G. Love & Special Sauce’s self-titled debut album was an out-of-left-field record upon its release in May 1994. An innovative concoction of rock, hip-hop, blues, and jazz music, its lead single “Cold Beverages” quickly overtook radio stations coast-to-coast that summer, but the band was none the wiser of its unusual, unexpected success.
“It was getting played on MTV, played on Beavis and Butt-Head ,” G. Love tells Rolling Stone . “It was a hit record, but we didn’t know it was blowing up ‘cause we were doing 250 shows a year in a van — we were just moving with our head down.”
Sitting at a table in the middle of an empty dancefloor before a recent sold-out gig at the Visulite Theatre in Charlotte, North Carolina, G. Love — real name: Garrett Dutton — ponders what that first album means to him 30 years on. The group is in the midst of a nationwide tour celebrating the anniversary.
“To look back now, 30 years later, is to see that the record was the catalyst,” Dutton says. “It was a launching point for my whole career, for our whole careers.”