Show Review: Hootie & The Blowfish in Houston, TX

11/11/05

Oh what a difference 11 years makes. After the 1994 release of Cracked Rear View, Hootie & The Blowfish went from a college cover band to a national hit machine, putting out some of the biggest pop/rock hits of the 90s. So here I am, seeing them perform in a small, no-name club (Meridian) in Houston, promoting their new CD, Looking for Lucky. The show was not even sold out, so I rolled up and scored a ticket for $15 outside the door. Not only was that $10 off the normal price, it sure felt good screwing Ticketmaster out of their $8.

I am sure most of you know HTB’s hit songs by heart, and you’ve probably even seen HTB in concert before, so it is no surprise to hear they are awesome in concert. So what I will aim to do here is comment on some interesting (to me at least) tidbits that I noticed during the show.

Since this was a general admission concert, I got to the venue around 7:45 to try to score a good spot. Boy, did I ever score! There were only a handful of people at the stage, so I staked out a spot right at the rail, about 6 feet from the stage.

Django Walker, son of the 70’s Jerry Jeff Walker, opened the show at 9pm, and played for 45 minutes. They are a young band from Austin, whose style is not far off from HTB. Their sound is more simple but solid, with good guitar work. Most of their songs are about Texas and college life, so that kind of got old after a while, but their talent was evident. I bought their 2002 independent CD, and Walker even signed it for me. That was cool. After further reading on Hootie’s website, I found out that Mark Bryan has produced a new CD for Walker, which hasn’t been released yet.

HTB took the stage about 10:15, and led off with “State Your Peace”, the leading song off the new CD. Following that was their hit “Time”, and this set the pattern for the show, which is playing a new song and then an older hit. This worked well.

One interesting thing I noticed about HTB on stage is that the lead guitarist Mark Bryan does all the talking/commentary. Matter of fact, I don’t remember Darius saying a word the entire concert. Weird. As it turns out, I enjoyed Mark’s performance more than anyone’s, I guess because he was so laid back, his goofy attempts at dancing (wow, what a white boy!) and his interaction with the crowd. At one point he got down and danced with a few ladies in the crowd. And the ladies weren’t even pretty. Lol. BTW, Mark’s old Gibson guitars were awesome. I want to learn to play just so I could get guitars like those. I’m sure they are cheap too. Yeah right.

Toward the end, they performed a few notable cover songs. One was David Allen Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”, (voted the perfect country western song). They also performed a melody of rap songs, which included “Gold-digger”. Very humorous.

They finished up their regular set at about 11:45, then proceeded to come back for three encores. At the very end, I caught a pick from Mark, and a drumstick from Jim "Soni" Sonefeld, which was beat-up from playing all night. Cool.

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the concert. And to think I almost didn’t go. Thanks, Scott, for making me go!

-Chad