Blowfish ponder return to its roots

Hootie & the Blowfish. Wow, they really dropped off the face of the planet, didn’t they?

May I remind you of the 1994 smash hit “Only Wanna Be With You,” perhaps one of the most overplayed singles of the past decade? That song – which did not so much burst, but rather pelvic-thrusted itself onto the nation’s airwaves – almost single-handedly transformed Hootie & the Blowfish from an average college bar band to pop music megastars.

It would be fair to say that, at least for a brief moment, Hootie & the Blowfish – which comes Monday at 8 p.m. to the Big Easy Concert House – was the biggest thing going in pop music. Of course, it also would be fair to say that there was another brief moment when Hootie went from purveyors of cutesy folk-inspired pop songs to the most redundant – and annoying – thing on FM radio.

Hootie & the Blowfish guitarist Mark Bryan agrees the song may have been spun one too many times. But Bryan also points out there wasn’t much anyone in the band could do about it either.

“Sure, I mean, of course the song was overplayed,” he says. “We happened to write a song that really connected with a large portion of the American psyche. What are you going to do about it? Try and not write a good song?”

Well, of course not, Mark. But one can’t help but wonder how things would have been different if the band’s big splash into pop music had not become a tidal wave. Critics of the band always have worked off the notion that Hootie was unable to evolve the straightforward rootsy-pop-rock formula that produced a twelve times platinum major-label debut with “Cracked Rear View.”

“Sure, you wonder about those things,” Bryan says. “But since then, we’ve been really focused as a band about moving ahead as if it never really happened.”

It’s worked. Since “Cracked Rear View,” the band has recorded five full-length albums, including the recent retrospective the “Best of Hootie & the Blowfish: 1993 to 2003.” The band has continued to tour extensively, and it is looking at starting an independent label.

“Who knows, we might write another song like that, and I wouldn’t be upset if it happened,” Bryan says.

After all, it could be worse, they could’ve written “Macrena”.