Hootie and the Blowfish followed up their third album with a collection of covers titled Scattered, Smothered and Covered, a name they borrowed from a Waffle House advertisement.
The band rolls through 15 tracks of enjoyable bar rock, mostly covering artists I don’t know, though they do include tracks from R.E.M., The Smiths, Roy Orbison and Led Zeppelin (today’s SOTD, one of the album’s standout tracks).
While I did buy Hootie and the Blowfish’s 1996 sophomore effort, Fairweather Johnson, when it was released, that marked the end of my fandom. Like most of the world, I tuned out after that.
So their third album, 1998’s Musical Chairs, is completely new to me. And that’s a shame, because after a couple of listens, and despite the major hits on their debut, I think this album is better than either of the first two.
Back in 2012, I posted a track from Hootie and the Blowfish’s 1994 smash Cracked Rear View, marveled at the meteoric rise and just-as-quick fall of the band, and suggested that “it’s about time it became cool to like Hootie again.”
I guess I was on to something. The band is currently packing arenas on a reunion tour, and recently the New York Times’ pop music critic Jon Caramanica published a piece titled ‘Hootie & the Blowfish, Great American Rock Band (Yes, Really).’
Of all the songs I’m writing about over the next couple of weeks, this throwaway pop hit by Hootie & The Blowfish is the one that I most felt was written with me in mind.
In 1994, I was a couple of years into my relationship with the woman who would become my wife, and this song became our unofficial anthem because it so eerily described us.
Hootie & the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View was the best-selling non-country, non-soundtrack album of the 90s. That seems like a lot of qualifiers, I know, but coming in fourth to Garth Brooks, Shania Twain and The Bodyguard isn’t too shabby.
Cracked Rear View sold more than 16 million units, a number unimaginable today. Consider that Adele’s current amazing yearlong streak has amounted to about 7 million sales and you’ll get an idea of how much different the landscape is now.
