SWIMMING WITH THE BLOWFISH

A drummer’s memoir of life in a band that enjoyed huge, surprising, and short-lived success.

As the title suggests, this is a book about Hootie & the Blowfish, the South Carolina–based band that made it big in the mid-1990s before seeing its popularity decline and a backlash intensify, as if Hootie embodied everything that was wrong with rock. Not that there was anything wrong with the band, a group of regular guys who made regular-guy music, melodic songs about love and other universal subjects that went down easy. They become a popular phenomenon well beyond the college circuit, but after a few years, they were unable to meet the considerable challenge of sustaining such success. Sonefeld chronicles their rise and fall, but the book is also a straightforward autobiography filled with boyhood stories of growing up in the Chicago suburbs. As the author notes, he was an indifferent student at the University of South Carolina before he hooked up with his future band mates. Though he offers a fair number of entertaining anecdotes about life on the road, Sonefeld isn’t interested in dishing dirt on Hootie. In most ways, they were normal guys playing catchy pop rock, mostly distinguished by having a standout frontman, Darius Rucker, who has continued to enjoy success as a country artist (he also provides the foreword). This becomes a very different book about midway through, as Sonefeld recounts the hard partying common on the rock circuit, a lifestyle that led—as it often does—to a destructive reliance on alcohol. Eventually, the author committed to recovery, the band went on an extended hiatus, and his marriage ended in divorce. In sobriety, he found faith, got married again, had kids, and inaugurated a new career as a Christian singer/songwriter and an adherent of Celebrate Recovery, a faith-based program.

A well-intentioned, middle-of-the-road rock bio.