On a warm, bright day in Columbia, South Carolina, the rock band Hootie & the Blowfish find themselves struggling to do something they used to do with ease: keep a very low profile. The occasion is the city's annual St.Patrick's Day celebration. It's considered a big event--although, truth be told, just about anything that carries with it the promise of free music and cheap beer is considered a big event in this frat-heavy college town. The members of Hootie, hometown heroes who made it big, have decided to join the festivities unannounced. The other acts are mostly smaller, local ones with monikers that evoke the names of long shots on racing forms--Cowboy Mouth, Gracie Moon, Treadmill Trackstar. So it's sure to cause a commotion when Hootie--a band that has sold 13 million copies and counting of its debut album, Cracked Rear View--suddenly shows up and starts playing at one of the dozen or so small festival stages. Says drummer Jim ("Soni") Sonefeld: "It's outdoors, there are a lot of drunks, it's our hometown--this has the potential for being really out of control." He says this happily.
Late in the afternoon, the four members of Hootie & the Blowfish--singer Darius Rucker, guitarist Mark Bryan, bassist Dean Felber and Sonefeld--leave the small bar where they have been hiding/waiting/drinking and head to a tent behind the stage where they are scheduled to perform. The crowd begins murmuring in delight and shock as word spreads that the band is backstage. A chant builds: Hoot-ie! Hoot-ie! But just then--and, if you're a student of outdoor rock festivals, you knew this would happen--it begins to rain. Hard. Noah's ark hard. But at this point, there is no turning back. Everyone in Columbia, practically everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line, knows Hootie is lurking. By the time the band waits out the rain, its entrance will be about as much of a surprise as the appearance of one of its ubiquitous videos on VH1. Bryan is crushed. He unleashes what, for him, is the ultimate epithet: "Bummer.''
A scant two years ago, surprising people was a snap for the unknown, unheralded, alarmingly goofy-named Hootie & the Blowfish. When the band released Cracked Rear View, in 1994, it came across as something fresh and different, in large part because it didn't try to come across as anything fresh or different. Modern rock needed some new life, figuratively and literally--Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder's misunderstood-misanthrope act got tired about five seconds after Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain's suicidally depressive lyrics turned out to be all too genuine. Hootie was embraced as an alternative to alternative, a straight-ahead zig to the posturing zag of the rest of contemporary rock, and Cracked Rear View, with its brawny, melodic, heartfelt songs, went on to become the second best-selling debut of all time.