Scott Davis: The Remarkable Return of Hootie

GamecockCentral.com columnist Scott Davis, who has followed USC sports for more than 30 years, provides commentary from the perspective of a Gamecocks fan. You can follow Scott on Twitter at @scdonfire.

Nostalgia’s a funny thing.

This past weekend, I saw old friends Hootie and the Blowfish play a packed concert at whatever they’re now calling the tennis stadium at Daniel Island (Charleston). I came in expecting to hear some old songs, drink a few brews, see a few friends and forget about the whole thing by the next morning. Instead, I got a moment.

I got a moment.

You know, one of those nights you don’t forget. One of those nights that crawls into your head, takes up residence and never leaves – like a elderly relative who moves into the basement and stays there.

The boys have been doing these shows for years now, two quick nights each summer to benefit Charleston County schools, always in front of a full house of Gen X’ers looking to revisit whatever remains of the good old days. I’d seen it all before, or so I thought.

I’ve attended and enjoyed these reunions frequently, but this time, the event was so suffused with Palmetto State-related nostalgia it was almost suffocating. I wasn’t prepared emotionally, mentally or physically.

For one thing, it was my birthday (I’m not revealing my age, but let’s just say it starts with a “4” and gets worse from there).

For another, now that I live in Atlanta, I just don’t get many opportunities to see this many flabby, middle-aged people wearing dorky Gamecock clothing in one setting. To many, the Gamecocks and Hootie will be forever linked, and there were so many fans in garnet and black that the entire affair began to resemble an extremely large family reunion (albeit a reunion filled with thousands of inebriated people you’d never met).

Once Hootie’s Darius Rucker took the stage wearing a USC hat, I realized I was extremely happy to be there, and more than ready to rekindle some old memories, dance awkwardly and high-five complete strangers wearing poorly fitting USC polo shirts. There may or may not have been some Bud Lights involved, as well (just like during my college days).

And somewhere after Rucker’s crystal-clear voice crested into the first few lines of “Time,” it hit me, that old feeling: Pride. Pride in my school, in my state, in my people.

I was with my people for the first time in a long time, and I was happy about it.

Yeah, many of those people were old, and they were singing along to lyrics like “I’m such a baby ‘cause the Dolphins make me cry,” but still…these were my people.

And if all that sounds cheesy to you, trust me when I tell you that I don’t care.

I was attending school at the University of South Carolina at the exact same time that Hootie and the Blowfish began to move beyond headlining frat parties and gigs at the late, great Rockafellas in Five Points, and started selling millions upon millions of albums to non-South Carolinian Americans who lived in places like Minnesota and Washington state.

What that means is that A) I am shockingly, spectacularly old; and B) I was a living witness to a phenomenon.

At the time, the general reaction around campus was something like, “Wait, what? Didn’t I just see one of those dudes at Garrett’s the other night?”

It was kind of like an asteroid fell out of the sky and landed on Assembly Street.

If you weren’t there, it’s almost impossible for me to describe to you what it was like watching it unfold in real time: One second, you could casually bump into any member of the band at the Elbow Room bar (R.I.P., Elbow), and the next second, they were on the cover of Rolling Stone, hosting an MTV primetime special on the freaking Horseshoe, and even having an episode of “Friends” dedicated to them – back when “Friends” was hotter than a blast furnace in July.

This kind of stuff happened to bands in Seattle – and even in local college towns like Athens and Chapel Hill. It just didn’t happen to bands in Columbia.

Then one day, it did.

In the beginning, most students felt a surge of pride about Hootie’s unexpected national breakout. It couldn’t have happened at a better moment: The Hootie earthquake shook the school at a time when USC’s sports teams were doing the exact opposite of making us proud.

Baseball was mired in mediocrity. Basketball was in the midst of a decade-long funk. Women’s basketball barely existed.

And football? Let’s just say I’ve been trying to forget Gamecock football in the 1990s since the second the clock ticked over to January 1, 2000, and even tequila, beer, therapy and prayer haven’t been able to help me do it.

As for Hootie, here was a humble, hardworking bunch of good, regular guys who had been grinding for years, kept playing for free beer at USC sorority mixers and finally received a deserving payoff. Plus, they repped the Gamecocks whenever they could. Who could root against that?

As it turns out, plenty of people could.

