Hootie & the Blowfish in Japan
A rear view of the band from South Carolina
Hootie & and the Blowfish are not famous here in Japan, where I live now, nor were they celebrities when was I was a senior at the University of South Carolina in 1987.
At that time, I was renting a roach-infested apartment on Devine Street, a place with a tricky address so that I often got discounts on pizza deliveries. I’d spent a semester during my junior year in Avignon in the South of France, and I was still dreaming about that left-behind Greek boy who kissed me for the first time on the train to Bordeaux.
Sometimes, at night, I smoked Marlboros in darkened rooms while listening to jazz records — Billie Holiday, Thelonius Monk. My roommate, an ethereal young woman named Jennifer*, whose eyes were two different colors and who wore thrift shop clothes, was usually off dealing with her mother. (Just after she’d moved in with me, her professor father had taken up with one of his students; Jennifer’s mom wasn’t too happy about this.)
Sometimes Jennifer came by to tell me about her underground adventures hanging out with sex workers at the Chat ’N’ Rest Motel, or with her damaged genius addict boyfriend. He played saxophone in a local avant-garde band. I’d only seen him once by daylight. His skin was the pale shade of vampire flesh. Once, Jennifer and I shared a joint she’d found in the glove box of her mother’s car, but for the most part, I was alone.
I was studying French and literature. I devoured the works of Julio Cortazar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ellen Gilchrist, along with the assigned Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Rimbaud. Like many young literary women, I cultivated melancholy and there were always strands of Plath poems running through my head. I was out of place on that campus — a G.D.I. in a nation of Greeks.
I’d actually rushed sororities, but I was blackballed by a high school enemy, and instead of attending the inauguration of the one sorority that was willing to accept me, I went to the park in front of the state capitol building and fed the squirrels. While others were going to football games and working on their tans in the last warm days of September, I was at my newspaper job, trying to scrape together enough cash for a trip to Marseilles. When I wasn’t working or studying, I wrote short stories and drank black coffee.
Most of the students I knew studied at the library. There, cramming became a social event with frequent flirtations and communal coffee breaks. I preferred to crack the books at home, in silence, without the distraction of frat boys and fellow students. And so I spread my papers out on the white cast iron table that my roommate had stolen from a dormitory patio and wrote my essays on Sister Carrie and Balzac.
Thus, I was studying when I first head the jangle of guitars coming from the house next door. Because I fancied myself a misanthrope and because the perpetual party atmosphere in that conservative college town was no match for my general mood, I briefly considered calling the cops. How could I get into Les Fleurs de Mal with that happy music infiltrating my brain?
I was quite sure that the band practicing next door was nothing like the black-clad neo-nihilistic bands that played at the G.R.O.W. café between poetry readings. These boys, I would soon discover, were wholesome American guys who frowned upon drugs (or so I thought at the time) and smoking and took care not to use vulgar language in front of girls. They had no interest in literature, let alone poetry.
But underneath my haughty pose, I harbored a wistfulness. I’d never met the two sun-bleached blonds who lived next door, though I’d watched them from my window. California surfers, I thought. I was wrong, but that’s what they looked like. In any case, they were gorgeous.
One afternoon — it must have been a weekend because there was already a keg of beer on the neighboring lawn — a group of guys were playing Nerf football out front. They accidentally kicked the ball onto my balcony. I soon heard a knock on my front door.
I found a lean, lanky young man with curly blond hair. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Mark.” He charmingly explained his predicament and I went to fetch the ball. “Hey, why don’t you come over later?” he asked. “Have a beer.”
“Maybe I will.”
And so, a couple hours later, I wandered over for the first time and met my neighbor Evan*. He was from Ipswich, Massachusetts and used to live next door to John Updike, which I, as a would-be-writer, found impressive. As a boy, he had lived in Brazil while his engineer father supervised the construction of a bridge. Foreign travel added to his allure, gave him a sheen of glamor.
Evan had impossibly blue eyes, a fine, fit body that I’d sometimes glimpsed from my upstairs window after he’d emerged from his shower with a towel around his hips. He was also very kind. He cooked for me and called me “dear.” I’m sure that he called all women that, but the men I was accustomed to were always falling apart, incapable of taking care of anyone. Evan was nurturing. He sometimes asked me to marry him (though he was only kidding).
He’d opened his apartment to this group of guys, his friends, who’d formed a band. Darius Rucker was introduced to me as Mr. February. He was featured on the Kappa Kappa Gamma Men of USC calendar. He joked that he was man-of-the-shortest-month because no one wanted to look at a black man for thirty days.
Not true. Most of the women I knew agreed that he was handsome. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Dean Felber was laconic, a little shy. He’d gone to the same high school as Mark Bryan up in Maryland. Mark had a late-night radio show on WUSC, the campus station. His DJ name was Styles Bitchly.
Back then, Hootie & the Blowfish was a cover band. They played songs by R.E.M., U2, Wire, and other alternative groups. One song that they often played at those bonfire-lit weekend play-till-the-cops-come parties was “I Go Blind,” which they later recorded for the soundtrack of “Friends.” When I hear it now, while I’m in my kitchen in Japan making miso soup, or driving to work past hills teeming with monkeys, it takes me back.
I’m twenty again, sitting in Evan’s living room. I’ve just found out about Sylvie, a lovely young pianist who spent her childhood in France. I’ve lapsed once again into Plathian depression. The keg is tapped, everyone around me is drinking heartily. Darius sits down beside me. “Why don’t you take me up to your apartment?” he asks.
