The gamecock. (Columbia, S.C.) 1908-2006, April 12, 1999, Page Page 4, Image 4
EVENTS
"A Choral Evening," 7:30 p.m.
Thursday in the Roger Center. USC
Concert Choir and University Chorus
performs Poulene's "Gloria."
Tickets at Coliseum box office.
Monday, April 12, 1999
i
Where ai
the Ho(
heads
Record sales have gone down, and radi<
stations seemingly nave forgotten them
Is the mega-million era over for Hooti<
and the Blowfish?
- . But Felber says he s not convinc
Associated Press Hootie's time in the spotlight is finishe
"I think people keep forgetting th
we've quietly sold a million records wit
The eye-pleasing videos, the ap- ?ut the helP ra??u 1 ^ we
pearances on "Late Night With David done'.r wouldn sellm^ album!
Letterman," the Grammy Awards, the e sa ' , ?. _ , ,
staggering record sales-they seemed ... Hoote s first album Cracked Re
like they would never end for Hootie View sold more than15 million cop
and the Blowfish. worldwide. Their third disc Music
Now, two years later, the band has ChaJTs- bf s?k\abouti nu,lhon' ..
trouble getting radio airplay. Blowfisb f/ thaY taew thl
"Youcan't always control what hap- would,never se" 15 mlllion copies
pens," Hootie and the Blowfish bassist any a. Vm afam' .
Dean Felber said. 'You can try, but in ? ,tWe been a live band
the -90s, it's just too hard. People are felber sald ?f b self and his mate
just too fickle; they're too hot and !e,ad, s'nSer Da"uf Rucker, guitan
cold. They don't want yesteiday-s band; Bryan and drummer Jim Son
thev want today's band " feld" That s going to keep us going
y y The band will blow out The Tow
ship today for a concert connected wii
Titanic boardii
/% u+s. ^ N. /-V
sells tor $1U0,<
^?_^^ ~?^^
The
Features Roundup had "kept it for a while, so I may, too
Associated Press he said.
The document ? an undamage
SEATTLE ? An $8 Titanic boarding immigrant inspection card that serve
pass that survived the ill-fated voy- as a boarding pass for Titanic's thin
age along with its passenger has fetched class passengers ? is believed to be tl
$100,000 at an auction. only such ticket in existence. Its pri<
The buyer was Jeffrey Trainer, an on Saturday makes it among th
Allentown, Pa. collector who is in the m0st valued of the ship's memorabili;
trading card business. Sjoblom, of Finland, had pinned tl
The price began at $5,000 on Sat- boarding pass inside her jacket fc
urday and zoomed to $ 100,000 in less the 1912 voyage. She had borrowed tl
than a minute, said Cheryl Gorsuch, $8 Titanic fare after she and thn
co-owner of the Tacoma antique store friends were bumDed from the Adria
where the auction was held. iC) another ship in the White Star Lin
Trainer said he would "'hoard the Titanic sunk on Sjoblom's 18th birtJ
ticket for a little while and enjoy it." day. She made it onto a lifeboat that a
Write for I
Call 777-7
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The Gai
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its "Monday After The Masters" golf
3 tournament.
It brings them back home after a
' worldwide tour that took them to mil?
itary bases in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia,
and Bosnia in December, where they
saw the horrors of war.
Felber said a couple of soldiers at
one base found a shallow grave with 15
bodies in it. The victims were blinda
folded, hands tied behind their backs
and bullets in the backs of their heads.
T9 "That was eye opening," Felber said.
s' While the band went to New
Zealand, Australia and Japan to tour
ar in February, Musical Chairs disappeared
from the charts.
Two singles, "I Will Wait" and "On- J
ly Lonely," failed to catch on at radio,
even though the album received some
of Hootie's best reviews. ,
? "It's the most bizarre thing in the
' world," Felber said. "Programmers at
IS' rock 'n' roll radio who got us started
won't even touch us now."
e,~ Felber said about 80 percent of '
[ ~ 1~ A*
uic ucuuic xiuuuc wuiacu vviLii ami*
n- I
th
lg pass
000
? so reportedly carried White Star Line
h chairman J. Bruce Ismay. The pass,
still pinned inside her jacket, stayed
1 drySjoblom's
three friends died.
I When she arrived in America,
Sjoblom headed west with her uncle,
finally settling in Tacoma. She married
and raised two children in Olympia,
and died in 1975.
Her pass had been packed away
with old photographs and postcards until
a widower of Sjoblom's grandniece
sold it to the antique store about six
months ago, Gorsuch said. She would
X 1 _1_ _1 J iV
inoi say now mucn sne paid or anyuung
else about the seller.
But how it got to such a distant
relation has left Sjoblom's direct descendants
perplexed. Their varying theories
have the pass vanishing long ago
a with Sjoblom's first husband, or being
? taken by a curious high school student
' whom Sjoblom lent a box of voyage keep^
sakes sometime in the 1960s.
^ "We never saw him again," said
j Sjoblom's daughter, Evelyn Henie
drickson, 84, who attended the auction.
Relatives considered making a bid
'e to bring the ticket back into the famia
ly, but William Hendrickson, Sjoblom's
' grandson, said the family couldn't af)r
ford it.
"Sometimes I think all the luck in
;e our gene pool was used up when my
t grandmother got on that lifeboat," he
e told The News Tribune of Tacoma.
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Hootie and the Blowfish with Stevie Wonder at the 19
group. Hootie's record sales have gone down considerably
ly getting any air play at the same stations in the soutt
ning.
lantic Records were let go during the And Hootie will
band's first two years there. ters again by releai
But don't feel bad for the guys just their next single.
irof TT-ioxr cnlrl nnt fxirn layrro l^lrvmrla rmf_ "Wo'ro rrninnr ir\ A/
jut. X 11U Y CJU1U VUt tTVU XtUgU X XU11UU UUt ?l U iU 5^111^ uu uv
door shows three weeks ago and should to see if rock radio w
be a good draw on the summer concert the Blowfish," Felbe
circuit.
