Hootie & the Blowfish: Fairweather Johnson : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

According to the numbers, most of the 14 million people who bought Cracked Rear View are fair-weather fans; only 2 million of 'em have coughed up for the follow-up. That's not chump change but a sure, sad sign that Hootie and the Blowfish are headed down the Peter Frampton Memorial Highway to who knows where. You can't begrudge Hootie their high rise, but the hard fall is their own fault. Fairweather Johnson is a flat-liner, a wearily earnest record suffocated by overrestraint and lacking even the modest, neighborhood-tavern-band bounce of Cracked Rear View. Everything is played at the same unruffled-shuffle tempo, and the mumbled, sometimes rather soulful pluck in Darius Rucker's voice raises only an occasional bump in the album's level folk-rock woodwork. Hootie and the Blowfish never pretended to be more than a basic hard-working band. Fairweather Johnson proves it with a vengeance.