Once the Blowfish started getting tons of daily airtime on MTV, including a video where they clowned around with the guys from ESPN’s SportsCenter in what could reasonably be described as the least “rock and roll” video ever made, and once suburban kids and soccer moms from Miami to Montana were singing along to “Hold My Hand” and “Let Her Cry,” the backlash inevitably settled in.

Even here.

It’s not like these dudes were the second coming of The Beatles, right? Weren’t they just a very good college band who rocked fraternity parties? Weren’t they kind of the anti-Nirvana, playing earnest songs with titles like “Only Wanna Be With You” during an angst-filled, irony-centric decade? Didn’t I just see Soni Sonefeld at the grocery store last week? What in God’s name were they doing on MTV and David Letterman?

After a few follow-up records to their smash “Cracked Rear View” failed to ignite the charts, the Hootie guys faded into the sunset rather quickly, their music eventually becoming a sort of quirky ‘90s nostalgia avatar, like reruns of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

I probably went a decade or more without ever even hearing a Hootie song, or queuing one up on my CD player (and later my iPod). They were just…gone.

Weirdly enough, as the ‘90s fizzled to a merciful close and the Blowfish vanished, South Carolina’s sports teams began to finally look like they belonged in the Southeastern Conference. The football team started registering a pulse under Lou Holtz, then underwent a full-scale revival once Steve Spurrier found his way to Columbia, with names like Lattimore, Jeffery, McKinley, Garcia, Shaw, Gilmore and Clowney roaming Williams-Brice.

Ray Tanner helped the baseball program usher in a turn-of-the-millennium renaissance, with six trips to the College World Series starting in 2002, plus back-to-back national championships. Gamecock fans even started attending women’s basketball games for the first time in recorded history.

And wouldn’t you know it?

At some point during all of that, Hootie’s front man Rucker started selling records again.

A bunch of them.

True, they were country records – not easygoing frat party tunes.

But they were selling.

Darius Rucker was on the charts again.

August is the best part of the year for looking ahead, especially for football fans. And especially for Gamecock football fans.

The reports from the practice fields start trickling in, and other than the occasional injuries, all of them seem good.

That wide receiver we’ve been waiting on to step up? Well, he’s stepping up.

The light bulb’s finally come on for that defensive lineman.

This new coaching staff really wants to be here, and these players are responding to their message.

Fans start murmuring things to each other that they probably shouldn’t be murmuring, things like, “I’ll tell you what – if we can limit the mistakes and get anything at all out of the running game, this offense might actually have a chance.”

Of course, the team hasn’t lost a game yet.

We haven’t seen the defense give up a long bomb on third-and-infinity yet.

We haven’t seen the offense rush for 43 yards on 25 carries yet.

We haven’t seen Gamecock players fumbling, Gamecock players throwing picks or Gamecock players getting sacked.

But we’re going to.

Still, at the moment, we don’t have to worry about all that. At the moment, we are undefeated. At the moment, we’re all still Hootie and the Blowfish circa 1994, when MTV and Letterman still want us to appear on the airwaves, and the cast of “Friends” still wants tickets to our shows.

For now, the future is ours.

And yet…

We can’t forget the past, can we?

We can’t forget the pain, certainly. The greatest TV character of all time, Don Draper, once described nostalgia as “the pain from an old wound.”

But we also can’t forget those blinding moments of beauty that are nestled way back there, either.

Maybe our football team will never play in the SEC Championship game again, but they did once just a short time ago. They did once. And that means they can again.

Hootie and the Blowfish may never sell a million records again…but they did once. They may never sell out Madison Square Garden, but they can sell out two nights every year in Daniel Island for the people of South Carolina who will always love them.

And those people will always love them because Hootie helps those people remember: It helps them remember being a kid in South Carolina on their own for the first time, remember wandering around the Fairgrounds in those nervous few minutes before a game or stumbling out of Talley Ho and hoping the buzz wore off before kickoff, remember kissing a girl whose name is now forgotten but whose face is not, remember everything they thought had forgotten and thought was gone.

They can still do that for a lot of people in this little state of ours, even if only once a year.

There are thousands of bands in Seattle and Athens and Chapel Hill and New York and Austin-by God-Texas who would love to be able to do the same, but they can’t.

Hootie can. And they still do.

No, they’re not Nirvana. They’re not Pearl Jam, not U2, not R.E.M.

But they are ours. And that’s all they ever needed to be.

Not a GamecockCentral.com member and want to get all the scoop? SUBSCRIBE NOW!

Never miss a moment with the GamecockCentral app: App Store - Google Play