first round game
(7) Hootie & the Blowfish, “Let Her Cry”
ANESTHETIZED
(10) Morphine, “Cure for Pain”
140-134
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE 2ND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/5/26.
Help Me Fly Away: Katie Moulton on “Let Her Cry” by Hootie & the Blowfish
A great bar band will save your life. You’re in a low-ceilinged cavern amid a dim neon haze, a holding pen for tourists or college kids. In your hand: a bottle of light beer. Under your feet: planked floors simultaneously sticky and wet – something deep and incidental that can never be mopped up. We call that History. You’ve found yourself there, alone in every way that matters, already too old, the promised spark of the night emptied out: You’re a lighter and nothing’s catching. She sits alone by a lamppost, tryna find a thought that’s escaped her mind. You shuffle toward the low stage, where you can just make out the ball-capped heads of the band starting their set. Three genial white guys with haircuts on the spectrum from ROTC to surfer-dude, and a sweet-eyed Black guy at the center. All of them wearing cargo shorts and T-shirts with logos of a particular holy trinity: Gamecocks, Jim Beam, R.E.M. She said Dar’s the one I love the most, but Stipe’s not far behind.
Recall the band’s bright, primary-colored guitar riffs, a springy sway from the kit, a bassist who keeps it chugging. Now imagine the moment that Darius Rucker’s magnificent baritone vibrato first rumbles through the rafters and into your rib cage. The verses delivering a casual talky-blues, each phrase bottoming out into irresistibly round vowel sounds. Tell me you aren’t nodding to the stranger beside you like, these guys are pretty good. Then the arc into the major-key chorus—that sensation of legs hard-pumping the swing to the tippy-top of the parabola, the chains loosing and ker-chunking as your body falls back to earth. You’ve never heard this song before, but you know the words. Tell me you don’t shout to the new friend beside you, These guys should be famous! Tell me, by the end of their ballad “Let Her Cry,” you haven’t hit your knees to those beat-up planks, dropping tears into your fifth Bud. Tell me you haven’t decided to stick around to see what might happen tomorrow.
Hootie and the Blowfish were that bar band. Cracked Rear View, their breakthrough, world-dominating 1994 album, was that bar band committed to record. Hootie—the name of the band, not the man—formed in 1986, honed their skills over years of playing dollar-shows at bars around University of South Carolina, and emerged on the main stage in full homage to their heartland-rock predecessors: the Heartbreakers, John Mellencamp, Blood on the Tracks Bob Dylan. But these older purveyors of jangle-guitar anthems never quite suited where they came from, much as they may have tried to claim it. Petty was too wry, too literate. Mellencamp was too moody and mean. Dylan’s biography just one of his million masks. They were always going to leave for art, for soapboxes, for the shadow world. But Hootie and the Blowfish, with their earnestly euphemistic hearts-on-sleeves, fit the essence of their origin.
“At its peak, Hootie & the Blowfish was a genuinely excellent band,” Jon Caramanica wrote in a recent apologia in the New York Times. “Earthen, soothing, a little ragged. And also deft, flexible and unflashily skilled. It splendidly blended the Southern college rock of the late 1980s with shades of vintage soul, bluegrass, blues and more, rendering it all with omnivorous-bar-band acuity.” The historical record would call the band’s success a fish-out-of-water tale—a fluke (forgive me), quickly tossed back. Their success represented “the day grunge died,” Rucker has said, a seemingly straightforward moment between the politics and irony of grunge and Riot Grrl, and commercial hip-hop and then factory-line pop by Disney graduates. The band names were bad, the chords were major, and as Rucker imagined haters saying: “This little pop/rock band from South Carolina [keeps] telling me to hold their fuckin’ hand.”
