Darius Rucker on country music, race and drugs: ‘I don’t think anyone tried harder than us’ | Music

Darius Rucker will be the first to admit that his memory can be fuzzy – he says on the first page of his memoir that his years as lead singer of American rock band Hootie & the Blowfish were a blur of fame, drugs and ” close personal relationships.” friend Jim Beam” – but he’s always armed with numbers. There’s also the runaway success of the band’s debut album, Cracked Rear View, which became the most popular record of 1994 and remains the 11th best-selling album of all time in the United States. There’s the negative reactions to the band’s mid-’90s ubiquity and sudden fall from fame, playing to 8,000 people in a 14,000-seat venue just two years after rocking stadiums. Then there are the odds Rucker faced as a middle-aged black man attempting a second career in country music, when he became the first black artist to score a No. 1 hit in 25 years .

Rucker, now in the second decade of his country career and a bonafide Nashville star, deploys these characters more casually in Life’s Too Short, his new memoir, and in amiable conversation peppered with uproarious laughter. Among them: the number of times he sang Nanci Griffith’s I Wish It Could Rain on his mother’s deathbed (at least 100); the amount his largely absent father asked for when he got back in touch at the height of the group’s popularity ($50,000); the number of radio stations he personally visited in 2008 to play his first country single (110); the number of ecstasy pills purchased from a dealer on a whim during a Hootie Stadium tour (2,000, for $30,000 in cash – “and we did them all,” he laughs over Zoom from his home in Nashville). “I thought about taming it, but then I always said that if I wrote the book, I was going to tell the truth,” he says of the latter statistic, “and the truth is that when we were going, I don’t think anyone tried harder than us.

The truth is also that Hootie & the Blowfish, although much maligned in its day – too average, too nice, too fratty – is one of the great American rock groups, and Rucker one of its most versatile and the most powerful. Released in July 1994, three months after Kurt Cobain’s death, Cracked Rear View ushered in a new era of more serious, jagged roots rock, to word-of-mouth popularity and the chagrin of critics. (“Grunge was beloved by critics, and we were the band that started its downfall. So we didn’t stand a chance with the critics,” Rucker says matter-of-factly.) Still, the album scored three hits in the Top 10 – Hold My Hand, Only Wanna Be with You and Let Her Cry – and two Grammys, including Best New Artist. A college bar band at heart, Hootie’s image was relaxed and unpretentious, their music free, lived-in, unpretentious. The guy in easy, constant rotation in my dad’s car, in my friend’s dad’s car, eventually in my car. But Rucker’s voice, a full, woody baritone, gave the songs weight. Just listen to Let Her Cry, a bluesy ballad about losing someone to their demons that, sung by Rucker, sounds like a downpour.

Rucker knew he wanted to be a singer from the age of six, when he performed an entire Al Green album for his mother and friends in the living room with a salt shaker microphone. The fourth of five children, Rucker grew up in a crowded, noisy home in Charleston, South Carolina, with little money but constant music. His mother Carolyn was a nurse; his father made very rare and disappointing appearances, even though he lived in town. Rucker’s musical tastes were voracious and eclectic – Al Green, Kiss, REM, Radney Foster. His most prized possession was his boombox, until it was stolen and sold by his older brother, a drug addict about whom he writes sparingly. He regularly listened to records dozens of times in a row, memorizing every nuance and every breath.

In 1986, at the University of South Carolina, guitarist Mark Bryan heard Rucker singing Billy Joel in the shower and invited him to play over beers; the two began playing impromptu covers from their dorm room. They graduated from a local bar, with bassist Dean Felber and eventually drummer Jim “Soni” Sonefeld. Then frat parties, then bigger bars and clubs all over the southeast. Along the way, the group adopted its distinctive, arguably terrible, name, the portmanteau of two classmates’ nicknames. Hootie & the Blowfish began playing original music and gained a regional following through relentless touring and persistence in predominantly white spaces. “I was the only black face everywhere we went,” Rucker says. (The other band members are white.) “So we had to work harder, and we did. »

A performance on Letterman in October 1994 sent them stratospheric – 1 million records a month, an international tour, with Frank Sinatra. “We experienced what artists are experiencing today, this viral moment where you’re literally the most important thing in the world, and then all of a sudden your label goes backwards and things go backwards and you’re having a hard time with yourself get out of it,” Rucker said. . The rise was rapid, as was the backlash. (“Death to Hootie & the Blowfish,” Trent Reznor told Rolling Stone, for example.) The group’s second album, Fairweather Johnson, released in 1996, sold 2 million copies but was considered a failure ; subsequently, ticket and record sales fell precipitously.

