Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to Cooper stuff. This is a pretty cool episode. I don't usually get to interview fellow musicians. And so, you know, I've got a kind of a new

Aquinas who I've just met so thrilled to have them on the show. And let's see. So he was the drummer for hoody and the blowfish, one of the biggest selling bands in American history. So we're going to talk about that.

Also, he has a new book out and EP. This guy is busy. And so we're so thrilled to have him on as everybody say hello to Jim. Son of Feld and Jim say hello to the peeps.

What is happening and so glad to be here. Gosh, thank goodness for zoom, right? We hate it and we need it.

Yeah, at first it was we're doing interviews on zoom because I was I was more stressed out about the technology than the interview. You might be a really important interview. And I'm like, Lord, please help it work. And I don't know how to it was so stressful.

And now, you know, we can sit in our PJs and do interviews, you know. It's not a bad life.

So anyway, we're kind of talk about a ton of things. It's cool for me. I don't get to interview a lot of fellow musicians. So you were the drummer for hooding the blowfish.

What do you want to say about that? I mean, it's one of the biggest bands in American history. What's up with that?

Yeah, you know, it's been a great journey. It was, you know, timing had a lot to do with it. I was trying to finish up college at the University of South Carolina. I came down here to play soccer. I'm from Northern Illinois. So I was a long journey, but I had a little dream. And so I played my four years here.

And at the end, I knew music was where I wanted to go. And it wasn't a cover band for a little while, an alternative band for a while. And I was trying to understand if I could be a songwriter. I was a drummer by sort of nature. But I was learning to song right. I played a little piano and acoustic guitar.

And at the same time, my buddies, Darius and Mark and Dean, who were in another band here on campus called hooding the blowfish, were losing their drummer, ironically following his Christian journey, which is beautiful.

And it opened up a spot for me, a guy who wanted to write songs and really just give it his all to join hooding the blowfish as drummer and, you know, collaborator. So in 1989, I joined that band.

And we went on. We kind of worked our butts off for four or five years, trying to get what, as you can appreciate as a musician and an artist in the 90s was a record deal. That was the only way to get up towards radio and have more fans.

And for five years, we drove around our van playing our music, playing covers, getting into much trouble, trying to learn to be good men and mostly failing at that, unfortunately, but we got a record deal and our song got on the David Letterman late night show.

And radio caught wind and it kind of changes forever. Nobody saw what the album that we had made crack review for Atlantic records was going to do, you know, you never, you never know if what you do as an artist is going to work with people as you can work with 20 people are 2000 people going to love it or 200,000.

So we really can't explain the success, but we embraced it and try to do the best with it that we could, you know, use our influence for positive use our influence for for charity and and to have fun, you know, we feel like maybe we were put here for, for hooding the blowfish.

I learned later I was not put here just for hooding the blowfish.

It's part of it, but not the whole reason right. So you know what's interesting when I was reading your book. It sounds like you were a pretty serious soccer player. I mean, that's right, right, meaning playing in college and that sort of thing.

Yeah, I almost went north from Northern Illinois. I got an invitation to come up to university of Wisconsin, the Madison campus. And I just thought, right, you know, I love soccer and I really want to play division one, but I'm not going further north guys.

I'm not like going to a cold region. And I said, I'm going to go south. And yeah, I was lucky. I was the only walk out and taken on my freshman year trying out for a team that had a bunch of recruited kids and scholarship kids.

And I loved it. I really was serious about it. And honestly, that was probably my only idea at the time at a J team soccer, soccer, you know, I wasn't thinking about much else. And that showed in my in my grades and it showed in my personal life too.

I came up, you know, short in a lot of ways.

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