How Hootie and the Blowfish Wrote This Massive Hit With a $5 Guitar Accessory

We often associate better sounds with better, more expensive equipment, but for Hootie and the Blowfish, all the band needed to write one of the biggest hits of their career was a guitar accessory you can snag for about five bucks. The alt-rock band featured the track on their debut EP, Kootchypop, and debut full-length album, Cracked Rear View. By the mid-1990s, it was virtually impossible to go anywhere without hearing this iconic song.

It just goes to show that inspiration doesn’t have to be pricey.

The Guitar Accessory That Inspired Hootie and the Blowfish Hit

Before Hootie and the Blowfish blew up into international alt-rock stars, the band was cutting their teeth across the country with various supporting and headlining bands. One of those bands was North Carolina’s Dillon Fence, which released three LPs between the mid-1980s and 1995. In a 2025 interview with Guitar Player, Hootie’s lead guitarist, Mark Bryan, recalled watching Dillon Fence perform with capos every night.

“I thought it sounded cool,” Bryan said of the small accessory that allows guitarists to adjust the pitch of all six strings by clamping down on the guitar neck and creating a “new” nut and open fret. This allows guitarists to play in different keys without changing their fingerings. “It made the guitars chime in such a wonderful way,” Bryan continued. “So, I thought, I’m going to start messing around with a capo. One of the first things I did was throw a capo on the second fret and came up with different chord patterns.”

Those new chord patterns, Bryan explained, eventually turned into Hootie and the Blowfish’s 1994 hit, “Only Wanna Be with You.” The influence Dillon Fence had on Bryan’s guitar part wasn’t lost on frontman Darius Rucker, who gave a subtle shoutout to their old touring buddies with the line, Put on a little Dylan, sittin’ on a fence.

Breaking Down The Guitar Parts For This Monumental Hit

As far as 1990s alt-rock classics go, it doesn’t get much more iconic than Hootie and the Blowfish. The band’s unique blend of country, pop, and rock was a vastly lighter musical fare than the grunge that dominated the rock world at the time. Given the band members’ varied musical backgrounds, it only makes sense that the band would go on to create a new style that defined the latter half of the decade. “Each member of the band came from different musical backgrounds,” Bryan told Guitar Player.

“Dean Felber and I came from a classic rock background. So, we were able to inject a lot of that energy into the sound.” Bryan cited the Who’s Pete Townshend as a major influence, particularly on tracks like “Pinball Wizard.” “If you listen to what my right hand is playing, you’ll hear me strumming a rhythm that’s in double time. I remember very intentionally wanting to have that same energy in the song.”

To record the guitar parts for “Only Wanna Be With You,” the band once again opted for a blend of tones instead of settling on one particular style. He performed the capo-ed version of the song on producer Don Gehman’s Gibson-45 acoustic guitar. Then, he laid an electric part over it with a Gibson ES-335. “Amp-wise, I plugged into an early ‘90s 50-watt Mesa/Boogie Caliber, which sounded like gold through one of Don’s Marshall cabinets.”

In fact, we’d argue it didn’t just sound like gold. That distinctive guitar part, bolstered by the harmonies produced through Bryan’s thrifty accessory, sounded like gold in the U.K., platinum in Australia, and 2x diamond and 22x platinum in the U.S. Not bad for a song that came from a $5 piece of plastic.

Photo by Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images