Rucker is now “at peace” with their dizzying arc – “I think anything that big has to get some backlash,” he says – although he is openly frustrated by critics’ reluctance to reevaluate their importance, a glowing 2019 New York Times article for Cracked’s 25th anniversary. despite the birthday. “The fact that it’s been six years and we’ve never been on the ballot for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? I mean, it’s crazy to me. CNN can do a show about 90s music and never mention Hootie & the Blowfish. It’s crazy to me,” he says. Cracked just hit 22 million units sold all-time, he notes. “Go ahead, okay, this record mattered. People still want it. They still want to hear it. They still broadcast it.

As the band faded, Rucker harbored a long-held desire to move to Nashville – a steep hill to climb, given the industry’s distrust of outsiders and general hostility toward anyone other than men white, despite the genre’s roots in African-American musical traditions. Rucker was not naive; “I am certain that the powers that be in country music deliberately kept black artists out of the industry after Charley Pride,” he writes. Access control was difficult. He often heard that white audiences wouldn’t listen to a black country artist. “I was at a radio station and someone said it to my face,” he recalls. “It wasn’t like they were hiding it: ‘I’ll play your song, but I don’t think my audience will accept a black country singer.'”

Rucker considers himself lucky. He promoted tirelessly and quickly found success: his first country single went to number one, as did nine subsequent songs; his cover of Wagon Wheel from the Old Crow Medicine Show is one of the best-selling country songs of all time; he was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2012. But country music, as an industry, has been slow to change. Female artists received only 11% of all radio airplay in 2022; women of color and LGBTQ+ artists earned less than 1%. It wasn’t until this year that a black woman had a No. 1 country hit, and that woman was Beyoncé, for Texas Hold ‘Em. Still, Rucker is optimistic about the change he’s seen in his time, citing many black artists claiming Nashville – Kane Brown, Mickey Guyton, Rhiannon Giddens, Brittney Spencer, Chapel Hart, The War and the Treaty, Willie Jones and more Again. “I want country music to sound more like America,” he says. “I think it will continue to evolve. I think more and more people of color will get recording opportunities and contracts. » He also recalls advising Chapel Hart, a vocal group of three black women from Mississippi, to “exert themselves” when they had the chance. “Because we have to work harder than them, we do.”

The advice is in keeping with the way Rucker approaches the subject of race in his memoir – direct but brief, not dodging it but not dwelling on it either. “I didn’t want to sound like I was preaching about all the discrimination I felt or was around me because I fought against it,” he says when I ask him about it. “Just say what happened and move on.” That’s how I approached it. I don’t want people to come away from this book thinking that I felt sorry for myself or something, because I understood. This is America. That’s how it’s always been. Alright, now I have to work hard and get through this.

Life Is Too Short takes place through 2015, when Hootie reunited to perform for the final week of Letterman’s show, and includes “larger than life” moments characters – a near-drowning experience with Woody Harrelson, a close friend; singing for Tiger Woods, also a friend; Taylor Swift, whom he met when she was getting her start in country music; Adele, with whom he performed at the 2010 CMT Awards. He dedicates the book to his family, including his three adult children, and credits Beth Leonard, his wife of 20 years before their separation in 2020, with having saved his life. But their life is their story to tell, he said. These stories – the dream, the road, the rise, the fall and redemption, and above all the music – were his. “I hope people hear this story and see how honest I was in the book,” he says as we finish our conversation. And still representing Hootie, he adds: “I…