Blind Melon — Blind Melon
29.June.2020
Blind Melon
Blind Melon
1992
Blind Melon’s self-titled debut had a life cycle that went like this:
— people ignored it
— people heard it
— people loved it
— people hated it (“that fucking bee song”)
— people ignored it
All I Can Say, a documentary about Blind Melon lead singer Shannon Hoon’s just came out. In light of that, it’s time to re-visit the band and this four times platinum debut album.
The public’s first exposure to Shannon Hoon was in the Guns-n-Roses video “Don’t Cry.” Hoon is seen sharing mic time with Axl Rose (Rose was a friend and he sang backup on the Use Your Illusion albums).
“Don’t Cry” is the G-n-R video where fans began asking the perennial existential question, “Where’s Izzy?”. The second most asked question from that video was “Who the fuck is that other guy singing with Axl?”
By the time the world was getting exposed to Shannon Hoon via “Don’t Cry”, his band, Blind Melon:
Christopher Thorn — guitar
Roger Stevens — guitar
Glen Graham — drums
Brad Smith— bass
had been signed to Capitol Records and recorded an EP with producer David Briggs. The band was unhappy with the resulting “slick and doctored” sound of the EP, The Sippin Time Sessions, they successfully pushed to shelve it. That kind of muscle for a new band is rare … it didn’t hurt that Hoon was friends with the lead singer of the biggest band in the world … and that both Blind Melon and Guns-n-Roses were managed by the same team.
With Capitol Records support, the LA-based Blind Melon debunked for Durham, North Carolina and hunkered down to write and rehearse new material with producer Rick Parashar — who was then riding high off of his success with Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and Alice in Chains Sap.
While some of Blind Melon was recorded in Durham at the place the band had nicknamed “Sleepyhouse” (immortalized on the album), the truth is that the bulk of the album was recorded at London Bridge Studio in Seattle … just as the crest of the grunge wave was taking shape.
Released in Autumn of 1992, Blind Melon was met with a deafening shrug. The first single “Tones of Home” picked up modest airplay but was far from a break-out. It’s sound, while hard-ish, was not as hard as the other music gaining widespread popularity (grunge). The music of “Tones of Home” is “chunky” and clean, but its message of alienation and the longing to be understood felt a little fallow:
Tones of Home
What do you think they would say
If I stood up and I walked away
Nobody here really understands me
And so I’ll wave goodbye I’m fine
Tones of home said
You don’t know the way I’m living
You don’t like me
Tones of home, tones of home
And so I’ll wave goodbye.
I’m flyin’ I’m flyin’ home
That theme of alienation would be much better represented in the video for the second single, “No Rain.” Directed by Samuel Bayer, the video follows the quest of the girl in the bee outfit from the album cover as she searches for her tribe. It’s one of the defining music videos of the era, if not of all time.
It’s also the video for “that fucking bee song.”
The fact that the video focuses on that loneliness and not the less subtle depressive message certainly served the video and the band quite well:
No Rain
All I can say is that my life is pretty plain
I like watchin’ the puddles gather rain
And all I can do is just pour some tea for two
And speak my point of view but it’s not sane
It’s not sane
I just want someone to say to me, oh
I’ll always be there when you wake, yeah
You know I’d like to keep my cheeks dry today
So stay with me and I’ll have it made
And I don’t understand why I sleep all day
And I start to complain that there’s no rain
And all I can do is read a book to stay awake
And it rips my life away but it’s a great escape
Escape, escape, escape
“No Rain” opened the Blind Melon floodgates.
The fourth and final single, “Change”, is the song with the most muscle and the one with real lasting power. With its surprising positivity and optimistic message, that makes sense.
Change
When you feel your life ain’t worth living
You’ve got to stand up
And take a look around and you look way up to the sky
Yeah, and when your deepest thoughts are broken
Keep on dreaming boy, ’cause when you stop dreamin’ it’s time to die
Musically, “Change” benefits from the layers of acoustic instruments, including a mandolin sound that is right off Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story. Often songs with this much texture can get lost in their own ass, but “Change” doesn’t do that. The song juts out its chin as if to say “You do you, I’ll do me” and finishes with sage advice:
And as we all play parts of tomorrow
Some ways will work and other ways we’ll play
But I know we all can’t stay here forever
So I want to write my words on the face of today
And then they’ll paint it
And oh as I fade away
They’ll all look at me and they’ll say
Hey look at him and where he is these days
When life is hard, you have to change
When life is hard, you have to change
If only Shannon Hoon had heeded his advice.
For an album as maligned as Blind Melon, it’s got a fuckton of great music on it.
As a group essentially from the bible belt (Mississippi, Indiana, and Pennsylvania), “Holyman” and its biting lyrics takes aim at religious charlatans and grifters:
Holyman
Holyman I tell you man you gotta
Believe in what you see
Cause its you that corrupt us man and
Deep throat philosophy
I don’t need your spells or the little
Games you try to pull on me
Come to think of it I don’t need your religion
Gotta getaway
I wish you would understand
Everybody prays
Let me find my own way
Musically, Blind Melon is a hodgepodge of genres. It’s got some jam band sound, it’s got some southern rock, it’s got some grunge, and it’s got some blues. Blind Melon is best described as an updated Lynyrd Skynyrd … by way of LA and Seattle.
The band and the album were marketed as “alternative” but during most of the ’90s alternative just meant three things:
It wasn’t hip hop or rap.
It was white.
It fell somewhere under the widening “rock” umbrella but wasn’t 20+ years old. In other words, a radio station you could play The Allman Brothers Band and not be vilified for playing Blind Melon.
Critics mostly dismissed the band and the album:
Richard Cromelin at The LA Times said: “In its best moments it mutates into a distinctive metal-grunge-psychedelic hybrid, but to get beyond functional, the group needs some songs with more dimension and a more focused attack.”
High Times Magazine said Blind Melon had “fashioned a soft-metal sound that fuses 20 years or so of rock history, from Yes to Janes Addiction.”
Hit Parader Magazine wrote: “[Blind Melon] have constructed a series of tight, hard-hitting tunes that possess an earthy, eerie quality that instantly distinguishes it from anything else currently on the market.”
And of course, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics gave the record a C+ rating but then eviscerated the album: “The biggest assholes yet to go alternative platinum … Musically they’re kind of a cross between Rhinoceros [who?] and Savage Resurrection [WHO?], although without the steamroller drive of the former or the messy idealism of the latter. They do boast better chops, however.” NOTE: Dear Mr. Christgau — name-checking two WILDLY obscure bands makes you the asshole, not Blind Melon.
Blind Melon would eventually sell 4 million copies and put the band on loads of magazine covers, television shows and they’d even turn in one of the more memorable performances at Woodstock ’94.
What makes Blind Melon, the band, even more interesting is that when it came time to record a follow-up, they pivoted and released Soup. An album that is in stark contrast to the laid back qualities of their debut. It would’ve been interesting to see how this band could’ve grown … but it wasn’t to be.
While it’s true that Blind Melon worked hard for the success they achieved it’s also true that their precipitous drop in popularity was a result of “that fucking bee song”. And that’s too bad because I think if you listen to the whole album again, it’s good … very good.
Blind Melon also makes for a GREAT summer album.