Unconventional Wisdom: Hootie & The Blowfish Tour First, Release Album Second

Jason Kempin / Getty Images – Hootie & The Blowfish

While most bands announce a tour, release an album and then put tickets on sale, wholesome ’90s hitmakers Hootie & The Blowfish took a different approach for its recent tour, a sold-out “Group Therapy” trek with Barenaked Ladies that played 47 arena and amphitheater dates across the U.S.

“I think Darius may have said it best: ‘Yeah, in typical Hootie style we don’t quite do it like everybody else does it,’” Nashville-based Maverick manager Chris Parr tells Pollstar, mentioning the affable, big-voiced frontman Darius Rucker. “Typically, we would drop it as we start the tour, but they weren’t quite there and it’s been a minute since we made one.”

“A minute” in this case is 14 years since its last album, and 25 since the 21 million-selling, ubiquitous Cracked Rear View, with the band not touring properly since 2008. Hootie never officially broke up but the band all but disappeared while Rucker re-emerged as a solo country artist (then managed by Doc and Scott McGhee) signing with Capitol Nashville in 2008. Meanwhile, the only Hootie & The Blowfish concerts have been once a year as the yearly Homegrown charity events in the band’s native South Carolina.

While it may have been obvious that the band still had fans, with songs like “Only Wanna Be With You,” “Let Her Cry” and “Hold My Hand” being Top 40 staples in the mid-’90s, even the band and its team might not have expected this kind of blowout success: 47 shows, 687,186 tickets, $42.7 million grossed, with two nights at Madison Square Garden, many shows selling upwards of 20,000 tickets, and three nights capping the tour at the band’s hometown Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, S.C., which sold a combined 32,179 tickets and grossed $2.8 million.

“We really didn’t know until we hit the onsale button what the level of demand would be,” CAA Nashville’s Darin Murphy says. “When someone’s been away that long as a band you just don’t know, and you don’t take it for granted.” Murphy says the strategy was to look at markets where Rucker’s solo career was strong, as he’s done both headline and package dates in similar-sized venues in recent years, but also add a few special touches, such as the Hollywood Bowl, which the band had never played, two rather than one Madison Square Gardens and even a few fairs.

“It took on a life of itself once it went onsale,” Murphy says, adding that there was the added perk of going on sale before Christmas. “We wanted to be ticket-price sensitive and I think we hit the right ticket pricing on this tour; $129.50 was our P1 price pretty much everywhere and we certainly watched the demand for that. They used the Platinum system through Ticketmaster, with dynamic pricing, and it all sort of happened in an awesome and exciting way. Live Nation, [senior VP of touring] Tara Traub and her team, did a phenomenal job watching the demand, and scaling the building the right way, too.” Both Murphy and Parr noted the added benefit of touring with ’90s hitmakers and touring mainstays Barenaked Ladies, which Parr called “a great bunch of guys, great new friends who I can’t say enough good things about.”

Jason Kempin / Getty Images – Hootie & The Blowfish
Dean Felber, Jim Sonefeld, Darius Rucker and Mark Bryan take the “Group Therapy Tour” to Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. The foursome’s Cracked Rear View album is one of the best-selling of all time, with more than 21 million copies sold as of May 2018.

Maverick’s Parr, who manages Hootie and Rucker alongside the firm’s Clarence Spalding, says the band itself was also not quite sure how big the response would be.

“We all thought it was going to be big and were very positive about the potential of it, but you don’t know until you know,” Parr says. “I remember Darius and I having a conversation on the Sunday night of the onsale week. He was even having a moment of a little trepidation. ‘Is this really going to be as big as you guys say?’ That’s when you look your artist in your eye and say, ‘We all think it’s going to be big, but I can’t tell you with any certainty how it’s going to go. One thing I can tell you is come Friday, then we’ll know,’” he adds, laughing.

Obviously it was big, bringing out the feel-good nostalgia in even some of the most notoriously hip markets.

“When you stand in Madison Square Garden for two nights and see, as jaded as the New Yorkers are, they’re on their feet singing along,” Parr says. “There’s special moments like that all along the tour – at the amphitheatre in Indianapolis, people are screaming at the top of their lungs. Even in Glasgow last week, and Dublin – sometimes it feels like European audiences sit on their hands a little – but man, these crowds, these songs are just so ubiquitous.”

While unconventional to release the album after the tour, new tunes did debut on tour, building buzz for the album and the band, which just recently was named as the most-added at country radio. The band will perform on “Good Morning America” Nov. 1 to celebrate the release of Imperfect Circle, Hootie’s first album in 14 years.

“We’ve been excited at how they’ve responded to the new music,” Parr says of audiences on the tour. “There was a moment when I’m sort of backstage and it only occurred to me halfway through that it was the new song! It struck me how much the new material fits right in. It sounds like Hootie & The Blowfish, and that’s all we ever set out to do.”

Although Rucker’s career metamorphosis into a solo country artist may have been a surprise at the time, the band and its team says it makes sense now and then.

“A lot of people say if Hootie & The Blowfish came out right now, they sort of sound like a country act because of the way country has evolved over the years,” Murphy says, adding that Rucker in his solo touring career has

kept the music alive across the world, playing at least three or four Hootie songs on his gigs.

The new music also best fits the country radio format today with ’90s-style alternative rock/pop hits not really having a place on Top 40 radio.

“If the guys put out Cracked Rear View today as a new album, it would live on country radio,” Parr adds. “Sonically, that’s where it sits best, we believe. That’s been the premise we’ve worked under. Go make a great Hootie & The Blowfish record, and we’ll sort out the formats and other things to make the commerce work.

“We now also sort of have the X-factor of Darius having a very familiar voice at country radio and with the country fanbase, so that’s a little even more of a positive. We think there may be opportunities outside of it, but the main thrust of it we believe will be in the country format.”

The big question, and maybe most unconventional part of the story, however, is that there are no immediate plans to tour after the album, with the team going into “Darius Rucker mode” for the next couple of years.

However, maybe that’s not the point.

“Darius said it best. He said, ‘I’m not doing this for you guys, not doing this for me, I want to do it for the fans that we never told we were going away, that we were going to stop,’” Parr relates, adding that the band really are “four of the nicest guys in the world.”

“I don’t know if they’ll ever tour together again, or not,” Parr adds. “It’s a big question mark and a big piece of the conversation.”