Review by Booklist Review
Rucker has been a fixture in American music since his band, Hootie and the Blowfish, rose from the fraternity parties and dive bars of the South to dominate the airwaves in 1994 with Cracked Rear View. The album became one of the highest sellers of all time. Rucker later established himself as a beloved country music artist and the first Black country performer since Charley Pride to have a number one single. This open-hearted memoir details his remarkable career. Rucker's writing sings the most when he writes about singing. He describes his respect for the artists who have inspired him, including KISS, Hank Williams Jr., the Notorious B.I.G., Lou Reed, REM, Barry Manilow, and Al Green. His wildly catholic taste often confuses and annoys his family and bandmates, but it creates the template for his success across genres. Fans of Hootie and of Rucker's solo work will relish the opportunity to better know this dedicated and influential artist.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hootie and the Blowfish singer Rucker reflects on his professional success and pays tribute to the music that shaped him in this run-of-the-mill autobiography. Rucker grew up in Charleston, S.C., and fell in love early with his single mother's favorite musicians--especially Al Green--who soundtracked the family's evenings and weekends. By the time Rucker was in elementary school, he was determined to become a singer; in 1986, he formed Hootie and the Blowfish with friends he met at the University of South Carolina. (The band's name was inspired by two of the group's nonmusician friends: one with owlish glasses, another with bulging cheeks "like the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.") After exhausting the Southern college circuit, the band broke through with a 1994 performance on The Late Show with David Letterman. As Rucker catalogs the group's late-'90s success and his mellower career as a solo country artist after the band broke up in 2011, he speaks candidly about his former cocaine use, his confrontations with racist concertgoers and industry professionals, and his anxieties about fatherhood. Nothing in the account feels revelatory, but it's a solid enough glimpse at rock stardom. This is best suited for Rucker's most committed fans. Agent: Anthony Mattero, CAA. (May)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From his home studio in Tennessee, laid-back Hootie & the Blowfish lead Rucker, for whom life has always been about music, cheerily narrates this playlist of life stories. Music pulled at him as early as age six, and he showed an innate sense for recognizing gifted musicians with lasting power in the industry, including Al Green, Barry Manilow, KISS, Nanci Griffith, R.E.M., and the Notorious B.I.G. Rucker fondly recalls Hootie & the Blowfish's 1985 origins as a group of USC-Columbia students who played their way through local bars. After eight years, they reached mega-stardom with their album Cracked Rear View, which became one of the best-selling albums in music history. In 2008, due to constant touring, the drain of longstanding heavy substance use, and bandmates wishing to explore other life experiences, the group paused touring. Rucker's desire to make a country record was fulfilled that year; his first number-one song as a country artist soon followed, and his version of the country standard "Wagon Wheel" won a Grammy. The memoir avoids oversharing about personal relationships, and Rucker's loyalty to friends and family shines through. VERDICT A recommended purchase. Rucker's easygoing storytelling will have listeners hitting play on his music long after the memoir's end.--Kym Goering
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The rock and country star examines his career through "the songs that formed me." "We're not just the biggest band in America, we are omni-fucking-present." So writes Rucker of his band Hootie & the Blowfish, which, back in the 1990s, was inescapable. The band came out of the Chapel Hill music scene, which is so well documented in Tom Maxwell's A Really Strange and Wonderful Time, and while many acts were better, somehow they rode a zeitgeist wave to stardom, reaching "the top of the rock-pop music mountain." The band, writes Rucker, indulged in the customary rock 'n' roll vices: "Hootie & The Blowfish reigned supreme in two not altogether unrelated areas: selling records and doing drugs." As always happens in these rock memoirs, the author chronicles how drugs threatened to take down the whole enterprise, though there were other tensions of personality--and, of course, it's success itself that turned out to be the devil. Rucker's chapters are sometimes loosely, sometimes more coherently tied to songs that in some way contributed to his musical formation and shaped his songwriting. Naturally, R.E.M. figures with the jittery ballad "So. Central Rain," but, given the author's generally unchallenging approach to pop, so do more unlikely picks like the Black Crowes' "She Talks to Angels" and Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." There's not much wild side at play in rounds of golf with Willie Nelson and hanging with Frank Sinatra, but there are some instructive moments in what it means to be a pop star, notably Chrissie Hynde's gentle upbraiding about setting aside artistic ego to take care of the fans. The rise-and-fall business is without a single wrinkle of surprise, but at least Rucker keeps his eye on the music throughout, even if Barry Manilow's is among it. Unexceptional, as rock memoirs go, but something for the fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
