Hootie & The Blowfish highlight evening of '90s rock favorites at Bridgestone Arena
Three decades later, Hootie & the Blowfish have sold over 20 million copies of their 1994 debut album "Cracked Rear View." The event was cause for a Saturday night celebration at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena. Collective Soul and Edwin McCain joined the Darius Rucker-led act for a night of chart-topping radio and video-familiar favorites and sterling band performances.
If you were a Generation Xer or in the 36-54 age demographic, the night was solidly in your wheelhouse of songs ubiquitously attached to air guitar bedroom concerts, in-car vacation singalongs, or wooing potential mates.
Impressively, time has not worn the stylings of any of the acts onstage on Saturday night.
A half-century of Southern rock-inspired bar band hustle
A night when a trio of Southern rock acts play hits from roughly the same era deserves to be correctly couched in history. Rucker, via Hootie & the Blowfish covering "Losing My Religion," tipped his baseball cap to R.E.M.'s influence on his college junior-aged self at the University of South Carolina in 1988 to play covers of the band.
R.E.M. was still the Athens, Georgia-based and early 1980s University of Georgia-attending college band-to-mult-platinum global superstar success story that acts like Hootie & the Blowfish aimed to mimic.
Rucker and Mark Bryan were initially acoustic-punk duo The Wolf Brothers at U.S.C. When drummer Jim Sonenfeld joined Dean Felber to round out the unit, what Rucker referred to onstage before a countrified acoustic jam session (that included the Carter Family's "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" and later featured Rucker's cover of Old Crow Medicine Show's "Wagon Wheel") as "bluesgrass" became an essential facet of their sound.
A clear, Southern power-pop through line emerges when coupling what became Hootie's defining "acoustic punk 'bluesgrass'" with Atlanta-based Collective Soul's indie grunge sound and the indie rock Edwin McCain developed while cutting his teeth on South Carolina's Hilton Head Island.
But these are all still fundamentally (though black sequin-suited Collective Soul lead singer Ed Roland would state otherwise) T-shirt and jeans-wearing local bar bands that, similar to R.E.M., hustled to regional, national, and global acclaim.
Three decades later, the band's hit catalogs still stand the test of time. But it was in moments like Collective Soul and McCain covering AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap," or even when Hootie & the Blowfish blended a verse and chorus from Kool and the Gang's "Get Down On It" into "Only Wanna Be With You" that the core drive of their initial influences emerged, timeless as ever.
Collective Soul and Edwin McCain still deliver
Take away the two dozen undeniable '90s rock hits from the evening and these are all still rock-solid live acts capable of delivering a memorable night of entertainment.
While singing his 1996 hit rock ballad "I'll Be," McCain joked that the song's penultimate multi-octave vocal run appealed to his voice three decades ago. However, on the cusp of 60, he wasn't so fond of the idea. Still, though, McCain, 54, has been performing on stages for 90% of his life and has released two E.P.s and a Christmas album in the past decade. Thus, he's still a captivating live performer charismatic enough to energize a 15,000-seat arena with his personality alone.
Insofar as Collective Soul, their 1993 single "Shine" still, well, shines.
Once described by critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine as "a tremendous guilty pleasure, built on a guitar riff so indelible you swear it's stolen," — it was, at five minutes in length, an uncharacteristically long radio single that remained mega-popular for a half-decade.
Does it do the "triple guitar" thing that underpinned Lynyrd Skynyrd's timelessness? Yes. Is it played in the same A key as Pearl Jam's 1991 hit "Alive?" Absolutely. Does it hit like Led Zeppelin's most bombastic anthems? Assuredly.
Live at Bridgestone Arena, it slayed.
It set the stage for a set that highlighted other classics like their 15-week rock chart-topper "Heavy."
It's a huge, grooving, riff-led rocker that still sounds like a missile aimed at the pinnacle of mainstream cool.
Hootie headlines
On Saturday night, Hootie and the Blowfish's live set could've been "Cracked Rear View," front to back, and nobody would've minded it. Instead, they, as they have often since playing more significantly together again for the past five years, endeavored to deliver more.
When Rucker and the band's essential inspiration, Radney Foster, joined for "A Fine Line," their country rootings appeared. All manner of banjos, fiddles and mandolins are now part and parcel of the Hootie experience. The band, less tethered than ever to genre delineations — partly inspired by their lead singer's 10 country chart-toppers and Grand Ole Opry membership — has a musical freedom amidst them now that adds immeasurably to their live experience.
Does that also include the literal "f*** it" attitude that sees them interweave another band favorite, The Notorious B.I.G., into "When I Get To Heaven" via rapping sections of "Mo Money, Mo Problems," "Big Poppa" and "Hypnotize" over an extended breakdown? Absolutely.
And yes, there's Rucker, ever the consummate front-man, welcoming Christian star Matthew West onstage for "Hold My Hand," McCain back, again for a take on his 1992 debut single "Solitude," plus performing an excellent rendition of Stone Temple Pilots' "Interstate Love Song."
Was Rucker jealous that "Interstate Love Song" hit the top of Billboard's Mainstream Rock Chart while "Hold My Hand" stalled at No. 4? In fact, he admitted, in front of a capacity-filled Bridgestone Arena, that he was.
Rucker's also 58, just released a tell-all autobiography, and as a solo artist and Hootie & The Blowfish member, has sold 30 million albums in a 40-year career.
Instead of being embroiled in pettiness, he's singing joyfully about not just his and his band's success but about the success of his friends, too. The success they earned has created lifetimes of memories for themselves and their fans.
From bar stages to arena main stages, their catalogs have impressively endured.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Hootie & The Blowfish highlight evening of '90s rock favorites at Bridgestone Arena
