#bluevan

We had never heard of Hootie and the Blowfish until we moved to Charleston, SC. We can be forgiven; in 1994 they were just at the point of catapulting past being a "regional band" into being a national one. Also, we had been listening strictly to Irish music and country blues for the past few years, and straight-up classical music before that, so we were very much out of the rock and roll loop. I started listening to Nirvana right after Kurt died, and the radio station in Boston had been playing Beck, Juliana Hatfield, G Love and Special Sauce, and whatever boring band Evan Dando was in.

When we got to Charleston, there was a lot of "pop punk" on 96 Wave: the Offspring, Green Day, Everclear, and then some Smashing Pumpkins and a lot of Alanis Morissette. We fell in love with Bjork and Radiohead, ourselves. But the bands that were popular with the majority of boys and girls in Charleston in '94-95 were groovy. Bands you could do the "itchy scratchy" to. Jam bands were back, but maybe had never left this coastal town? Dave Matthews was somewhat interesting because he had a fiddler and saxophonist. Widespread Panic was carrying the torch of the Dead. And if you wanted something to sing to, frat-rock was the perfect thing for people that wanted to have a good time, celebrate being in college or romanticize about your days in college, and not think too much about…anything. Besides beer. "It's all about the beer," Darius Rucker once told me, and it certainly seemed like he truly meant it.

One of the most popular bands in the country in '95 was claiming South Carolina as home. Everyone in Charleston had a Hootie story. How the band ate at this and that restaurant all the time. Someone saw Soni doing his laundry at the corner laundromat. The guy that sold us our first touring vehicle, a 15 passenger blue van, told us that not too long before he had sold a similar vehicle to someone with a "sweet, soulful voice". Our blank stares encouraged him to add: "Darius Rucker!".

I was surprised to find that the guys in Hootie had grown up worshiping bands like R.E.M.: Southern rock bands that weren't Southern Rock bands and had almost literally created many of the venues that we were wanting to play in the South. I, too, worshipped R.E.M., for many reasons (and still do). Their original sound, their fight for creativity even after getting signed to a major label, Stipe's flair for the dramatic. Knowing that the Hootie guys liked one of my favorite bands endeared them to me, even if I coudn't get behind their music. Hootie was exceptionally supportive towards all things Southern, and especially bands. They wanted to give back to the scene they had helped to create, like R.E.M. did in Athens, GA. This would prove to be very good for us, later, and then very bad for us, much later. But we'll get to those chapters eventually.

Thanks in part to the nation's eye on Hootie's ascension, and the aforementioned indie-power of 96Wave, it was a good time to be a touring band in South Carolina. And then around both South and North Carolina. And then Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Maryland…we took it slow and steady, and tried to be smart about touring. We had bought a van from Darius's dealer and hit the road. But we didn't do what a lot of our peers did. We followed the Golden Mean: "the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency." In other words, while fellow bands living in GA would take gigs in Ohio just because they existed, and then Los Angeles, and then maybe the Carolinas, driving all over the place for one gig that probably didn't pay and was hard to get to over and over to build a crowd, we worked in more of a spiral. We figured it was better to say "no" to the venue far away until we had made fans in towns in-between Charleston and that venue, first.

We didn't have dimes to our names (we refused to let each other get jobs, remember?) to even pay to get to the gigs, at first. We auditioned at a NACA conference to try and land more college gigs, and were "wooed" (they took us to Applebees and bought us jalapeño poppers) by husband-wife team the Rosens, who became booking agents that tried to find us places to play in college settings for a larger sum of money. These places ended up being frat houses, cafeterias at lunchtime, pep rallies. These gigs were almost entirely disappointing, but there were a few benefits to starting our touring career this way. First and foremost, we were learning about all the kinds of shows we would never want to play again. We discovered that we were not a band that was comfortable playing "in the background", and would rather play to three fans than a roomful of inattentive bodies. Secondly, the larger sums of money let us pay for gas to the shows we wanted to play that didn't pay that much at first. We could get to Columbia to play Rockafellas, the Moon Room in Charlotte, the 40 Watt in Athens, opening up for larger bands that would give us a chance.

And we were able to put together our first album of original music.