I try to deflect his proposition with charm. College boys. It’s like their hormones are constantly driving them. They leave no stone unturned.
“You don’t like black men, huh?” Darius asks. He’s half-kidding, but this implied bias irks me into honesty.
“No, it’s not that. I’m interested in someone else.”
“Evan,” he guesses.
I confess.
“He’ll never ask you out,” Darius tells me. “He’s crazy about Sylvie.”
At twenty, art, love, and literature — these were the things that mattered most. I had fallen in love, the unrequited kind, which somehow fit the image I had of myself. I thought there was something tragic yet noble about secretly pining. I’d seen L’Histoire d’Adelle H. and it had struck a personal chord.
Though I may not have been exactly happy, I look on those days with bittersweet nostalgia. I was about to enter a world in which I wasn’t sure I would be able to define myself. After “English Major,” what would I be? Secretary? Waitress? I knew I couldn’t count on writing to pay the rent. I wasn’t even sure if I’d ever be able to publish anything. I was scared about that, too.
Darius was wrong.
One evening, I was standing in my apartment’s kitchen and Evan called up to my window a la Romeo.
“Hey, Sue! Do you want to go to that turtle movie?” He was referring to the film at the local art house, something with Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley.
I feigned cool and yelled back. “Okay.”
I still remember what I wore — black velveteen pedal pushers that I’d picked up at a church rummage sale and a black argyle sweater. I still remember what Evan said: “You look marvy.” I don’t remember much about the movie or what we did afterward, but I recall a gentleness, a courtliness, that pure feeling of hopefulness when no one has yet disappointed.
A week or so later, Evan and I spent an evening on his sofa watching the Red Sox lose the World Series. We drank mimosas and wound up making out, then spending the night in Evan’s bed. Though our moment of passion went unconsummated, he forever after publicly referred to that night as “our affair.” I didn’t mind, though I wished it had been more.
After that, we settled into “just friends.” I started going out with a guy in my French class who later left me for Africa, and Evan dated a succession of un-depressed blondes. We both graduated. Evan moved back to Massachusetts. I came to Japan to teach English. Darius dropped out of college and started working at a local Sounds Familiar record store. I went back to Columbia every summer.
I saw Darius now and then at the record store. We would talk about Evan, ask each other how he was doing. A couple of summers later, I discovered that Hootie & the Blowfish were playing regular gigs in Columbia, and I dragged a friend along to hear them play. Amazingly, they were now singing original songs and everyone knew the words and sang along! I was quite impressed.
The next time I saw them perform was during a visit to Charleston. I drove to the Lowcountry to see my friend Fran, whom I’d met when we were both working at the public library in Columbia. She had a great apartment on the Isle of Palms, near the beach. Across the road, there was a bar called the Windjammer. It was a true beach bar. You could walk in with nothing but sand on your feet and order a beer during the day. At night, local bands such as Dillon Fence and Edwin McCain performed on the narrow stage.
On a Monday night, Fran and I sauntered across the street, had a few beers, then took our position in front of the stage. Hootie & the Blowfish came out and the modest crowd went wild. The band had already signed a recording deal with Atlantic, but they hadn’t yet released their CD, hadn’t yet appeared on David Letterman. In short, they were not yet nationally famous though they had sold tens of thousands of independently-released CDs on their own.
Fran and I danced ourselves into a frenzy, danced with Darius’s Charleston cousin who continuously shouted, “Play the brother song!” He wanted to hear “Let My People Go,” a song which concerns racism from the “Kootchy Pop” album.
By this time, original songs had replaced most of the covers of the early days. Which was not to say that the band had forsaken them entirely. Darius would occasionally belt out a Barry Manilow tune, or the guys would erupt into a rousing rendition of “Mustang Sally.”
I tried to interest my husband — and later, my son — in the band. My husband would listen and dance around to the music, but it wasn’t the same for him. When I crank up “Running from an Angel,” I’m emerging from dark, smoky neo-Beat bars into the bright afternoons of late summer. I’m sitting on the front porch with Evan, watching the cars go by. I’m chucking my ennui out the window.
A few years after I saw them perform in Charleston, Hootie & the Blowfish came to Japan. I bought a concert ticket and took the ferry to Osaka. On the streets of the Shinsaibashi district, businessmen clutching cell phones rushed home from work. A flower vendor hawked tulips, and well-heeled young women roamed the aisles of the clothing store on the first floor of the Parco Building. Seven stories above — and half a world from Columbia, South Carolina — Hootie & the Blowfish took the stage at Club Quattro.
The band was no doubt more accustomed by then to huge arenas, but the club’s atmosphere harkened back to Hootie’s early gigs. With its exposed black pipes in the ceiling and scuffed hardwood floors, the 250-capacity club was more like the tiny Southern venues where the band had cut its proverbial teeth. The band, too, in their baseball caps and grungy clothes, looked much the same as they had on that lawn next door. They were still drinking beer.
Darius closed his eyes and started singing. “Sha la la la, I’m going home…”
I closed my eyes, too, and I could see the Palmetto trees, the dolphins, the red dirt, and clumps of wisteria. I was flying on a song, and then I was home.
*Not their real names.
Suzanne Kamata’s forthcoming novel Cinnamon Beach, is a multicultural tragicomedy in which an American writer living in Japan returns to South Carolina to scatter the ashes of her brother and reconnects with her college friend, now a famous African American country music star. Now available for preorder!
