Who Got the Hooch?: An Interview With Steve from Everything

 "Who got the hooch, baby. Who got the only sweetest thang in the world." If you listened to pop radio in 1998 you might remember that hook. That came from Harrisonburg, VA's own Everything. The song seemed to be omnipresent for a few years particularly on the east coast. The song went on to appear in several TV shows and films including "Scrubs" and "The Waterboy." The band had been around for several years before their hit and were able to break out of the pack for a brief period. Unfortunately, due to record label mishaps, the band were never able to become as huge as they should have been. Guitarist/sax player Steve Van Dam graciously agreed to talk about the band's history and what could have been.

Pete Crigler: When did you get interested in playing music?

Steve Van Dam: When I was five years old my older brothers were getting piano lessons, and apparently I wouldn’t leave them alone, even during their lessons. I have a distinct memory at about age 4 of playing two low notes on the piano next to each other and holding them and listening to the sound drone out. It sort of sounded like a propeller plane flying away into the horizon. I remember doing this for a long time… Creating sounds that fascinated me has been something that I’ve done for decades since…

Pete: How did Everything come together and what was the scene in Harrisonburg like?

Steve: There are some fun stories about how the guys in the band all came to meet each other and started playing music together. The core was a band that Mark and I were in in high school called Those Damn Kids. This was in Annandale, Virginia. Once we were at JMU, Mark and I roomed together, and Dave had been in Annandale before he moved down to Richmond, so he knew about us. He lived in Hillside Hall, where Craig was renowned for taking an acoustic guitar into the bathroom stall with him and “working things out, song wise of course...” So Dave introduced us and at that point we just needed a drummer. Stewart Gunter, our first drummer decided to take a summer off doing adventure youth camping stuff in Alaska, and we had started playing by then so we were looking to keep going. This led to some drummer auditions, where Nate showed up and blew everyone away. Rich might be the best story – somehow he was sitting next to us on a shuttle bus trip across campus, and we started talking about if you could drag race buses and the engines and tires that would really be required for such a thing… One thing led to another, and after many hours of practicing in the basement of White Hall, and hours of recording onto a porta studio four track cassette multi track recorder, we started doing some open mic nights and the rest as they say is Everything.

Pete: How did the band come to develop its sound?

Steve: This will dovetail into what the scene was in Harrisonburg, and in the mid-Atlantic in general. JMU has an amazing music program to this day, and most of us at least took music industry classes, and enjoyed the atmosphere of music making, and the cacophony of practice rooms, even the state of the art brand new studio that was built while we were there. That’s where we recorded our first album. I was a composition in theory major, so I was all about writing, creating, performing, and recording. My composition professor and mentor, Dr. Hilliard, was an enthusiastic advocate and guide. He even came out to some band practices and advised on cord movement and horn charts! Our sound of course was a product of all of our influences, from a lot of ‘80s alternative and ska on one end, to classic rock and even classical/experimental stuff. We really tried to live in to the band name-it was like a challenge to explore and blend genres and instrumentation! And then there are the live shows – we were heavily influenced by high energy funky ska bands, like Fishbone, and the idea of a performance as almost like a competition of Energy, entertainment and execution. We played a lot of frat shows, and perhaps to our detriment, we found that we had songs and styles that worked really well for a certain type of audience. Partiers. The mid-Atlantic was fantastic for bands because there were so many places to play within a short drive away. So our almost 10 years of 200 shows a year was the proving ground of our sound, songs, and even our marketing and business sense. From a startup perspective, our build/test/learned cycle was 24 hours, meaning that we were pretty fearless about trying stuff out and seeing if it worked. And if it packed the dance floor, then it stayed in the set for next shows, and if it didn’t, then we agreed to never do it again! The other great thing about that scene was how many other good bands we got to rub shoulders with and even share stages and jam sessions with.

Pete: Tell me about recording Play and Solid.