The most indelible art has something wrong with it, and the best pure-pop songs are logically incoherent. Cracked Rear View’s lyrics are often jumbled, but the album builds a potently repetitive internal system. Every single song includes: Crying (usually the singer himself), Hands (holding, reaching, wearing rings), and an argument with Time. Though the big singles are remembered as lighthearted, self-deprecating love tunes, each one is undergirded with awareness of a broken world. Rucker says of their breakthrough hit “Hold My Hand”: “For me, that song was always about racism.” In many other tracks, the political message is less opaque; for one, “Drowning” explicitly rebuked the Confederate flag hanging from the South Carolina statehouse twenty years and many anti-Black hate crimes before it was finally removed. Other songs reckon with Rucker’s brother’s addictions, and six songs—half the total on album—overtly mention the loss of the singer’s mother. Rucker’s single mother, Carolyn, a nurse, raised six children, and died suddenly in 1992, before the band hit the big beyond South Carolina.
Near the end of “Let Her Cry,” the singer finally tries to leave the lover whose demons are killing her. At the moment in the last verse when Rucker’s voice swells and crashes, he cries out for help not to a friend or to God, but to his mother—Oh Mama, please…won’t you hold my hand?—who’s already gone.
She never lets me in/ only tells me where she’s been/ when she’s had too much to drink. “I was going to write ‘She Talks to Angels’ for Bonnie Raitt,” Rucker said about sitting down and writing “Let Her Cry” in one stream. The Blowfish have never disguised their influences, and this description is typically straightforward. But neither inspiration Rucker mentions gets close to the sadness of “Let Her Cry.” The Black Crowes song plots a point on the graph somewhere between the Rolling Stones’ “Angie” and Train’s “Meet Virginia” and never achieves liftoff into true sorrow. The singer is almost anthropologically marveling at his Addict Pixie Dream Girl: She’s a tragic fantasy; what does it cost him? I say that I don’t care/ I just run my hands through her dark hair. The existential blues of Raitt’s cover of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is at work in “Let Her Cry,” but the Rucker song is nowhere near as poetic or transcendent. Then I, pray to god ya gotta, help me fly away. And that inarticulate, been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up, failure to transcend is what makes its sorrow so deep.
I want to convince you Hootie and the Blowfish deserved their shocking middlebrow success thirty years ago and that their moment deserves reconsideration now. I want to argue this song is good and quintessentially Nineties, that it combines all the best elements of country storycraft and gospel crying-to-God and sunny socially conscious pop-rock…but that’s not why I’m here.
I’m here because “Let Her Cry” is the saddest song. It’s a song about loving an addict, yes, and about losing that person you love long before they’re gone. But at the core, it’s a song about a powerlessness that can never be reconciled. Knowing the worst will come and slowly realizing that your role is only to watch it happen.
Maybe you’ve got your own Cryer. Maybe you’re the helpless god they call out to. Maybe it takes you a long time to call them back. What can you do? How do you live? How will you lose?
Rucker recalls playing this new song just after he wrote it, introducing it to the bar crowd as untitled. As the band packed up after the set, he was approached by a very drunk white frat bro. This happened a lot. Sometimes the same man lifting a bottle to his chorus would also call Rucker a slur to his face. This time, the fan had a note on the new song. “If she’s gonna cry,” the boy said, “I figure, just let her cry.”
*
I wrote all this before. All these words and a thousand others.
Darius Rucker’s voice has been rattling through my brain for weeks. I’ve got jokes about Rucker’s Burger King cowboy ads and bad puns about the prison of masculinity (“Every-Bro-dy Hurts”). I’ve got descriptions of the lead guitar’s triplets painting those tears clink-cascading down like rain. I’ve got Rucker saying he wants his tombstone to read, “He was a nice guy.” I’ve got my memory of being nine on a field trip to the state capitol and gaping up at Thomas Hart Benton’s “Social History of Missouri” mural, wrapped on four walls by hay harvests, Huck Finn and Jim on the Mississippi, Jesse James pointing a pistol at a train conductor, Frankie shooting Johnny for love, a Black man lynched, a mother wiping a baby’s ass at a civic rally, courtrooms and the Veiled Prophet parade, bondage and commerce, hypocrisy in religion, government, and law—the whole sinewy kaleidoscope of history and myth—then riding home with my 1994 Walkman cassette player, staring out the rain-flecked window at the green-gray world, winding and rewinding “Let Her Cry.” So I sat back down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself, saying— What did I know at nine. But didn’t I know? Didn’t we?
