Hootie: Playing for More Than the Beer Money

Every so often, a bar band hits the lottery.

With Hootie & the Blowfish, the latest group of lucky rock yeomen with a huge-selling album, the jackpot has never been bigger. But for lovers of the bar-rock tradition, with its sweat, its in-your-face energy, its love of stagecraft and its sense of cut-loose passion and fun, the rewards have never been more meager.

The South Carolina foursome knocked it out for five years on the Southern bar circuit before breaking through with “Cracked Rear View,” a national debut album that has sold more than 9 million copies since its 1994 release. Although the new “Fairweather Johnson,” at 1.8 million, has fallen off from that peak, Hootie is still one high-riding bar band.

But the group’s tepid performance on Sunday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre made it hard to fathom how Hootie & the Blowfish ever survived years in the dives. The fans back in the bars must have gotten far better shows than Hootie put on for a near-capacity Irvine crowd of about 15,000.

*

The performance was the definition of dullness until it registered a few vital signs at the end. Not until an energized closing rendition of the Doobie Brothers’ nugget “Long Train Runnin’ ” did Hootie muster the vitality of barroom achievers.

The headliners spent most of their nearly two-hour set playing competent, to-the-note renditions of songs from the two albums, adding not the slightest spark that could give the material an in-the-moment life of its own.

Singer Darius Rucker may be the first soul-influenced rocker who has more in common with the shy, introverted “shoegazer” school of British alt-rock performance than with anything related to firebrands like Otis Redding and Mitch Ryder. Rucker’s baritone was warm and powerful but one-dimensional and repetitive, falling into a predictable range and emotional tone.

Perhaps we get the bar-band breakthroughs that the times demand. The J. Geils Band was just right for the hedonistic ‘70s; the unrelenting good cheer of Huey Lewis & the News fit the Reagan era. Hootie & the Blowfish is a bar band for the Prozac nation. Most of its songs are about loss and uncertainty, but they come across with a gentle, reassuring touch, like an encouraging pat on the shoulder. Great pop claws and wrestles with tough realities and keeps an edge.

Still, there can be value in less ambitious music that seeks to comfort and sustain. Despite the general critical shelling Hootie has taken, its songs do have some modest worth. The success of “Cracked Rear View” isn’t so shocking, given the big, catchy, oft-repeated choruses of such concert crowd-pleasers as “Let Her Cry,” “Only Wanna Be With You” and “Hold My Hand.”

On “Fairweather Johnson,” the band is less blatant about selling its songs with big chorus hooks, which might account for sales being merely bountiful rather than once-in-a-lifetime stupendous. “Sad Caper,” the jangling next single; the lament “Earth Stopped Cold at Dawn”; and the brisk, Beatle-esque “Silly Little Pop Song” were “Johnson” numbers that provided some of the show’s patches of fair weather.

They suggested that the album could have more legs than critics eager to bury Hootie would suppose. But if the band can’t put some action and personality and unpredictability into its concerts, it will deserve to be buried in the bars again, and soon.

* Hootie & the Blowfish play on Sunday at Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion, 2575 Glen Helen Parkway, Devore, 8 p.m. $17.50. (909) 886-8742.