Esquire Exclusive: “We must reckon with what we have done to Hootie and the Blowfish”
January 10, 2019As Hootie & the Blowfish prepare for their Group Therapy Tour, Esquire welcomes their return with a comical look at the band’s history.
“The Blowfish Backlash was the debut of a very new-millennium kind of viciousness, and it came out of nowhere. The band’s 1994 major-label debut, Cracked Rear View, was a staple of every college party, sports bar, and pleasant mainstream rock station of mid-1990s. By the end of 1999, the album had sold 16 million copies, and it still sits in the list of top 20 best-selling albums of all time, where it will probably stay forever because nobody’s ever going to buy albums again.
And then came 1996’s Fairweather Johnson, a perfectly respectable sophomore release. An improvement even. I mean, ‘Sad Caper?’ Deep Blue Something – the band behind the ’95 hit ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ – could never.
Fairweather Johnson sold 2.3 million copies, and instantly Hootie and the Blowfish became a joke. One could not even say the name of the band without a big roll of the eyes…. We wanted something edgier and darker than the music of Monica and Ross Geller. We longed for grit, realism. Give us Dishwalla, we said.”
Read the full article here.
