Darius Rucker.Photo:Jim Wright
Jim Wright
There’s a storyDarius Ruckerand hisHootie & the Blowfishbandmates tell over and over and again each time they hang out. The group was set to see the Ramones play a show, but after a day of drinking, Rucker was passed out, and had every intention of staying that way.
Enter guitarist Mark Bryan. “I just remember Mark beating me silly to make me wake up and saying, ‘You’re going to the Ramones,’” Rucker recalls in this week’s issue of PEOPLE. “And to this day, it’s the best show I’ve ever seen.”
Hootie’s ‘90s heyday may have come and gone, but that easy camaraderie between Rucker, Bryan, and bandmates Dean Felber and Jim Sonefeld has remained in the years since, even as Rucker, 57, has pursued a solo career in country music (Hisnew album,Carolyn’s Boy, is out now).
“We’re still friends. We still talk all the time. We go to football games together,” he says. “What we have as friends transcends [fame] because we went through so much together that even if we say tomorrow, Hootie & the Blowfish is never going to play again, I think the four of us would still be friends.”
Hootie & the Blowfish at the 1996 Grammy Awards.SGranitz/WireImage
SGranitz/WireImage
The quartet first crossed paths in 1986 as students at the University of South Carolina, where they named their group after the nicknames of two friends.
For years, they toiled in obscurity, playing frat parties for $30 a gig, until 1994, when their debut albumCracked Rear Viewbroke through to the mainstream (The album remains one of the best-selling albums of all time, and earned the group two Grammys at the 1996 ceremony).
“[My Hootie bandmates and I] are still a bunch of dorks. Fame and money have made it more fun to be a dork, but we’re still those four geeks running all over the country who don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Rucker says of the group’s everyman appeal. “We were always the guys next door— everyone looked at us and went, ‘I could hang out with those guys.’”
Even so, the “Beers and Sunshine” singer says that critics often left the musicians feeling as though they had “to prove something” to naysayers.
Hootie & the Blowfish (L-R Dean Felber, Jim Sonefeld, Darius Rucker, Mark Bryan) perform on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1994.Alice S. Hall/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
Alice S. Hall/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
“That was tough to go through,” he says. “We sold all these records, we played all these shows, and here we are, still having to prove ourselves. But it made us stronger. It made success even sweeter.”
After releasing a steady stream of albums in the ‘90s and early 2000s, Hootie took a break after their fifth album,Looking for Lucky, in 2005, as Rucker found success as a solo country artist. In 2019, the group reunited for a reunion tour and a new album titledImperfect Circle.
“At the end of the day, we really like each other. I don’t know if we’ll ever make a record again. I’m sure we’ll play shows again. I’m sure Mark’s going to want to make a record again, so we probably will,” Rucker says. “I’m not going to say we’re not going to make a record again. I just know nobody’s calling me up right now and saying, ‘Let’s make a record.’”
For more on Darius Rucker, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.
source: people.com
