Songoftheday 7/8/21 - The working day was long and the road is grinding on, and your body's winding down again...

 

 

"Hooch" - Everything

from the album Super Natural (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #69 (after chart rule change)

Billboard Hot 100 airplay peak: #34 (one week)

Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 6

 

Today's song of the day comes from the rock band Everything, who came together as college students in the Appalachian western part of Virginia in the late 1980's. The six members - singer/guitarist Craig Honeycutt, bass player David Stankard, drummer Nate Brown, and Wolf Quinn, Rich Bradley, and Steve Van Dam on horns and keyboards released their debut album Play independently in 1991. The group put out three more records on various labels until 1998, when their fifth set Super Natural came out on Blackbird Records. A song from the set, "Hooch", was the band's first, biggest, and only success at radio. Written by the group and produced by Jim Ebert, the song's lite-ska vibe seems so much like a copy of Sublime's "What I Got" (as filtered through Sugar Ray's "Fly") without any gravitas, but rather a frat-boy adulation of moonshine. It makes inoffensive background music, but just comes across as a pale imitation of the original. I'm sure having it show up in the movies and TV at the time helped it greatly...

Since "Hooch" wasn't released as a commercially available retail single in the U.S., it wasn't initially able to place on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the song got enough radio spins to make it into the top-40 of the airplay component of the tally in November of 1998. And when the music trade bible changed their rules to allow album cuts to make the chart, the song appeared for a bunch of weeks, with a high of #69. "Hooch" climbed to #12 on both the Alternative Rock and the older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio format charts as well. The Super Natural album, released in the fall of 1998, climbed to #173 on the Billboard 200 albums sales chart in the U.S.. 

This would be their last time on the radio or sales charts. They released two more albums, People Are Moving, in 2001, and In The JuJu Underworld in 2006, with the latter having a version of "Hooch" on it. The band continues to tour, though, and it still together as a trio. 

(4/10)

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Here's the band live in concert in Colorado in 1997...

 And lastly, performing in Charlottesville on campus in 1999...

Up tomorrow: A reFugee strikes out on her own for this throwback to the future #1.