 million copies. It seemed the marketplace was finally saturated with Hootie. The band were not doing anything fundamentally different. Fairweather Johnson contained the same mix of jangly rock with soulful, broadly socially conscious lyrics. Its second single, Tuckerstown, for example, was another story song about a man seeking refuge in the predominantly black community of Tuckerstown, Bermuda. In August of 96, Tuckerstown barely scraped the top 40 at number 38, Hootie's first major label single to miss the top 20. What had changed was that Hooty and the Blowfish, the now multimillionaire quartet, had targets on their backs. To critics, cool kids and even other rock stars, Hooty were the symbol of middle of the road Pablo, you make.
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Me hard When I'm all stuffed inside I see the truth When I'm all stupid eyed the arrow goes straight through.
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Quote death to Hootie, nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor declared in a Rolling Stone interview. Around the same time, Reznor protege Marilyn Manson warned, quote, hootie and the Blowfish will make your life completely boring, unquote. The odd thing was, in more mainstream circles on pop and rock radio, the sound of Hootie didn't go away. For example, the week after Fairweather Johnson debuted, the Dave Matthews Band rode Hootie's coattail by issuing their follow up album Crash, and it debuted at number two, right behind Hootie. The difference was Crash would go on to sell 7 million copies, more than double Fairweather, and spent two years on the chart spinning off multiple hits.
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And I come into.
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You Moreover, perky, jangly alt pop, let's call it Friends Rock, the kind of music Monica Geller would bop to, kept on scaling the charts right through 1996 and 97. Del Amitri, deep Blue Something and the very Hootie esque Sister Hazel, who scored a top 10 hit in late 97 with all for your. By then, even Atlantic Records was finding success with other alt pop bands of the post REM, post grunge, post hootie model. They sold 12 million copies of the debut CD by Matchbox 20, a band whose rustic jangle basically picked up where the Blowfish left off. What none of these bands had was the signature sound of Darius Rucker's voice. But by the late 90s, Hootie and the Blowfish were a band, so to speak, without a country Pop fans had moved on. Rock fans were getting their fix from other bands, and Hoodie's music was still too rock based to appeal to R B or country audiences, even though the band's sound was broadening in scope. I Will Wait was the lead single of hootie and the Blowfish's third album, Musical Chairs, in 1998. Promoted as an airplay only track, it managed to reach number 18 on the radio songs chart. Not bad for a band past its pop prime, and it featured an interesting blend of rock bones, R B style vocals and a slightly twangier melody. Elsewhere on the Musical Chairs album, the band tried banjo inflected Americana on Michelle Post.
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Michelle Bus knows all about it, what she don't want just to talk about it.
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Poised cinematic balladry on Only lonely, a number 25 adult contemporary hit, Only Lonely.
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On the inside didn't mean to take.
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Away your dream, and even blue Grass on Desert Mountain Showdown. Musical Chairs debuted and peaked at number four on the album chart in 98 and sold a million copies to the most loyal of Hootie's fan base. It would be the last Hootie and the Blowfish album to go platinum or chart that high. Still, in ways no one could have known at the time, Musical Chairs was pointing toward the future. If not of Hootie, then certainly Darius Rucker. But choosing which musical path he would follow would prove a conundrum.
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Once I thought things were fine, it would rain. This is how it is.
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In 1999, in his spare time and with the encouragement of a senior executive at Atlantic, Darius Rucker began recording a solo album as a side project. Only it didn't sound much like Hootie and the Blowfish. It was a contemporary R B album, and in theory, Atlantic should have been the ideal label to release it. They had been scoring on the charts with such hit makers as Brandy, Aaliyah and Timbaland. If any company could handle this genre shift, it was Rucker's home label. But when Rucker, circa 2000, turned in the finished album, which he called back to then, Atlantic balked. They didn't want to commit their ample R B promotional team to promoting Rucker as an R B singer. Quote, it was shocking. Rucker later told Tim Summer, my record label, who had paid for the whole thing, didn't want to put it out. They wouldn't even try. I made this little hippie RB record and they didn't have any idea what to do with it. And they said it had no hits. And I'm like, have you heard Exodus? Have you heard Wild one if you.
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Could pull me out of the dark if our love will fall apart like cookies crumble See I'm a demon.
