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Hootie & the Blowfish kick off their 2024 Summer Camp With Trucks Tour on May 30, but in March 2008, the Nineties rock band whose debut album, Cracked Rear View, became a pop culture touchstone, was hitting the skids. Lead singer Darius Rucker was abusing cocaine and Ecstasy and traveling on his own bus, records and tours weren’t selling, and drummer Jim “Soni” Sonefeld had finally had enough.
In this excerpt from Rucker’s new memoir, Life’s Too Short, available for purchase now by HarperCollins Publishers, the singer details his marital problems brought on by too much partying on the road and the subsequent split of the band, which sent Sonefeld, bassist Dean Felber, and guitarist Mark Bryan their separate ways —and Rucker to Nashville to launch a country music career.
I’m a mess. I’m unhappy, I’m frustrated, and I’m high — on weed, mushrooms, and equal and excessive amounts of Ecstasy and cocaine. Tons of that shit. Tons. I stay high to escape, to avoid dealing with where we are as a band and who I am as a person, a husband, a dad. To be honest, I get high because I like to get high. I like it. A lot. I do. And I hate coming down. Coming down, I crash, I get cloudy, and then I can get moody. Translation: I can get mean. So I stay high. It’s safer. More comfortable. I stay high to get by.
But when I’m with Beth, I disappear into myself, whoever that is, sometimes a guy I recognize, sometimes just an uncommunicative asshole. I do blame the drugs. Or my attachment to drugs. Beth deals with it. I don’t know how she does it. But she holds herself together and holds our family together. She knows the problem — me. And drugs. She tries to talk to me. And when she does, I sense her fear. She’s not afraid to talk to me, to speak to me from her heart. She’s afraid for me, and for her, and for the kids.
Finally, she sits me down for the heart-to-heart I have been expecting and dreading. Still, I’m not prepared for what she says.
“I want to tell you something,” Beth says. She takes a breath. “Before we started dating, I asked Dean if he thought I should go out with you. You know what he said?”
“Not sure I want to know.”
“He said, ‘If you want a good time, definitely go out with him. If you want to have a boyfriend, run for the hills.’”
“Deano. Yeah. I believe it.”
“Yeah, so,” Beth says. “Darius.”
She studies her hands, her long, regal fingers entwined in her lap. She lifts her head and I see that her eyes have filled with tears. She speaks then with a hurt and fury I’ve never heard before.
“You can keep doing what you’re doing. Partying. Doing all the shit you do. You can do all that, continue doing it, and I won’t leave you.”
My breath catches in my throat.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“No, I’m not going to leave you.” Then Beth raises her voice, slightly. “But I will spend the rest of my life — every waking minute — figuring out how to make your life fucking miserable.”
I have been momentarily struck dumb.
“Stop partying, or I will make your life hell,” Beth says.
She stands. Towering over me, she slams her hands onto her hips.
“Your call, Darius,” she says.
The next morning I call a band meeting, only the fourth or fifth band meeting in the history of the band, and the first one I have ever called. We all hate band meetings. We call for band meetings so infrequently because a band meeting means only that something big has come up or we have a big problem.
I know what I have to do. It’s clear. Radical. But necessary. I can no longer sit in the back lounge of the bus, watching someone put a mound of coke on the table, and all of a sudden say, “Nah, I’m good, none for me, thanks.” Not a chance. If I see drugs and watch somebody dig in, I will go right in with them. Mark, of course, abstains, always has. He may drink a few beers, but he never parties like I do. I have told Mark what’s going on, but I don’t think he has a clue how heavy I go back there.
So, I call a band meeting and I get right to it.
“Guys, I need my own bus.”
Deafening silence.
I know I’m asking for something unheard-of — I rarely ask for anything at all — but it’s as if I’ve just confessed to a murder.
“Yeah,” I say, to clarify, to emphasize, “I really need my own bus. The party is over for me. Beth’s not happy. At all. That’s an understatement. And I’m not happy. So, I’m going to stop going hard with the coke and the E. I’m going to go cold turkey. Stop all that shit. I have to. The only way I can do it is if I have my own bus.”
More silence. I feel Dean looking at me, but I avoid his eyes.
I stare at the floor and I mutter, “I’m fucking killing myself. I got to stop.”
“Well, okay, this was unexpected,” Mark says. “Let’s talk about it later. I’ll give my dad a call.”
“I’m not actually asking,” I say, looking at Mark, hard. “I need my own bus.”
Nods. Grunts. Bodies shifting, guys standing, moving, no body speaking, then everyone’s gone, and I’m alone.
And then, it happens.
We come to the end.