Steve: We recorded Play at JMU in the brand new studio in the music building. Nobody knew what we were doing, so they were happy accidents and some pretty funny recordings that got committed to our first CD. A lot of creativity and sometimes it works, and other times listening back now it’s a bit cringe! Like what in the hell were we thinking…! Solid was four songs that we recorded in a proper studio with a proper engineer and the rest live recordings. I think that’s all the money that we had for it. And we struggled through several albums to capture the energy and intensity of our live shows. Doing that in the studio is a whole different animal. I think Solid is notable for the songs - It’s kind of a time capsule for our greatest hits at the time.

Pete: What happened with the Capricorn Records deal?

Steve: We recorded Labrador at the farmhouse with two amazing producers – John Alagia and Doug Derryberry. If you don’t know their work, Google them, they went on to do some pretty amazing stuff! Labrador has a vibe - we were moving towards grunge and more guitars. Our experiences on the road and at the farm and the many hours in our practice room led us into some interesting creative places, and I think this album captures that, for better and for worse. The record was done, even the artwork and packaging, and that’s when we signed with Capricorn. Months went by and the record still wasn’t in record stores, and we were looking to record our next album. They started sending us producer recommendations that we weren’t very happy with, so between all that, we agreed to end the contract and that was it. Just not a good fit I guess. It’s too bad, because Cake did really well on Capricorn, and Widespread Panic as well, and stylistically we were somewhere between those two bands at that time…

Pete: What was it like recording Super Natural?

Steve: We definitely learned from some of our experiences. The Capricorn lesson was that just like dating, it’s a matter of finding the right partner versus whoever will have you… Billy Lehman and Blackbird records, his boutique label were that right partner for us. He loved us, and I remember him saying “I just want to help you guys make the record that you can make!” That record was Super Natural. We recorded it with a producer that we trusted--the incomparable Jim Ebert, who at that point had produced hit songs in various genres. We recorded at the pre-Civil War mansion across the road from the band house. We did it up--2 inch tape machine, ProTools rig, and almost 2 months of recording/retooling/mixing/magic. We had a very clear goal – we wanted to make songs that we were proud of and that could be played on the radio and MTV/VH1, because they were the gatekeepers to a mass audience. At this point, we had sold 30,000 of our own albums and we were ready for the next step. So “Good Thing,” “Hooch,” Time Will Heal Me,” and “Spent,” -All of these songs were intentionally arranged and produced to be the best most radio friendly versions that we could make.

Pete: Tell me about how Hooch came together. 

Steve: "Hooch" was first and a cappella doo-wop thing that we put in the middle of “Soulfish” during our live shows. “Soulfish” of course was the epic jam crowd favorite featuring some DC gogo and whoever else we let on stage with us that night… with Jim’s help, we came up with a baseline and I found that guitar riff and away we went! Craig’s wonderful and purposefully all-encompassing lyrics were written on one of our shuttle bus jaunts out to Colorado ski resort touring. A funny aside, my high school reunion was the weekend that we started tracking “Hooch,” so I recorded the guitar riff and a bunch of chord and rhythm noodling and left for the weekend. When I came back, Jim had stitched together the different loops into my guitar part!

Pete: How did the Blackbird/Sire deal come about and do you think it was a good idea?

Steve: Blackbird had an uplift deal with Sire, and I’m pretty sure that existed even before we were signed to Blackbird. It was pretty common back then for big labels like Sire to have lots of uplift deals with smaller indies. It just meant that when something good started happening for us, like people started calling in to request “Hooch” on various radio stations, Sire could quickly step in and add their muscle. So they did, and “Hooch” got added to more and more radio stations playlists. One thing Sire lacked was a good PR department, so even at the peak of our hit song, when we should’ve been playing all the late night shows and getting press in Rolling Stone etc., that didn’t happen. I think it’s why so many people know the song, but not the band. No regrets, but it’s one of those things where you look back and say I wonder what might’ve happened… We had an amazing run, and there were so many good bands that didn’t see the lightning in a bottle success of a hit song, so it’s kind of silly to complain about what record labels could’ve/should’ve done.

Pete: What was success like and how did everyone react to it?