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These songs are hits, rucker continued, and someone at the label said, yes, they're hits, but not for you. Darius Rucker accused Atlantic, not unjustly, of wanting him to sleep, stick closer to the hoodie lane and thwarting his attempt to spread his stylistic wings. To be fair to the label, Rucker had fallen into an odd juncture in the R B marketplace. Back To Then was not new Jack Swing or Timbaland style rap and B. It was an adult R B record, which around the turn of the millennium and typically meant so called neo soul such as d', Angelo, Erykah Badu or Jill Scott. In fact, in a move to make amends with Rucker, Atlantic gave him back the rights to his debut solo lp, and Rucker wound up releasing it on Jill Scott's label, Hidden Beach, a neo soul imprint distributed by Epic Records, part of the Sony family and hence a rival label to Atlantic, ironically agreed to put out Back to Then in the summer of 2002, nearly three years after Rucker had started recording it. Rucker even included a duet with Jill Scott herself on the cd. Back to Then debuted and peaked on the Billboard 200 at number 127, and it was off the album chart in just two weeks. Weeks. None of its singles charted at black radio or on the R B chart. In essence, Rucker's admirable lack of categorizability, along with yes record label shenanigans had foiled the project. Darius had delivered a Neither Fish nor Foul record. It was neither d' Angelo nor Timbaland, and in the two years Back to Then Sat on the Shelf, R and B had only moved further in the direction of hip hop, a la 2002 hitmakers ja rule, Ashanti and Nelly. Rucker's little hippie R B record was not going to compete with that. It remains the charming anomaly in Rucker's catalog. By 2003 he had resumed recording with Hooty and the Blowfish, who were still active but whose own commercial prospects were dimming in the early aughts, the era of Nickelback, Incubus and System of A Down, Hooty were even less likely to place on the rock charts than Rucker's solo project had on the R B charts. To their credit, the band weren't really trying to be rock stars anymore. In the mid-2000s, Hootie and the Blowfish delivered one final studio album to Atlantic Records Records, and in exchange for a greatest hits compilation, they negotiated their release from the label. Tim Summer had long since left Atlantic, and with no one shepherding them through the corporate machinations anymore, the label's interest in promoting or retaining them was near zero. In just four albums, Hootie and the Blowfish had gone from the top band on the charts the to a casualty of the major label system. Hoodie then tried their hand at recording for a smaller label, the longtime independent imprint Vanguard Records. Interestingly, their regular producer, Don Gaiman, had relocated to Nashville, so the band joined him and recorded their next album, 2005's Looking for Lucky, in the country music capital for the first time. Even though they weren't trying to record a country record on tracks like Autumn Jones, the influence was hard to miss. Finally, in 2008, with the band members entering their 40s, Hootie and the Blowfish went on an amicable hiatus. Years on the road had taken a toll, and a 2006 live album had failed to chart entirely. Drummer Sony Sonefeld in particular, told the band he didn't want to tour anymore. It was during that band meeting that Darius Rucker determined what he wanted to do next. It was inspired by his fandom for this performer, a del Rio Texas singer and 90s country hitmaker named Rodney Foster.
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The best of it with him, the Lovers and the Dealers and the quote.
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Ever since I heard Rodney Foster back in the day, rucker told Tim Summer, I would say I'm going to make a country record someday. It was like a mantra in my head. My original thought was that I was going to do this in my basement or in some small studio in South Carolina with my buddies and I would have some fun doing it and that's all it was going to be. Doc McGee, Hooty's manager, had other ideas. He'd heard Rucker murmuring about wanting to do a country record, and he decided to call Mike Dungan, the president of Capitol Records Nashville, and see if he might be interested in signing Rucker to a country recording contract. Amazingly, Dungan said yes. This was amazing and risky for two reasons. As Darius told Tim Sommer, it was the race thing and the pop thing, unquote. Let's talk about the pop thing first. For decades, pop acts have tried to cross over to the country charts and vice versa. Those that start out country, like Dolly Parton or Taylor Swift, generally stay welcome at the country format. But so called carpetbaggers who go from pop to country are given generally a chillier greeting. In the aughts alone, several pop carpetbaggers had run aground on the country charts. Folk pop singer Jewel got no higher than number 13 on on Billboard's Hot Country Songs with her many crossover attempts. Rap rocker Kid Rock tried even harder to cross country with hits like Picture.
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I Put your Picture Away, Sat down and Cried Today.