I had a wry observation about the second verse, when the singer thinks his troubled lover has abandoned him, but hasn’t even finished the breath of I wanted to look for youuu—before she walks right back in, barely a glitch in the cycle. In fact, the speaker in “Let Her Cry” never leaves their apartment, just keeps standing up and sitting back down on the same sad sofa, cracking and uncracking a longneck, trapped in the vortex of someone else’s addiction. But addiction never belongs to someone else. It remakes reality. It swallows the world.
Then my Cryer called. Telling me to call back. Telling me, Mindy—
My cousin, one year ahead. My flipped Gulf Coast shadow. Bleached and brown and unforgiving as the sun—
Knowing it was never going to go any other way doesn’t help when it finally goes.
You terrified me my whole life. You took the anger I’m so careful to smother and bury, and you coated yourself in it. I don’t know if you ever made it past eighth grade—you were already running wild then—but you knew plenty. You knew where to harvest the best bay scallops, nestled in the sea grass. You knew how to navigate the back passages of the hotel your mom managed. You knew how to distract the front desk and swipe extra key cards, sneaking into rooms with full ocean views. You never got a driver’s license, but you knew how to get rides and money and wine from old men. You knew how to hide but you didn’t know how to lie because no one paid enough attention to catch you.
Summer trips to the vast beach where you lived. Going out at night with flashlights, swinging the beams and watching a thousand translucent ghost crabs skitter across the sand. Once, when we were little, you disappeared. My mom, scared and mad, scolding your name into the wind and deafening darkness. There were only waves. There was no one coming. Then there you were, stomping out of the ocean like some skinny redneck nymph. I swear to god you were glowing. Mouth set, arms locked out in front of you, holding in two hands the biggest blue crab I’ve ever seen, before or since. How did you pluck it out of the dark? Why weren’t you afraid?
Our dads were brothers, and when we got older and they were both gone, swallowed up by drink and oxycontin, you liked to tell me that we were the same. That we understood them, that we shared this. This family curse. She says Dad’s the one I love the most, but Stipe’s not far behind. You were forty, Mindy, and today, in the pre-dawn on a friend’s couch in Indiana, you died in your sleep. You died like they did. Just later, a little younger. You died like they did, working at it every day.
This sorrow is about losing you, yes. But what hurts more is knowing nothing ever changed, that now nothing ever will. We’re spinning there, inside a narrative that never resolves. In the first verse of “Let Her Cry,” the singer comforts his lover, even as he suffers. In the second verse, he angrily pretends to ignore her cycle of despair: Let her cry—not my problem! From the instrumental break on, he’s the one who’s crying. If the sun comes up tomorrow—it’s not a guarantee. In the third verse, he tries to muster the strength to leave but is paralyzed by the dissonance of seeing a flash of “the same girl I fell in love with long ago”—even as she goes “in the back to get high.”
The song is wrestling with that old Serenity Prayer passed among addicts trying to be in recovery: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. In the end, the singer seems to realize all the things he will accept to stay close to her, to the traces of her he can still make out. That “wisdom” is where the pain is. He knows how much he’ll give up to love her, to witness her disintegration, how powerless he is. There’s nothing lonelier.
One time we danced together. We were in our mid-twenties, and in those years, I found cause to be down 30A more often. You knew every dune-path on the sugar sands of the panhandle, but you said Grayton was still your favorite. At Red Bar, we waited for a table with our moms and your little girl. She already looked like you—straight blonde ponytail, not a spare ounce on her. You were dating a grizzly biker your dead dad’s age. That day, you’d worn flip-flops on a ride, and you showed me where the exhaust pipe left burn marks on your ankles. The sun tilted through the windows, making a blinding latticework of the open space between a tiny stage and people eating hush puppies. The bar band kicked in. Gray hair and cargo shorts, roots-rock jangle, a rhythm section tighter than it had any right to be, a gang of guys who’d jammed themselves into a dependable machine that’ll run 200,000 miles, make you cheer and make you cry. You grabbed my wrist and said, Let’s go. I don’t remember the song, but it must have been “American Girl.” We ran to the front, nearly eye-to-eye with the singer. We danced. We shook and threw up our hands and tossed our heads and swung our asses in time. We were at some ragged edge, alive and surging in a few square feet of floor, and you were right, then – for that song, we were the same.
