“Put on a little Dylan, sitting on a fence…”
“Ain’t Bobby so cool…”
“Tangled up in blue…”
Listening to “Only Wanna Be with You,” in hindsight, it’s half tribute to Bob Dylan. It’s not something I picked up on, back in the day. Hootie haters, today, they only hear “I only wanna be with yoooou,” the refrain, but the song is better known, in some circles, for the legal problems the band got into for borrowing wholesale from Dylan’s “Idiot Wind.” At one point it’s just Darius Rucker singing from it. It’s something, again, you don’t notice if you’re not paying attention, but inescapable once you do.
I’ve gotta figure some of the backlash Hootie faced was the rock scene not figuring this out, that Hootie was completely immersed in the music it loved. For years they toured as a bar band, so they played what they loved, interspersed with their own stuff. Not nearly enough is made of how much the band adored R.E.M., how Rucker tried singing like Michael Stipe on many tracks in Hootie’s early releases. Rucker isn’t Stipe, though, so to hear him bury his full-throated grandeur in Stipe murmur can be disorienting.
But aside from “Only Wanna Be with You,” Hootie never really pursued Dylan. There isn’t an outright cover in any of the band’s recorded material. Just imagine! A huge part of Dylan’s legacy is other artists eagerly covering his music, and a significant portion of the history of rock music is a result of that. By the time Hootie came around, Dylan was beginning a reemergence, but aside from “Make You Feel My Love,” which Billy Joel happily covered, the scene had begun to move on. At any rate, Hootie’s audacious sampling of “Idiot Wind” was a new way to spotlight Dylan, but it didn’t really catch on, except to say some five years later when Old Crow Medicine Show resurrected “Wagon Wheel,” which Rucker eventually made his own, bringing the whole thing full circle.
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