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If the Chicago Bulls have become America's Team, Hootie & the Blowfish are now America's Band--down-home, upbeat and immensely popular, a group of rock stars who don't look or act like rock stars. Typically dressed in baseball caps and baggy jeans, they look as if they're about to do some farm work or finish the back nine. While Rucker, 29, and Felber, 28, are still single, Bryan, 28, and Sonefeld, 31, are both engaged, settling down. All four still live in Columbia, within walking distance of one another, in homes that are sizable but modest (Sonefeld's pad boasts a Foosball table--the perfect just-a-guy, have-a-beer, I-love-you-man touch). But don't let the downscale bonhomie deceive you; the band is a corporate money machine. Cracked Rear View cost around $200,000 to make and generated more than $100 million in gross revenues for Atlantic Records, Hootie's label (owned, it should be noted, by Time Warner, which owns TIME).
That's the kind of return on an investment that would make Silicon Valley instantaires envious--and now Hootie is back for an encore. This week the band will release its eagerly awaited second album, titled Fairweather Johnson. Although Atlantic Records head Val Azzoli is cannily trying to lower expectations--"I don't want to overhype the record," he says, "because I know we're not going to do what Cracked Rear View did"--at the same time he's vigorously cranking up the hype machine. MTV will air a Hootie Unplugged special on April 22; just after midnight, Hard Rock Cafes around the country will hold listening parties at which the new CD will be sold. The day the CD comes out, the band will appear on Late Night with David Letterman. And, thanks to encouragement from Atlantic, Wal-Mart stores will be stacking Fairweather Johnson right next to the cash register, so patrons will have no trouble picking up a copy with their next bag of Lawn Gro.
Overall record sales were flat last year, and the industry could use a megahit. But while music-industry suits may be understandably breathless about Fairweather Johnson's impending release, not everyone is panting. Now that Cracked Rear View has sold more copies in the U.S. than any single album by Pearl Jam, U2, the Rolling Stones and even the Beatles, the Hootie backlash has begun. A page surfaced on the Internet recently calling for readers to join PAHB--Peoples Against Hootie & the Blowfish. This week the New York Times dismissed Rucker as rock's "reigning crybaby," a reference to his emotive lyrics. Some of the criticism cuts deeper. A writer for the Village Voice compared the band to a minstrel show, and Saturday Night Live did a sketch where Rucker leads beer-swilling white frat boys in a countermarch to Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March (apparently, to the mostly white staff at SNL, successful blacks must be sellouts).