I firmly believe that the only compact disc that was produced more than AOL discs in the mid-90s was Hootie and the Blowfish's 1994 album Cracked Rear View. It made Hootie and the Blowfish a household name, and is the 16th best selling album of all time in the USA. Did your Dad own a copy? Did you? I rest my case.
I think the reason for this is Hootie and his pals were able to capture the sound of the absolute mainstream in 1995, appealing to pretty much everyone without coming off as cynical or like they were faking it. I remember hearing discussions amongst pretty heavy metal guitar teachers where I took guitar lessons in 1995 about how Hootie and the Blowfish make music everyone can enjoy. They said that, standing around in Alice in Chains t-shirts.
Hootie and Friends carried that same idea to music videos, creating videos that were inoffensive and fun, and what could be more inoffensive and fun than sports? So today we're watching a music video that took sports and ran smiling and goofin' all the way to the net/goal/basket/hole, 1995's "Only Wanna Be With You" by Hootie and The Blowfish, directed by Frank Sacramento.
The video starts off with SportsCenter (a sports show on ESPN, for those not aware), and the first thing that you may notice is that news/sports anchor Keith Olbermann is in this music video. Yesterday it was announced that Keith Olbermann is returning to ESPN after spending years as a journalist on MSNBC and then on Current TV, so maybe we can expect more videos from him in the future, but this will do for now. The reason it opens with SportsCenter is that this video, as we mentioned before, is a sports-themed video. Like having your birthday party or a restaurant sports-themed, but with more celebrities.
We're music video database afficianados here at IMVDb, so we'll defer to the experts at sbnation.com for an analysis of the subleties of the sporting aspects of this video, including how disinterested Fred Couples is in taking part in the Hootie and the Blowfish hijinks. However, we are qualified to mention that Dan Marino and Alonzo Mourning are in this video and they put their all into jokin' around. It's a little known fact that sports celebrities are actually pretty funny people, and I know this because I briefly worked on a show that was based around this concept. It's important to note that Dan Marino was hot off his turn in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994, so they knew he had chops before bringing him in. As sbnation.com mentions, however, Fred Couples is useless in this video.
I love this video because at this point, Hootie and the Blowfish could have very well gone down a dark path. There was a lot of Alanis Morissette-style angst floating around in 1995 and we all known Alanis Morissette-style angst is contagious. Instead, Hootie and the Blowfish sat down with director Frank Sacramento and said "let's make a video with us being bad at sports with pro sports people. Golf, basketball, football. All the sports". You can't argue that the result is an entertaining video for a huge radio hit.
As the wise man Dan Patrick says, "you can't stop Hootie, you can only hope to contain them".
