Hootie & the Blowfish, Great American Rock Band (Yes, Really)

Hootie & the Blowfish remember all the slights.

Trent Reznor saying “Death to Hootie & the Blowfish” in a Rolling Stone interview. An executive at the band’s record label calling “Cracked Rear View” — the album that would go on to sell millions and cement the group’s place in pop history — “unreleaseable.” Garth Brooks declining the artist of the year trophy at the 1996 American Music Awards because he knew Hootie had a better year than he did but wasn’t being properly recognized.

Even in the years before Hootie, an earnest and deceptively easygoing roots-rock band, became a global pop phenomenon, there were indignities. The South by Southwest festival turned them down, year after year. Record labels sent stiff rejection letters.

Still, Hootie persevered, thriving in the face of indifference. “If you played Hootie you were uncool,” Darius Rucker, the band’s frontman, said. “You know, I understood. It got so big.”

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Late last year, Rucker, 53, and the band — the guitarist Mark Bryan, 52; the drummer Jim (Soni) Sonefeld, 54; and the bassist Dean Felber, 51 — gathered at the office the group has maintained for almost three decades in Columbia, S.C., where they met during college and first formed as a cover band, to discuss years of getting short shrift.

The conversation was boisterous, cathartic. Rucker, 52, fluently profane and exasperated about the vast chasm between the group’s outsize success and its general critical dismissal, said that he’d recently watched CNN’s docu-series on the 1990s, executive-produced by Tom Hanks (among others), and was frustrated to see that Hootie hadn’t even rated a mention.

“How the [expletive] can you do a show about ’90s music and not mention ‘Cracked?’” he asked, tying up his complaint with a coarse bow: “[Expletive] Tom Hanks!”

Released with something of a whimper in July 1994, three months after Kurt Cobain’s death, “Cracked Rear View” went on to become one of the defining albums of the 1990s, spawning three indelible, sublime Top 10 hits: “Hold My Hand,” “Let Her Cry” and “Only Wanna Be With You.” It’s is the 10th most successful album of all time in this country according to Recording Industry Association of America certification.

For about 18 months, there was no more prominent artist in music: On an episode of the second season of “Friends,” Ross gets Hootie tickets for his birthday; “Saturday Night Live” mocked Rucker as the leader of a frat nation. The band won two Grammys in 1996, including best new artist. After that, however, came a precipitous drop. Hootie became, to some, a punch line — shorthand for the kind of middlebrow rock music that arrived in the wake of grunge’s demise.

In the 25 years since the release of “Cracked Rear View,” the band has been generally reviled, or shrugged off, or forgotten. At minimum, it is excluded from conversations about the great rock music of the 1990s. When Hootie was functioning at an exceptionally high level, it was not perceived as functioning at an exceptionally high level. And once the band began to recede from the center of pop, it was effectively erased.

Since 2010, Hootie’s activity has been largely limited to playing annual charity shows. But this year, it plans to release its first studio album since 2005, and it’s just begun a four-plus-month tour of arenas and amphitheaters marking the 25th anniversary of “Cracked Rear View” that includes two sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden in August. Suddenly, Hootie is back.

Let me stop here to emphasize a truth that has gone unsaid for too long: At its peak, Hootie & the Blowfish was a genuinely excellent band. Earthen, soothing, a little ragged. And also deft, flexible and unflashily skilled. It splendidly blended the Southern college rock of the late 1980s (the dBs, R.E.M.) with shades of vintage soul, bluegrass, blues and more, rendering it all with omnivorous-bar-band acuity. In the gap between late grunge and the commercial rise of hip-hop and rap-rock, Hootie was a balm.

This is perhaps one of the last unpopular opinions. Hootie has hovered in a critical no man’s land for decades — not a cause célèbre for progressive young thinkers, not outré enough in its day enough to merit reassessment. Especially in the 1990s, when subculture was brand, Hootie’s evident (but misleading) plainness was a team no one wanted to bat for. (There was also the dismal, unforgettable name, an amalgam of two college friends’ nicknames. A residue nothing could wash off.)

To become aggressively uncool, you have to at least engage with the axis of cool. But Hootie never even bothered. Its music was a refinement of an intensely vernacular sound. “I think everyone in America and the world was trying to be the next cool thing, you know, and no one was really worried about just writing great songs,” said Felber, the group’s pragmatist, in late March, during a band recording session in Nashville.