"Now we don't have to convince them
that we can sell out their shows. "P^nnlp o
"Now we can just say:'Call the pro- P
moter who booked us in Florida.'That WZHlt yeSl
sets us up for the summer, and if our todav'S t>!
first few shows in May are good, then ^
that means we'll be booked up in August
and September," he said.
Christianity b<
by Raymond McCaffrey
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. ? There was a laundry
list of reasons why Randi Wilkerson drifted away from
church when she went to college.
First, she fell in with a wild crowd that loved to party.
Second, she moved away from home - and her Christian
parents. But mainly, like others her age, the 23-year4-1,
u
U1U UlUUgliL CI1UIL11 WdMl t tuui.
"People think it's boring," Wilkerson says. "That's why
I was rebelling. All the guys who went to my church
were dorks. I thought,
'Is this what I'm going to have to marry?' I'd never been
exposed to cool Christian people."
The term "cool Christians" might seem like an oxymoron.
But for many people
Wilkerson's age, being Christian
and going to church is the "It's because ct
hip thing to do. f. little hit
College-age students are 8 ttie Dll
undergoing a spiritual reawak- modern. They'i
ening, experts say, and in turn, tional "
churches are scrambling to
reach them.
The result: More and more college
poster children of the so-called
Generation Y, the "millennium generation," are dancing
away Friday nights at Christian socials and spending Simday
mornings at worship services geared to them.
"It's because churches are getting a little bit more postmodern,"
.says Wilkerson, who's part of Crossroads, the
college-age ministry at Pulpit Rock Church in Colorado
Springs. "They're not so traditional. That's what drove me
around," she says.
"I think people are getting involved because they realize
how fun it can be and that people who are Christian
are not boring.
"They're not dorks," says Wilkerson, a stock supervisor
at a Gap store.
The spiritual reawakening among today's college students
also constitutes a resurgence of the so-called Jesus
movement on campuses, which began in the late 1960s
and proceeded through the '70s, says Tom Yeakley, director
of The Navigators' U.S. Campus Ministry, based in
Colorado Springs.
But by the early '80s, campus ministries that once had
1,000 members were down to about 50.
"We saw a very spiritually apathetic college student in
America," Yeakley says. The decline continued until 1994
when "we saw an uptake again in spiritual hunger," Yeakley
says. That spiritual hunger was initially gauged by the
individual campus ministries and confirmed in surveys
The Navigators handed out to more than 50,000 college
students in each of two years.
In the '80s, only 10 to 15 percent of college students
polled answered "yes" or "maybe" to one or both of the
following questions:
I I {l JI [{'J II
SITE OF THE PAY
A site designed to make you
think. ?
http//www.moron.com
Page 4
m0$s?!^
Courtesy of Hootie and the Blowfish official Web site
97 Grammys, at which Hootie won best new musical
1 since then, with the new album, Musical Chairs, hardleast
that helped make the band popular in the begintest
the radio wa- Felber said the important thing is
sing "Wishing" as connecting with people and sometimes
that takes work.
3 it in a subtle way "The same stuff was happening
ill play Hootie and when we started. It's not easy street,"
r said. he said. "If you sit back, you're not going
to get anywhere. It's just going to
ire just too fickle. They don't
terday's band; they want
and."
Dean Felber
bassist, Hootie and the Blowfish
ecomes cool
"Would you like to be in Bible study?" and "Would you like
to talk to someone about your spiritual life?" Over the past
two years, 40 to 60 percent of college students have answered
yes to at least one.
Jim Rottenborn, director of the college and career ministry
at Woodmen Valley Chapel, witnessed the boom in
the size of campus
ministries while he was working with students at Miami
University in Ohio.
"It just seems there's a definite growing interest among
students in spiritual stuff," Rottenborn says. "In '91... the
biggest group on campus had about 300 kids showing up.
When I left in '97, they had about 1,200 showing up."
Yeakley says he doesn't think anyone really understands
why there's a spiritual reawakening "other than
God is at work again in the lives of this generation of students."
That would be Generalurches
are get- '!onJ'which actcor^"g 10
? Yeakley, consists of those
UlOrC pOSt- born in 1980 or later - al
re not SO tradi- though some gauge the starting
point as 1982.
"This is the leading edge of
Randi Wilkersotl Generation Y, the millenni:
student, Colorado Springs um generation," Yeakley
says.
"They are different than
Generation X... They're hungry spiritually."
The common assumption is that the booming economy
in the '80s prompted Generation X to focus on getting high
grades so they could "get a good job and earn a lot of
money," according to Yeakley. Church wasn't in the picture.
New methodologies are being used to draw Generation
Y to church.
At Woodmen Valley Chapel, for instance, there's a special
Sunday-night service at which Rottenborn focuses
on a message from the Bible. However, students lead the
worship, as well as gather to play games and just hang
out.
"It's a lot more of a coffeehouse atmosphere," Rottenborn
says. However, Rottenborn maintains that the most
important part of his ministry involves one-on-one breakfast
or lunch meetings with students.
"The idea is that I give time to the oldest eruvs in the
ministry so that they can take on one or two younger guys,"
he says.
First Presbyterian Church has a Sunday school class
designed expressly for college students. The
church also has students and adult
leaders who preside over on-campus Bible study groups at
Colorado College and the Air Force Academy.
"I would say that's a scriptural kind of principle," says
Mark Epperson, director ofYoung Adult Ministries at First
Presbyterian.
"Jesus met people where they were, and that's why he
was so effective," he says.
I t