Steve: Those were amazing years - the almost 3 years that “Hooch” was on the radio! Suddenly we were in a tour bus and sharing stages with Coolio and *NSYNC and playing huge crowds, signing autographs, doing radio shows with Rick Dees and hanging with Lionel Richie and Young MC and just this whirlwind of what that world is like. It’s no wonder that celebs fall prey to all of that craziness, because it messes with your head pretty good…We got just the tiniest taste of that, but it was enough for me. Fame. It was fun to be back together with Dave Matthews or Hootie & the Blowfish, and to reflect that we had played frat shows and beach bars not too long ago…

Pete: Did the band choose to leave Sire or were you dropped after the crazy merger?

Steve: Two mergers sounded the closing bell of our amazing run. The first merger was London Records with Sire, and of course fired everyone at Sire because they didn’t need the staff, they just wanted the label. We had a memorable meeting with the new president - Peter Koepke. Let’s just say he didn’t quite understand what we were all about, and as a result he didn’t put any money towards our second single, “Good Thing,” which was actually supposed to be the home run. (The strategy from the record label experts had been to go with “Hooch” first as kind of a warm-up and then after everyone knew our name to hit them with the big one “Good Thing.” Oh well.) The second merger was the AOL/Time Warner merger, which somehow notified all of the uplift deals that any label in that family had, and at that point that was the death of Blackbird Records, and the end of our radio career.

Pete: Where did the idea come to sign with W.A.R.?

Steve: The last thing that Blackbird did before they went out of business was hand us the masters to the new album that we had recorded. We needed distribution and that’s where WAR came in. Our hope was that between our pre-Hooch fan base and the post “Hooch” bump, we could still have massive success without radio support. We were wrong. 

Pete: Was the recording of People are Moving any different than the previous records?

Steve: This record is interesting, as we were trying to figure out a post hit song sound, and Craig been super influenced by dance music, and I had gotten deep into engineering and production in ProTools so the result is some pretty cool creativity along with some head scratchers that didn’t quite survive the test of time in my book. On a personal level, the work I did on this totally prepared me for the next 10 years of my career in the music industry as a composer/producer/engineer. I learned a lot from Jim and just from doing it, the ok’ 10,000 hours...

Pete: When did the band start to slow down?

Steve: We booked a solid East Coast tour to support the new album, and off we went. But moving back down into a van and trailer after all of the success, and going back to playing half full venues… It felt like going back in time at least five years... We had a good band heart to heart about all of it. We decided that maybe it was time to do other things, and that it had been an amazing 10-year run! 

Pete: Was there ever a full breakup or has it just been a very long hiatus?

Steve: Definitely not a break up. Just a “ till we meet again…”

Pete: Tell me about what you're doing and are you in touch with everyone?

Steve: For 10 years I owned and operated a studio, first recording bands for 25 bucks an hour, and then for most of that time I wrote and produced music for TV/commercials. For the last 10 years, I’ve been doing Light the Music – a startup dedicated to connecting more people with the amazing power of musical creativity, especially in the world of music education. Up until Covid, we were providing special ed programs with everything they needed to teach music to their kids. Since then, we’ve built a program for secondary school music educators who desperately need something while their kids are out of the band/orchestra/chorus room. We’re super excited about this program, and so are these music teachers and their students! Check it out – www.lightthemusic.com

Nate and I played for over a dozen years in a cover band called E3, which was amazing. Power trio with Andy Waldeck (Earth to Andy) on bass and all three of us singing. Say what you will about wedding bands, and corporate gigs, but we were kind of amazing and explored all kinds of really fun musical territory. I’ve never had experiences with a tighter band where you can change songs/keys with just a glance. Ironically, Nate and Craig and I had played a few shows a year ago, first as “Almost Everything” and then just as the real deal, and it felt great so we were planning to do a bunch more bigger shows this year and maybe even record a new album. All of that is of course on hold now until the pandemic eases up. 

Pete: What do you hope Everything's legacy will be?

Steve: I’m a bit of a dreamer, so I wonder even if our best days are behind us, or if we have more to give. Part of what light the music is working on right now is connecting student musicians with the good parts of the music industry... and somewhere in all of this there is more creativity, and a future Everything vision of new songs, and new jams, more collaboration, maybe even more success, however the world chooses to define it. And if not any of that new stuff, we still have the amazing story of all the experiences that we shared, the highs and lows, as a band of brothers traveling down the road to the next gig.