Or at least our version of the end. Because the band never breaks up and we never will.
March 2008.
Right before our summer tour. The day before the tour begins, Soni calls a dreaded band meeting — number five or six, total, in more than twenty years.
His call for a meeting comes out of the blue. I have no inkling that Soni has an issue. I don’t know what he wants, but I know something big has come up. Has to be. The only reason to call a band meeting. We hate band meetings.
We take our seats around the kitchen table at my house. After a few moments of uncomfortable, strained small talk, Soni begins talking seriously. Soni, we all know, has gotten sober, a complete turnaround for him. He’d previously been a record-breaking drinker and partier, a day drinker, even an all-day drinker. He has crashed and burned a thousand times, only to pick himself up and start partying all over again, every time. That’s all changed, for the better. I’m proud of him. The Soni who has called this band meeting is a different guy.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately,” he says.
He doesn’t have to say anything else.
I know what he’s about to tell us.
I could stand up right now, go over to him, hug him, and say thanks for the good times, thanks for being there, thanks for your thunder, thanks for your smooth and steady beat, thanks for always keeping perfect time, thanks for everything.
Soni speaks from his heart, but I’m gone. I’ve drifted away. None of his words land. Everything he says swims by me. My thoughts explode. A sort of dizziness drops over me. Here we are. The day of days. The moment that Hootie & The Blowfish has come to the end of the road, literally. We have reached the end of the run.
Soni speaks quietly, but with urgency, and absolutely no hesitation or doubt.
“I don’t want to miss watching my kids grow up —”
I want to shut out the sound that’s begun drilling into my head. I want the dizziness to stop. And then suddenly, I remember, all of it, every moment of the band’s journey. I am back in college, singing in the shower, belting out “Honesty,” and when I walk into the hallway, this guy Mark is waiting for me. That night we start playing together and we become a twosome, the Wolf Brothers. Dean joins us, then Brantley, he leaves, and we add Soni.
Dean, I think.
Dean, play with us this once, just this one gig, and then we’ll find a permanent bass player …
We’re still looking, Dean. Still looking for that bass player.
I see us recording cracked rear view, appearing on Letterman, beating all the odds, playing in front of packed, sold-out stadiums, winning Grammys, singing with Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Springsteen, Dylan, singing for Sinatra —
“What I’m saying is, guys, I need to stop touring.”
Soni is speaking right in front of me, but his voice sounds far away and muffled, as if trapped in a canyon.
“I am definitely not quitting the band. Or saying that you guys should quit touring. And if you want to find another drummer, I totally understand.”
“We’ll never get another drummer. It’s the four of us. Period.”
Maybe I say that. Or Dean. Or Mark. Doesn’t matter. We all feel the same way.
Soni clears his throat, nods, and says, “It’s just that for me —”
For him.
For us.
What does this mean for us?Soni looks at me then and says, “And Darius, I know you’re hoping to dedicate some time to your country music project —”
My country music project.
My country music obsession.
Soni’s right. I have been thinking about my country music project. More than thinking about it. I’ve written songs, made inquiries, but nothing serious or specific. I continually ask the guys to join me in Nashville, a lark, a fantasy. But they always say no. Dean turned me down the hardest.
I don’t want to play country music, Darius.
I offered him three times what anyone else would pay him. We could hang out together, the two of us, like old times.
He doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to play country music.
“So, yeah, I guess that’s pretty much all I have to say,” Soni says.
Silence. Feels like we’re at somebody’s funeral. I look from face to face and etched on each one I see what I feel — shock. Blindsided. We have arrived at this unknown place. It feels dark, unbelievable, unreal.
Nobody speaks for a long time and then finally, mercifully, we dive into details. Hootie & The Blowfish is a band, of course, but it’s also our job. The source of our livelihoods. What will we do now? Somebody asks about keeping the health insurance for our families. Somebody else talks about dividing up what’s currently in our bank account, splitting it four ways, and then talking to our financial advisors, wondering if we can live on royalties after our current tour.
I have these same thoughts, share these same concerns. But only briefly. I know that in a couple of months, when this current tour ends, reality will rap me in the head. But right now, another thought hits me, almost as hard as Soni’s announcement.
I’m going to Nashville. I am going to make a country record.
I don’t care if I get a record deal. I don’t care if I record a bunch of songs in my basement on an MP3 player. I don’t care if nobody notices me.
I hear Radney Foster’s song “Louisiana Blue,” his lyrics driving me — I just want to disappear heading South away from here.
I am going to Nashville.
From the book LIFE’S TOO SHORT by Darius Rucker. Copyright 2024 by DCR Music Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
