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Fairweather Johnson
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Date Aired
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November 19, 2019
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Running Time
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19:18
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TBA
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Website
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Todd: I... haven't really thought very hard about what qualifies for this show, but I get questions sometimes so I wanna be real clear about this: not every unsuccessful album is a Trainwreckord. Um, for example, Cyndi Lauper.
Video for Cyndi Lauper - "Girls Just Want To Have Fun"
Todd (VO): First Cyndi Lauper album, huge. [brief clips of Cyndi Lauper - "True Colors"...] Second one, wasn't really as good and didn't do quite as well; and [..."I Drove All Night"...] then the third album did kinda bad and...[and Cyndi Lauper & Alan Cumming performing "Pimp's Ballad" at the 2006 Tony Awards] she kinda goes away after that and she shifts her work to other media. Todd: That's... normal. That's a perfectly typical arc for a pop star. [graphic of declining graph] All careers end. And except for an elite few, no one finishes theirs on top. The name of the show is [shot of Trainwreckords logo] Trainwreckords. I'm looking for truly colossal disasters. It's gotta be something a little more noteworthy than just any old album that doesn't sell. But we're gonna make an exception today.
Audio for Hootie & the Blowfish - "Only Wanna Be with You" plays over concert footage
Todd (VO): If there is any band on Earth who shouldn't be on a show about spectacular failures, it is Hootie & the Blowfish. Todd: 'Cause they weren't a spectacular anything.
Clip of Hootie & the Blowfish - "Hold My Hand"
Darius Rucker: With a little love
And some tenderness
Todd (VO): One of the least pretentious and, let's be honest, least ambitious rock bands of the '90s, Hootie & the Blowfish's sound was so middle-of-the-road, it was like they'd scientifically pinpointed the exact [image of geometric diagram of...] mathematical center of the road with quantum precision. Todd: And it's weird 'cause on paper, they had a number of distinguishing characteristics.
Video for Hootie & the Blowfish - "Let Her Cry"
Todd (VO): Like their many hit singles, their frontman's distinct and sometimes overwrought vocals, the very fact of having a black singer in a lily-white genre, and just one of the [shot of Hootie & the Blowfish logo] stupidest names in the history of rock. And yet despite that, they never seemed more than just a bar band.
Todd: Bunch of regular guys with a band.
Todd (VO): Nothing at all particularly amazing about them. Except for one major thing.
Todd: They sold 20 million records.
Clip of the band accepting Pop/Rock Favorite New Artist Award at the 1996 American Music Awards
Todd (VO): Even for the '90s, when the record industry was still swimming in money, the number of CDs moved by this one band was absolutely nuts. [clip of MTV News interview] In the year 1995 alone, they sold 12 million copies of their [cover appears onscreen of their...] debut album, Cracked Rear View.
Clip of Charlie Rose interview with the band
Charlie Rose: According to The New York Times, 1 out of 27 Americans own at least one of their albums.
Todd (VO): That sounds like it can't be true. Todd: But trust me, I was there, they were actually that big.
Video for Hootie & the Blowfish - "Time"
Todd (VO): Even my father, who did not listen to modern rock, bought that album. Hootie crossed demographics, made oceans of cash. [clip of live performance] Hootie & the Blowfish was America's band. Todd: And then... they weren't.
Clip of Hootie & the Blowfish - "Tucker's Town"
Darius: Staring back at you
Todd (VO): I've joked before that Hootie's second album might as well have been shipped directly into the [shot of...] used CD rack. I don't know if anyone at the time realized this was a career killer...
Todd: ...but history has written it off as one of the slumpiest sophomore slumps ever recorded.
Todd (VO): No one was predicting it'd do Cracked Rear View numbers, but Hootie took a [screenshot of Los Angeles Times article: "It's Not Much to Hoot About"] staggering 80% drop in sales. [shot of album cover for...] Even the title, Fairweather Johnson, seemed to predict how fickle the Hootie craze was.
Another clip from Charlie Rose interview
Dean Felber: We're, you know, hoping that in 10 years we'll still be together and that people can look back at that point and say, you know, "Well they, they put out 5 really good albums".
Todd: Mm. Yeah, no.
Todd (VO): By the end of 1996, it already seemed like everyone had written off the Blowfish as a regrettable era best left in the past. And even Hootie's defenders nowadays don't really have any interest in revisiting their unloved follow-up.
Todd: Except me. 'Cause I gotta know...
Video for Hootie & the Blowfish - "Old Man & Me"
Todd (VO): How does a band sell 12 million records in one year and then just disappear? How? How how how how how? Todd: Well, slowly but surely, with a little love and some tenderness, we will find an answer for how and why the Hootie phenomenon ended just as bafflingly and abruptly as it started. [sighs] This is Trainwreckords.
Trainwreckords intro, followed by album cover for Fairweather Johnson
Todd: Every so often, a writer will get this kind of...bug in their head, just like a dare to themselves, a challenge.
Todd (VO): [book cover of Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright] Like, "Can I write a whole novel without using the letter 'E'?", [screenshot of Slate article "Kanye West Has a Goblet" by Jonah Weiner] "Can I write an all-access celebrity profile interview with Kanye West that's just me reading his Twitter feed?"