It got too painful and too dangerous to be around you. I stopped being able to see you behind your eyes. I said I was tired of the people I loved making me watch as they killed themselves. I told you so, because I had to say I tried. Now I don’t know your little girl. She must be fifteen now, living with your mom since before she can remember. Skinny and smart. The last lucid thing you posted on Facebook was a picture of the certificate they gave her at school for academic excellence.
I have my Cryer. The one I’ll never walk out on, who keeps me sitting back down on that same sad couch. I’ll be there with her, as much as I can, until she goes. Not because I believe if I fight hard enough, I’ll change or save her. Not because I believe I’m holding her together, but because I’m trying to realize that I never have. I’m trying to figure it out—how do I love her?—in the time we have left.
I started all this talking about a bar band. How a great one can save your life. I don’t believe that. But a song, being made in real time. A song can hold you, suspended. Can buoy you in the here and now. From there, you can catch a glimpse of your life, whatever you do or don’t do, happening all around you. On that makeshift dancefloor, we spun each other around. We sang into each other’s faces. I’d never seen you smile like that before. I’d never seen you look that light. I convinced myself that I had something to do with it. I had to believe I was that powerful. If you needed me near in order to cry, to feel understood, to stay above the surface— I wanted to let you, for as long as I could.
Katie Moulton is the author of the audio memoir Dead Dad Club: On Grief & Tom Petty. You can find links to more of her work at katiemoulton.com. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University and the Newport MFA. She wants to hold your hand.
Jenny Staff Johnson on morphine’s “cure for pain”
“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” ―Walker Percy
“Someday there’ll be a cure for pain.” —Mark Sandman
Imagine you’re 24. Imagine you’ve lived a charmed life up to now. No tragedy, no trauma, your parents paid for college. And a car. You have a five-speed, cherry-red Volkswagen Jetta and zero debt. So what do you do? You go to grad school, because you can. You get a summer job in Los Angeles, because it’s there. Los Angeles. It insisted on itself in your mind. You turn down a different job that would’ve been better, maybe, because it involved being a teaching assistant for your professor, the former Texas Lieutenant Governor, a man with connections. But you were offered something in Los Angeles, and that had always been where your dreams wandered.
It didn’t have much to do with Hollywood, that wandering in the realm of dreams. You didn’t care much about the movies yet, but the idea of Hollywood probably did have something to do with it. The behind-the-scenes of it all. Somewhere you’d gotten a ballpark-accurate sense of what Hollywood was actually like: scuzzy. Maybe it was your intense Fitzgerald fandom (you knew what had happened to him there, it didn’t go well). The grit of Hollywood was a good foil for the beauty of the LA landscape and, of course, that ocean. It’s contrasts. Contradictions. Tension. You take the California job, at a nonprofit that was betting the internet would save democracy (pity how that all turned out), and make arrangements to drive west for the summer.
Now. Enough of that second person business. We’re talking about me, obviously. We’re talking about Morphine. There is an extra potency in art encountered at the exact right moment—you see it a lot in the book that did’t hit the first time you try to read it, but which, later, becomes a formational favorite (looking at you, Under the Volcano). But I’d defy any music lover of any age or stage in life to listen without dawning amazement and delight to the album—and song—Cure for Pain.
Drums. Saxophone. Two-string bass. Lyrics that were incisive and vivid and spacious. The whole sound of Morphine was architectural somehow. It worked with these elements, but it also worked with silence. Negative space. Pauses. Audible intakes and exhalations of breath.
I’d just had my first close friend get married, the rest of my friends were all paired up, and I was radically unattached. I felt different and I didn’t know where I fit in. My married friend and her husband were moving to Phoenix for some job or other (nobody cared much what anyone was doing for their job in those days) and we agreed to caravan as far as Arizona, then I’d go on to LA. I remember the night I spent in their apartment, where they were starting their adult lives together, and waking up to a view of the mountains out the back patio. They looked blank. Stark, and not particularly appealing. Then I got in my Jetta and drove off, alone, leaving my friends too fend for themselves. Their wedding had taken place the same weekend as the Oklahoma City bombing. The marriage did not endure.
