Word: frats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...himself. But when Sergei Bubka thunders down the runway with the zeal of a mounted hussar about to drive his lance through a peasant yeoman, people are apt to do strange things. Things one wouldn't expect them to do. Things one might call downright ... unnatural. Like the three frat brothers who wrench their gaze away from the bikini-clad strumpets draped over the first-deck seats to train their binoculars on the vault pit. Or the women heading for the video monitor, who have just abandoned places in the rest-room line they have been holding for 30 minutes...
...ease: keep a very low profile. The occasion is the city's annual St.Patrick's Day celebration. It's considered a big event--although, truth be told, just about anything that carries with it the promise of free music and cheap beer is considered a big event in this frat-heavy college town. The members of Hootie, hometown heroes who made it big, have decided to join the festivities unannounced. The other acts are mostly smaller, local ones with monikers that evoke the names of long shots on racing forms--Cowboy Mouth, Gracie Moon, Treadmill Trackstar. So it's sure...
...York Times dismissed Rucker as rock's "reigning crybaby," a reference to his emotive lyrics. Some of the criticism cuts deeper. A writer for the Village Voice compared the band to a minstrel show, and Saturday Night Live did a sketch where Rucker leads beer-swilling white frat boys in a countermarch to Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March (apparently, to the mostly white staff at SNL, successful blacks must be sellouts...
...Atlanta to Rockafellas, the Elbow Room and Green Streets in Columbia (young bands on this circuit don't earn much; if you're in it for the money, move to Seattle). Hootie fitted right into the Southern pop-rock scene, playing clubs, bars, parties: any parties--birthday parties, frat parties, you name it. They would would sing REM and U2 covers and maybe a few Hootie originals, then crash on a dorm-room floor. "We'd drive 12 hours to do a show," Bryan recalls. "For $150 and two free beers," Sonefeld says, finishing his band mate's sentence...
Throughout the early '90s, the band logged a couple of thousand miles a week and earned only $6,000 to $10,000 apiece annually, but from the start the supposedly carefree group displayed a nascent business sense and an instinct for organization. "Even when doing cover songs for frat parties they used their earnings wisely," says Dick Hodgin, the band's first manager. (Rusty Harmon took over when Hodgin decided he didn't have the time to focus on the band.) "They put money away instead of doing what most bands do--split it and spend it." Today the band...