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While his duet version with country singer Alison Moorer did reach a respectable number 21 on the country chart, most of his solo tracks on that chart did worse. Indeed, the country duet version of a prior pop song is a fairly common country crossover gambit. For example, a re recording of Bon Jovi's who says you can't Go Home with country star Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland went all the way to number one on Billboard's Hot Country Songs in 2006. We'll give Nettles the win on that one. But Jon Bon Jovi's other attempts at country crossover charted, thankfully much lower. Basically, attempts by pop carpetbaggers to present themselves as credible country soloists, as Darius Rucker was now about to attempt, generally hit a wall. And then, looming much larger, there was the race thing. The country establishment's embrace of black performers was, to say the least, not great. Infamously, Ray Charles's legendary 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music generated no country hits, despite topping both the pop and R B charts and having country right in the title. Not unlike Bon Jovi, Ray Charles would need a duet with an established country star to top the country chart. He scored his only country number one in 1985 in a duet with Willie Nelson called Seven Spanish Angels.
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Angel Home There were seven Spanish Angels.
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For decades, there was really only one shining exception to the posity of African Americans in the format. One of the greatest stars period in country chart history, Charlie Pry.
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You got to kiss an angel good morning and let her know you think about her when you're gone.
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With 29 country number ones between 1969 and 1983, Pride was one of the 10 biggest hitmakers ever in the genre. And by 2008, no solo black performer since Pride, again not counting Ray Charles in his duet with Willie Nelson, had topped the country chart. So by signing to Capitol Nashville, Darius Rucker was looking to change a lot of entrenched bias in country history, which makes what he pulled off all the more remarkable. Rucker worked solidly within the Nashville system, producing his country debut album, Learn to Live, with established producer Frank Rogers, who'd worked with country hit makers like Brad Paisley, Trace Adkins and Josh Turner. Rucker co wrote nearly every track, working alongside journeyman songwriters like Clay Mills, Chris dubois, Rivers Rutherford and on the album opener, Forever Road, a still relatively unknown Chris Stapleton. What was most freeing for Darius Rucker was singing in his natural South Carolina accent. Rucker's Southern drawl had, of course, always peaked out in his Hootie and the Blowfish material. It was apparent from the start on Hold My Hand. But Rucker gave it full voice on his country album, most especially on its lead single, the aching mid tempo story song Don't Think I Don't Think about it, which came complete with lyrics about whiskey tail lights and dusty roads.
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But don't think I don't think about it, don't think I don't have regrets, don't think I don't get to me.
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Released in the spring of 2008, don't think I Don't Think about it debuted on Hot country songs at number 51 and began a steady march upward for the next five months. Slow climbs are commonplace on the country charts. Even established superstars are expected to earn their embrace by radio listeners. But Darius Rucker's ascent was more suspenseful than most. Could Capitol Records get country fans who'd cast a shady eye at Jewel, Kid Rock and Bon Jovi to accept the former frontman of Hootie and the Blowfish Fish? Never mind the whole race thing. The answer? Yes they could. On the Billboard charts, dated October 4, 2008, Darius Rucker pulled off a double triumph in its 23rd week on Hot Country Songs, don't think I Don't Think about it rose to number one. It therefore became the first country number one by a black soloist since Charley Pride's final chart topper, Night Games, in 1983, a full quarter century earlier.
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Oh we playing Night Game, Night Game.
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That Same week in 2008, on the Top Country Albums chart, Rucker's Learn to Live album debuted at number one just one month before Barack Obama was elected as the first black president in American history. The number one country single and album in America were by Darius Rucker. Anyone who expected Rucker's country chart conquest to be a fluke were disabused of that notion right quick. The follow up single It Won't Be like this For Long also rose to number one in the spring of 2009. In fact, Learn to Live wound up generating four massive country hits back to back to back. In addition to its first two chart toppers, the celebratory uptempo all right also reached number one, And History in the making reached number three by the time it peaked in March of 2010, learn to live was platinum.
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History in the Making.
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Foreign it's important to note that at this time, Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart was composed entirely of country radio data. Not single sales, downloads and streams would be added to the chart a few years later. So these high chart peaks of Rutgers did not reflect digital consumption by Old Hootie and the Blowfish fans. These were songs that country radio listeners across America were hearing in heavy rotation every day. In his early 40s, Darius Rucker had established himself among the top tier of country hitmakers, alongside the likes of Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith and Rascal Flats.
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Because I didn't know I needed you.