Todd: Or, here's one: "Can I make a whole 20-minute video about [album cover for Fairweather Johnson] Hootie & the Blowfish's second album and make it interesting?" It's a tough assignment. I can't promise you I'm going to succeed.
Clip of VH1 performance
Todd (VO): I guess I wanted to do this just 'cause of one thing, which is the only reason this album qualifies for this show. I'm just fascinated by the sheer depth of the plunge. Todd: When you take a cracked rear view back into Hootie-mania, it does not make a whole lot of sense.
Clip of 2Pac and Kiss presenting the award for Best New Artist at the 1996 Grammy Awards
2Pac: And the Grammy goes to...[arrow points at 2Pac with text: "Tupac F-ing Shakur] Oh, my other homeboys! Hootie & the Blowfish!
Todd can do nothing but throw his hands up in bewilderment
Todd (VO): And then, basically immediately following this Grammy ceremony, they vanished from the face of the earth! How could they have turned out to be such a flash in the pan, when they had so little flash?!
Todd: Well, the easy conclusion to make about their downfall is that they were fucking lame, and we all snapped to our senses.
Clip of Hootie & the Blowfish performing on SNL
Todd (VO): Certainly after a year of over-play, Hootie & the Blowfish had to become "Hootie & the Backlash" real quick. I mean, they were so corny and edgeless.
Todd: In lead singer, Darius Rucker's own words, [reading while doing a Darius Rucker singing impression] "People hate us because we don't write songs about how much we hate our parents." [normal] I assume that's how he said it. But I feel like lameness alone doesn't really cover it.
Todd (VO): [clips of "Mr. Jones" by...] Counting Crows, ["Push" by...] Matchbox Twenty, 3 Doors Down, these were all unhip bands and they all managed to have big hits after their first album. [clip of live performance by...] Nickelback had tons of backlash and their fans are still ride-or-die.
Todd: For Hootie to have that steep a drop off, they must have really alienated their fans by radically altering their sound.
Start of the video for "Old Man & Me"
Darius: Well an old man said to me
In a voice filled with pain
Where you going young man
Todd: No, that's still clearly Hootie.
Todd (VO): Not gonna mistake that for any other band in the universe.
Todd: Actually, why don't we back up? What made this earnest and straightforward group of frat bros so big to begin with?
Video for "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains
Todd (VO): When we talk about '90s rock, we're usually talking about grunge and post-grunge and alternative. [clip of Stone Temple Pilots live performance] But that stuff was actually burning itself out by the mid-90s because of drugs and death and general messiness, and the world was just getting tired of shit being heavy all the time. Todd: People forget that there was also [clip of "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow] another, rootsier rock scene that really came into its own in the early '90s. Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Clapton unplugged, you know, VH1 rock. And crossing over between those two scenes, there was, of course, R.E.M.
Live clip of "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M.
Michael Stipe: If you believed they put a man on the moon
Todd (VO): After about a decade of being the best college rock band in America, R.E.M. improbably broke through in the early '90s and became superstars. [clip of "Losing My Religion"] They were huge and hugely influential, but there was always gonna be limits on how big they got. [clip of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"] Like Nirvana, they were weird and abstract and uncomfortable with being mainstream, [clip of "Shiny Happy People"] and their intersection with pop stardom came from very uncharacteristic songs like "Everybody Hurts" and "Shiny Happy People". It wasn't the kind of thing they could sustain for very long.
Todd: So that's where Hootie comes in.
Clip of Hootie live performance
Darius: We'd like to drink this to R.E.M. because it wasn't for them we wouldn't be a band and this is for them.
Todd (VO): Hootie & the Blowfish counted R.E.M. as their main influence, but they were not nearly as oblique, so they filled in the gap for anyone who liked mandolins but could do without confusing lyrics about Andy Kaufman and shit like that. [clip of Garth Brooks live performance] And considering the early '90s was also the era of the big Nashville boom, I'm guessing they picked up a lot of the Garth Brooks audience also, [clip of "Wagon Wheel" by Darius Rucker] as evidenced by Rucker's eventual turn as a country star.
Todd: After all, they were a very traditionalist band, [brief clip of live performance] their lyrics were very direct and they built their success the old fashioned way, through relentless touring. So Hootie were basically the band for everybody. And if you want my opinion about it, there's also that... yeah, Cracked Rear View was a pretty solid record with some good singles.
Clip of "Hold My Hand"
Hootie & the Blowfish: Hold my hand
Todd (VO): Well, "Hold My Hand" still sucks, I don't like that one. But I do really like the cornball "Only Wanna Be with You", and I do a pretty good "Let Her Cry" at karaoke. And in the wake of Darius' solo comeback and a big, successful Hootie reunion tour this year, some critics have tried to make the case that [screenshot of article: "Hootie & the Blowfish, Great American Rock Band (Yes, Really)"] Hootie was a deserving, worthwhile band.
Todd: But those defences definitely don't include Fairweather Johnson.
Clip of "Old Man & Me"
Todd (VO): Well, why not? Okay, this is the first single, "Old Man & Me".
Darius: Well I wonder who will walk with me
When I get to heaven
Todd (VO): It's, uh... It's okay, I guess. It's about, Darius tells some old man he's going off to war, hooray.
Darius: Gonna fight a war
Gonna fight for my country