Just One Man Can Say He Gave a Hootie

Hootie & the Blowfish’s “Cracked Rear View” album is the biggest- selling debut of the decade and anyone even remotely associated with the project has taken credit.

Depending on whom you believe, Hootie could have been discovered by either Danny Goldberg, Val Azzoli or any of a growing list of current or former bigwigs at the band’s label, Atlantic Records. Tim Sommer, an Atlantic talent scout whose salary was recently doubled to ward off suitors from competing companies, is also frequently given credit.

But the truth is Hootie wasn’t discovered in a smoky bar by some hip intuitive genius with his finger on the pulse of American pop culture.

The band wound up at Atlantic thanks primarily to the persistence of a 24-year-old research assistant named Scott Schiff, who stumbled onto the Hootie phenomenon while conducting a routine phone-room survey of mom-and-pop stores in South Carolina.

Schiff, the scion of a wealthy New York family, was part of Atlantic’s low-profile R.I.S. division, a three-person phone research team that polls retailers in small markets on a daily basis trying to detect unusual sales spikes in music released by local artists.

Schiff had been working less than three months at his $22,000-a-year post when on Aug. 12, 1993, an enthusiastic merchant in Columbia, S.C., told him that “Koochypop,” a self-produced CD by Hootie & the Blowfish, was outselling practically every superstar album in his store.

“Nobody at Atlantic had ever heard the name Hootie & the Blowfish before that day,” said Schiff, who left Atlantic last year to form his own New York-based Touchwood Records label based on his belief that if he discovered Hootie he can do it again. (Schiff’s great aunt was the late Dorothy Schiff, the heiress and longtime owner of the New York Post.)

“After I hung up the phone with that guy, I called a dozen more record stores from Charleston to Myrtle Beach and they all said the same thing: Hootie was one of their top 10 bestsellers. Some retailers said the record was so hot they couldn’t even keep it in stock.”

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Schiff asked one merchant to read him a phone number printed on the CD, which turned out to be a direct line to the band’s manager, Rusty Harmon. Schiff called Harmon and asked him to send Atlantic a copy of the album, which included an early version of Hootie’s big hit, “Hold My Hand.”

Atlantic executives, however, were not impressed. According to sources at Atlantic, the firm’s talent division initially dismissed Hootie as a generic “frat band” and recommended that the company not sign them.

But Schiff did not give up. He spent the next two weeks phoning hundreds of retailers throughout the South and confirmed that Hootie had not only sold tens of thousands of its own albums, but was also receiving airplay on about 50 radio stations. In addition, he discovered that Hootie T-shirts, hats and other merchandise were blowing out the door at local clubs and record stores.

Schiff delivered the data detailing Hootie’s sales and airplay history directly to former Atlantic co-Chairman Doug Morris, who immediately insisted that the band be signed. Goldberg, who was senior vice president of Atlantic’s artist and repertoire division at the time, then sent Sommer to South Carolina to hear the band and sign them to the label.

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Sommer hired the album’s producer and oversaw the recording of “Cracked Rear View,” for which Azzoli developed the marketing plan. But even after “Cracked Rear View” was delivered, sources say one executive at Atlantic deemed it unlistenable and several others recommended it not be released. Their view was overruled and so far Hootie has generated more than $100 million in retail sales. Next week, the group is releasing its follow-up, “Fairweather Johnson.”

“Scott is the guy who deserves the credit, but he’s just too humble to toot his own horn,” said Schiff’s former boss Dick Vanderbilt, who recently quit his job as director of Atlantic’s R.I.S. division to work for Schiff. “It might be more glamorous to say that Hootie had been discovered by somebody’s brilliant ears, but in fact, the discovery came about as the result of grueling phone work.”

Atlantic co-Chairman Azzoli and Goldberg, who is now president and CEO of Mercury Records, acknowledged in separate interviews Thursday that Schiff was the catalyst that united Hootie and Atlantic.

Hootie isn’t the only top-selling Atlantic act discovered through its research department.

Rock group Collective Soul, whose last album has sold nearly 2 million copies, was found by researchers canvassing mom-and-pop stores in Florida, as was rock act Seven Mary Three, whose debut has sold about 500,000 units. Top-selling R&B; crooners All 4 One were also discovered after a phone search of the San Diego area.

Schiff said recent advances in digital technology allow young bands to record albums cheaply and that they often sell those recordings on consignment at local mom-and-pop stores. Because independently produced records typically are not bar-coded, they don’t register as a sale by SoundScan, the industry’s computerized sales tracking system.

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Schiff said phone solicitation, as dull and grueling as it can be, remains an effective way to pick up tips on emerging artists who operate below the radar of modern tracking methods. Still, only a few of Atlantic’s competitors utilize similar phone rooms.

Morris--who invented Atlantic’s research system 20 years ago at Big Tree Records and fine-tuned it in the late ‘80s at Atlantic--has already installed a new team at MCA Music, where he now oversees the global record division.

In the last three months, researchers at MCA’s Universal Records have struck gold twice by tapping into hit records by Latin diva Lisa Santiago and rock band Goldfinger.

“It’s like mining for gold,” Vanderbilt said. “There’s nothing glamorous about it. Nobody in the media pats you on the back and tells you what great ears or intuition you have. Much to the contrary. Guys like us operate in the dark. It’s like police work. It’s a tedious process involving tens of thousands of cold calls, but it can pay off. I mean, look at Hootie & the Blowfish.”