LIFE'S TOO SHORT

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.