For the three years before the release of “Cracked Rear View,” grunge had dominated the American rock music conversation, an ostensible triumph of gritty, real-emotion guitar music over the blowhard arena rock of the 1980s, and gangster rap was experiencing its first mainstream success. The country was hovering at a steady boil — the first gulf war, the Los Angeles uprisings, an economic recession. Pop music was tense and serrate.

And then came Hootie, catapulted to success not by critics, or alternative-rock radio, but by an appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman.”

“The day grunge ended,” Rucker said plainly, as if relating an uncomfortable but incontrovertible fact.

“We had just gone through three or four years of record sales not being that good, and grunge being the big thing on the radio,” he continued. “And then all of a sudden we’re saying, ‘Hold my hand.’ You know, these great little hooks that were undeniable, and people wanted to hear that. They wanted to hear it again and again.”

By the beginning of 1995, Hootie was approaching saturation levels. At this point, though, Hootie was already several years deep into its career — road-tested in bars, frat houses, dank basements and shoddy venues long before it headlined arenas. It made the members realists. “As much as we didn’t think we were uncool when it was ending, when it was on a decline, we knew we weren’t that big when it was big,” Rucker said. “We knew we weren’t that good.”

It made them more sanguine about how critics treated them, too. “We didn’t wear the right clothes, we didn’t have the right look, we didn’t portray the right thing,” said Sonefeld, the band’s earnest mystic, now shorn of his trademark party-length long hair. “And when you do that you’re just going to get dogged.”

And so even though Hootie had some compatriots — Gin Blossoms, Dave Matthews Band, Toad the Wet Sprocket — in the retrospectives of the 1990s, it became a footnote, a casualty of a war it never asked to fight. Unlike other pop success stories that critics later fumbled over themselves to ascribe meaning to, or to divine meaning beneath during the more pop-friendly critical environs of the 2000s, Hootie remained unloved, if thought of at all.

Not anymore: It’s time to bring Hootie in from the cold.

The first thing you notice when you return to “Cracked Rear View” now is how ramshackle and loose at the edges it feels. Even though the songs are sturdy, it feels remarkably hand spun. And it offered a tonic: Optimistic harmonies drive it from the very beginning.

But this joy wasn’t uncritically ebullient — beneath each of its healing lyrics was something broken. The band’s high-water mark is “Let Her Cry,” a slow, triumphant blues about losing someone to their demons, and a bravura performance by Rucker. “Hold My Hand,” a spectacularly comfy and genial-seeming roots-rock song that was the band’s breakthrough hit, is a “protest song,” Rucker said. “For me that song was always about racism.”

Hootie was forged in the fire of resistance, not bonhomie. Rucker and his bandmates formed a close bond in their college years, occasionally having to fight their way out of a racist fraternity party after someone hurled bigoted language at Rucker. Once, at the University of Tennessee, Rucker observed a white student turn to his friend, praise the band, then sling a racial epithet about him. “He just said that right in front of me,” he recalled. Seeing what Rucker went through, Sonefeld said, “made us a tighter fellowship.”

After a soft guitar figure, Rucker opened “Hold My Hand” with a stanza invoking gospel, soul and blues:

With a little love, and some tenderness
We’ll walk upon the water, we’ll rise above the mess
With a little peace, and some harmony
We’ll take the world together, we’ll take ’em by the hand

In the South where he was raised, such notions of comity — sung by a black man fronting a white band — could be taken as radical. During the “Letterman” performance of “Hold My Hand” that catapulted the band into the national spotlight, Rucker sang with a voice that verged on scarred; behind him, the rest of the band propped him up with hope.

That balance was the hallmark of the best Hootie songs. Rucker has — no exaggeration — one of the great voices in contemporary pop music, a dynamic and sophisticated baritone that’s full of gravity. It ensured that even the brightest Hootie songs weren’t frivolous, and has secured him a long-running second career as a country music star. The rest of the band makes spry work of otherwise staid idioms. Bryan is a patient decorator with guitar, never overpowering an arrangement, and as a rhythm section, Felber and Sonefeld are insistent but amiable.

On the underappreciated remainder of “Cracked Rear View,” — which has just been rereleased in a deluxe box including remasters, rarities, and live versions — Hootie addressed social issues head on. Rucker sang of “Children killing in the street/Dying for the color of a rag” on “Time,” and on the harder-rock “Drowning,” took on the South’s reluctance to let go of the Confederacy: “Why is there a rebel flag hanging from the state house walls?/Tired of hearing this [expletive] about heritage not hate.”