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Darius Rucker then went on, over the course of his first decade as an official country singer, to score seven number one country hits out of a dozen top tens. The Rucker chart topper that pop crossover fans are likeliest to know was his 2013 number one, which has an interesting backstory. Bob Dylan wrote only a fragment of what became Wagon wheel back in 1973 as a demo for his soundtrack for the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dylan left the song unfinished. Nonetheless, it circulated widely as a bootleg called Rock me mama. In 2003, Catch Secor, a member of the Americana string band Old Crow Medicine show, got a hold of Dylan's fragment, added new verses to his original chorus, gave it a two step tempo, and released it in 2004 and as a full song now called Wagon Wheel. When Catch Secor attempted to publish his version of the song and Bob Dylan learned of its existence, Dylan agreed to a 5050 publishing split, making Catch C Corp. Was one of a handful of songwriters to receive co writing credit with Bob Dylan. Though Old Crow Medicine show were not big country hitmakers, their version of the song became a standard and a bar room sing along. Reportedly, some barrooms instituted no Wagon Wheel policies as the song spread very gradually. Old Crow's version sold about a million copies over a decade. Then finally in 2013, Darius Rucker had a turn with it. Rutger's Wagon Wheel was an across the board smash. It not only topped Billboard's country airplay chart and Hot Country Songs, which now included digital data, it sold so well it reached number 15 on the Hot 100, the highest any of Rutgers solo singles ever went on the pop chart.
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I made it down the coast in 17 hours picking me a bouquet.
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Rucker's Wagon Wheel was certified for sales of 3 million downloads by 2014. Later in the decade, when streams were added to the RIAA's formula, the song was recertified diamond for over 10 million in sales and streams. As of 2022, Wagon Wheel was 11 times platinum and is probably being sung in a bar somewhere as I speak. In a way, Wagon Wheel is a metaphor for Darius Rucker's improbable career. A song originally based in folk and rock transformed into something like a Americana and crossing over with both country and pop listeners. It is of many genres and supersedes genre. Like Rucker himself, the members of Hootie and the Blowfish stayed in touch during the 2010s and Rucker's rise to country superstardom. When David Letterman announced his retirement from late night Television in 2015, the band reconvened for a final performance on Dave's Soundstage of Hold My Hand, the song that had catapulted them to fame in that same venue 21 years earlier.
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Our next guests are made their television debut. Listen to this back in 1994 oh my God, is that possible?
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Hootie and the Blowfish.
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With a little look handsome tenderness Three.
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Years later, Hoodie announced a tour to commemorate the 25th anniversary of their debut album, Cracked Rear View. The Tour, which hit 44 cities in 2019, was, according to the band, more lucrative than any they had played before, and not just because of higher ticket prices. They played to more than 650,000 people, a larger crowd than in their chart topping 90s heyday. The combination of Hootie nostalgia and Rucker's country stardom made the tour a near sellout. That same year, the whole band signed to the Capitol Nashville label. Hootie and the Blowfish were on a major label again, the same label that had issued Darius Rucker's solo work. Accordingly, for their 2019 comeback album, Imperfect Circle, Hooty recorded more overtly country material than ever in their career, although frankly, in a post Eric Church world country music with rock guitars was now so commonplace, Hoodie didn't sound drastically different than in their old days. The Hootie comeback album didn't produce any big radio hits, but it did reach number 26 on the Billboard 200, higher than any Hoodie album since Musical Chairs, and reached number three on the Country Albums chart. Perhaps Hootie and the Blowfish should have been on that chart a lot sooner. Genre boundaries were more hidebound. In the mid-90s were a cracked Rear View released today, much of its material would, with minimal tweaking, qualify for country radio. Even though at root, Hoodie's music was always fundamentally pop music wrought from the ashes of 80s college rock and the many musical influences of Darius Rucker's tape collection. Maybe that's why those University of South Carolina football fans sing along so enthusiastically with Hold My Hand. To this day, none of the current U. Of S.C. college students were alive when Hootie and the Blowfish ruled the Billboard 200 or were a plot point on Friends. Hooty's and Rucker's biggest hits were inspired by hipsters like R.E.M. and Bob Dylan, but the end product isn't and never was hip. Maybe critics be damned, that's what still makes it music for everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis. Kevin also produced the latest installment of our monthly Hit Parade the Bridge shows, which are available exclusively to Slate plus members. In our latest Bridge episode, I talked to author and former A and R man Tim Sommer about how he signed Hootie and the Blowfish and helped them navigate the major label system. To sign up for Slate plus and hear not only the Bridge but all our shows the day they drop, visit slate.com hitparade + Derek John is executive Producer of Narrative Podcasts and Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio for Slate Podcasts. Check out the their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanfi.