Sometime in 1986, Darius Rucker was singing in his dorm shower at the University of South Carolina when another kid on the floor overheard him. Mark Bryan grabbed his guitar and asked Rucker to jam in his room, leaving the door open. Within minutes, they were drawing their first crowd.
From there, Rucker’s musical career has been more or less charmed, even if it took Hootie and the Blowfish years on the road before they got a record deal. Since 2008, he’s been a boundary-breaking country star, and he’s currently back on the road with Hootie, playing sold-out amphitheaters. With the release of his enjoyable new memoir, Life’s Too Short , Rucker was ready to look at his whole career — and reveal his new supergroup along the way.
(To hear audio of the entire interview on our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify , or just press play below.) It sounds like this Hootie tour is huge. We’re at that point where I think most bands would love to be when they’re starting out — going out every few years when we feel like it, selling out these big arenas and amphitheaters, seeing all the people just having fun.
It feels good to know that we can still do it. I know you’ve always done covers, but to see you guys doing a Stone Temple Pilots song on this tour is pretty funny. It’s like the whole Nineties are somehow blurring together.
Oh, yeah, man, we do that song because I remember when it ca.