That Rucker was as much agitator as pacifier wasn’t something critics took much note of. And when the band returned with its follow-up, “Fairweather Johnson,” two years later, the bubble had somehow already burst. Hootie was stupefyingly famous, until it wasn’t. The fall happened quick. After 1996, the year Hootie won two Grammys, it never again cracked the Billboard Hot 100, and after 1998, none of its albums placed in the Top 40 of the album chart.

Even throughout the following stretch, during which Hootie released an album every few years, very little changed about the band or its music; its second and third studio albums have several strong songs, as does its covers album. Unlike many artists faced with the task of maintaining popularity in the face of rapidly changing tastes, Hootie simply opted out, sticking to what it knew best.

“I don’t know if finding a different gear would’ve been authentic,” Sonefeld said. “We didn’t sell out,” he added. “We were true to ourselves, you know?”

All the while, behind the scenes, Hootie was having a more robust, wilder time than anyone picked up on. “To be honest with you, our lifestyle when we were really rolling on the road probably wasn’t that much different than a lot of the heavier rock bands. We just never got into heroin,” said Bryan, who still brims with childlike enthusiasm. “But, you know, the drugs were there, the women were there, all that — we lived a rock-star life for sure.” (For a while Hootie sold condoms at the merch table: “Cover Your Hootie.”)

Rucker recalled one peak-era night of debauchery, observed alongside a longtime friend, Woody Harrelson. “We were having this party at the Chateau Marmont in L.A., and this party is on,” he said. His eyebrows did a leap. “Something’s going on,” he emphasized, declining to go into details. “I turn to Woody and I go, ‘Dude, I’m from South Carolina. This [expletive] doesn’t happen.’ He said, ‘Man, I live in L.A. and this [expletive] doesn’t happen.’”

Eventually, a hard life on the road coupled with the band’s decline in popularity caused an implosion. Bryan, Felber and Sonefeld all went through divorces. Sonefeld became sober in 2004, and in 2008, he told the other members he needed to stop touring, effectively putting Hootie on hiatus.

In the last decade, Rucker has become one of country music’s biggest stars, not a complete shock, given that Hootie provided a template for the roots-rock that occupies such a prominent spot near the center of contemporary country music: Zac Brown Band, Luke Combs, Eli Young Band. “‘Cracked Rear View’ would have to be a country record today,” Rucker said.

That might say less about country music than it says about the desiccated state of contemporary rock. The sort of centrist, agnostic, big-tent rock that Hootie specialized in, and that served as a bridge between eras of far more abrasive material, has all but vanished from the rock mainstream, inasmuch as there is even a rock mainstream anymore.

Which is one reason the band isn’t sure where its forthcoming album — to be released on a country label, Capitol Nashville (which also puts out Rucker’s solo work) — might fit in. When Hootie was in Nashville in March, it recorded familiar-feeling songs written by band members, and also “Wildfire Love,” which Rucker recently wrote with Ed Sheeran, and which has Sheeran’s weightless melodies delivered with Hootie’s trademark patina.

When collaborating with songwriters for the album, the band had one dictum. “We don’t want you to write the Hootie song ” Rucker said. “Write a song and we’ll make it sound like Hootie.”

That’s what they did at the opening night of the new tour, at the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater at Virginia Beach in late May. After preshow shots with the crew and opening act, Barenaked Ladies — toasting, in Hootie tradition, to Slash, an early rock-star inspiration — and after an introduction recorded by Samuel L. Jackson played over the loudspeakers, the band took the stage.

Rucker was magnetic, fully in control of his voice. Bryan, playing barefoot, occasionally windmilled his guitar. The band was impressively flexible — rowdy country funk on the bawdy “Go and Tell Him (Soup Song),” a summery yet tragic “Alone,” gut-punch piano balladry on “Goodbye.” Covers of songs by R.E.M., Led Zeppelin and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” as well as tracks by Public Enemy and Digital Underground (with Bryan rapping the Shock G parts).

In moments, the show felt like a confident victory lap, but more often, the mastery and flair was unfussy, a well-oiled working band hitting its marks with factory precision.

Out at the merchandise booth, beer koozies were $5 and socks were $25. For $40, though, you could support the band finally leaning in to its awkward pop antihero status by taking home a T-shirt that trumpets, in a bulbous 1970s font, “I Still Like Hootie, Bitch.”