I don’t remember what I listened to in the car. I don’t think it was Morphine. I was definitely into songs about driving west like LA County by Lyle Lovett, staying tight on theme. I was into LA Freeway by Jerry Jeff Walker and Ford Econoline by Nanci Griffith. I was obsessed with Thelma and Louise and was very into the soundtrack so I might have had that with me, too. I remember driving through Joshua tree, and this experience sold me forever on driving through deserts alone. I was confused and lonely and sadder than I had any right to be, 24 and adrift and possessed of a melancholic temperament, one that didn’t look for solace in its opposite but instead in more melancholy. Into this void slid Morphine. The music hit like the soundtrack to a noir set on the moon, signaling to me that there was more out there for me to find if I kept looking. That the idea of a search existed. That I was onto something, and others were onto it, too, whatever it was.
The job was okay. I got in trouble for taking long lunches, which I spent driving to the coast and sitting on a bench next to the Santa Monica Pier, watching the ocean, which was what I had driven all that way for. The internet did not save democracy.
I made it to Hollywood, too. I hung out at a tiki bar at Sunset and Vine, Jack’s Sugar Shack, with one of my two friends. In a little theater deep in Hollywood, I saw Bill Pullman do a one-man performance of ‘Elvis Calls His Mother after the Ed Sullivan Show.’ And I saw Morphine play live at the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever cemetery.
I have no proof that this show actually happened—no photos, no setlist posted online, nothing—and really wouldn’t it be more interesting if it hadn’t? If the whole thing had been a hallucination? But it wasn’t. I remember the name of the guy I went with; probably I could google him and find his email or his LinkedIn or something and request corroboration but I don’t want to do that, I want to keep it like I have it in my memory.
If you were going to pick a perfect place to see Morphine live, the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery would be high on the list. The sort of place conducive to dream states. Dark, windowless, with has high wood beamed ceilings hung with huge wood chandeliers and the walls up-lit at intervals in reds and purples and blues, the moodiest of color palettes. Hanging above the stage is an Order of the Eastern Star, illuminated in softly glowing primary colors.
I don’t remember Sandman singing Cure for Pain that night, though he must have. I remember him introducing “I Had My Chance and I Let it Go,” by saying, “this song is about trying to make a left turn in Los Angeles,” and me laughing knowingly. I'd been there all of six weeks or so, and I imagined I knew the struggles of a real Angeleno. More clearly than anything else, I remember the Masons pacing around the back of the venue in their fezzes. I remember wondering what they thought of it all. Adding to the drama was the fact of the adjacent cemetery—we were surrounded by fields of the dead. Ghosts, maybe.
Speaking of ghosts, I was living in a haunted studio apartment. It was rent stabilized and I found it by driving around West Hollywood looking at signs hanging out in front of buildings. It was a cute Spanish-style place, and I could not believe my luck. As I was moving in my few belongings, the next door neighbor, a guy about my age, was moving out. He volunteered that he was leaving because the place was haunted. It took a minute before I thought to ask the obvious question:
“Wait, is my apartment haunted, too?”
“Oh,” he said, shaking his head pityingly. “Your apartment is WAY haunted.
All the rest of that summer, I marinated in—let’s not say mainlined—Morphine, and I skulked around being sad.
I wasn’t thinking that much about democracy in my off hours. I was doing a lot of driving around. It felt, sometimes, like why I had gone there. To drive around. Santa Monica Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard. It wasn’t long before I understood Sunset Boulevard as another place one went to be sad. The landmark for my street in West Hollywood was a strip club with a red neon sign that said BODY SHOP 18 Years OK!! LIVE NUDE Girls Girls Girls. I thought it seemed sad, what was going on in there. Then there was the Marlboro Man billboard at the bend in Sunset, over the Chateau Marmont. The Marlboro Man died of cancer and John Belushi ODd at the Chateau. This wasn’t far at all from The Viper Room, where River Phoenix Died. That’s a lot of pain.
I listened to Morphine and read magazines. I made a mix tape called EXILE ON SUNSET but I lost it and don’t remember what was on it. Maybe I gave it to some guy. I drove up and down Santa Monica Boulevard a lot. I bought Jack Daniels at 7-11 in West Hollywood and thought that was a cool innovation, having Jack Daniels at a 7-11. Sad, like I said. But I had my music.
Mark Sandman beseeched the world for a cure for pain. He made this beseeching not desperate, nor angry, but sexy, as if the cure might be found in the beseeching itself. He didn’t display the hubris that would have led him to say, ‘I, mark Sandman, with my sultry voice and dark brooding eyes and my thoughtfulness and winking humor and my willingness to say fuck in interviews’ am a cure for your pain, but he was. God damnit, he absolutely was.
The song Cure for Pain is about wishing things were different. Longing for a better world. One of sacrifice, and of faith, and of love and sex and grooves, things that Sandman determined were satisfactory cures for pain. We all get to look for our own answers to the problem of pain and one of mine is music. Where is the ritual? Where is the sacrifice? Where is the faith? These are the opening lines of the song and we should take them seriously as answers to the question.
A cure for pain isn’t the same thing as a distraction from pain, or a (bandaid), or a spiritual bypass. It’s something deeper and more important. And Mark Sandman had known real pain. Nothing superficial would have sufficed. Two of his brothers had passed away, one from a heart condition, one from suicide, and he had been the subject of a brutal stabbing to the chest when he’d worked as a cab driver. Not the kind of pain that could be driven away by trivial distraction.
That was not the sort of thing I’d experienced. Cure for Pain came out in 1993. The year I graduated college and got the hell out of Dallas. I’d been sad in college, too, and thought one of the things I maybe needed to do to fix that was to find God. That’s the sort of thing you sometimes think of when you’re young and depressive and raised in the south. In hindsight, the problem might just have been that I needed to get—as I mentioned I did as soon as I could—the hell out of Dallas. When I got to Austin, the world opened up to me and things started to make a little more sense. I was still sort of looking for God, but in a less anguished way. Austin will do that to a person, drain the anguish out of them.
I didn’t find God right away, nor did I find Morphine until closer to the time when I drove to Los Angeles, in that summer of ’95. Who goes to Los Angeles to look for God? I don’t know, y’all. I’d been told he was everywhere. But I was looking for something. Something I couldn’t seem to find closer to home.
“The word ‘Morphine’ comes from the word ‘Morpheus,’ who is the god of dreams, and that kind appealed to us as a concept,” Sandman said in an interview. “I’ve heard there's a drug called 'morphine' but that's not where we're coming from...we were dreaming, Morpheus comes into our dreams...and we woke up and started this band...we're all wrapped up in these dream messages, and we were compelled to start this band.”
I think he might have been tweaking the interviewer with the “I’ve heard there’s a drug called ‘morphine’” bit, but the rest of it, yeah. Dream messages that spoke to the soul and musical structures with room to run around in. This is music that reorganizes the inside of your brain—or expands it, like a dream where you’re in your home, and you find another room that you’ve never seen before, amazed to realize that it had been there all along. The music is somehow spatial, and into that space grows feeling.
Four years later, when I heard of Sandman’s death onstage in Italy in 1999 of a massive heart attack, I was back in Austin and much more settled—I had found my place in the world and a relationship to art and love and God that would sustain me through more periods of searching, periods which have never really ended. I’ve never heard anything remotely like Morphine since.
It was one of those moments when art meets you and leads you deeper into the mystery of life. Makes you perk up your ears and realize there is something worth pursuing, even if you don’t know what it is. If you are lucky a chain of such artists and art hands you on, one to the next, songs and books and films and friends and lovers and sometimes even strangers on stages and paintings and plays, when the brain is alive to hints, to signs and wonders to intimations that the search exists. There is sweetness and sadness in the search, and the knowledge that it will never truly be finished.
We all run out of time.
Jenny Staff Johnson earned her MFA from the University of Houston. Her fiction, nonfiction and literary translation have been published in The Texas Observer, Tin House Online, and Asymptote, among others. She previously served as Assistant Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast, and currently serves on the boards of two nonprofit publications: Words Without Borders, which focuses on bringing world literature in translation into English, and Glasstire, which focuses on the visual arts in Texas. She is at work on her first novel.