Shannon Forever: Blind Melon’s Bee Girl and Countercultural Afterlives

Justin Rogers-Cooper

The Portlandia video “Dream of the ‘90s” plays with many of the stereotypes about the decade. Its conceit begins with Jason (Fred Armisen) explaining to Melanie (Carrie Brownstein) that Portland is where the dream still lives: piercings, tribal tattoos, forming bands (and “singing about saving the planet”).^[1] Interestingly, the video’s arch and mocking tone about ‘90’s attitudes (read: grunge) becomes conflated with a scathing mockery of the hipster in one of its main motifs.^[2] It features Jason leading a pack of grungy freaks and geeks on a riverwalk. At first we see a predictable satire of persistent slacker iconography lifted from films like Reality Bites (“remember when people were content to be unambitious?”).^[3] Queerly, the pack includes a big dude with Terminator shades dressed in all black, wearing a skirt; a short woman in a striped shirt carrying a plastic sword; a woman in a dog outfit with a black clown nose; a female carnival clown; a punk rocker; a man in a blue suit with a top hat; and a biker-leather guy with a burly chest.

Aside from Jason, then, the ‘grunge’ crowd scene feels quite queer. What especially interests us too are two women essentially dressed as clowns.^[4] For one, they’re so serious. For another, they’re posed as street performers or unfashionable narcissists: ironic, funny because they’re unfunny. They open memories, though, to a peak ‘90s moment, imprinted on millions, that reveals much about the decade’s vibes -- and which happens to conceal one of the era’s brightest souls. Recall if you can the “Bee Girl” from Blind Melon’s 1993 hit video “No Rain,” the second single and fourth video from their self-titled album released the prior year.^[5] Although she is a bee, you can easily imagine her in the riverwalk pack, close behind the clown.

She’s one of the defining icons of the decade, an unforgettable analog meme. Her story is a nostalgia trap for the happy ‘90s, but she is more instructive than you think. She first tells us how a video on cable became a meme before digital social media. But the Bee Girl also overwhelmed perceptions -- and memories -- about Blind Melon. Now thirty or so years later, I want to historicize the Bee Girl’s virality as an articulation of the decade’s generational cross-currents, its gender politics, and its cultural aesthetics. I will begin with how she propelled “No Rain” into analog virality, and how cable television and alternative FM radio expanded her appeal to young women and girls.

Their identification with the Bee Girl’s message -- about social acceptance and solidarity across difference -- became conjoined to a commercially accessible image of the Melons, helping to solidify them as five approachable, non-threatening, gorgeous men. The video anchored their hippie glamor as a definitive contrast with the moshing rage of Seattle grunge, but also disrupted gender norms and commercial expectations about the band’s overall sound. Importantly, Melon bassist Brad Smith wrote “No Rain” in a “hippy dippy scene” before joining Blind Melon, and wrote it from the perspective of his girlfriend, who was depressed and in love.^[6] The song’s feminine perspective amplified the Bee Girl’s story, jolting Blind Melon into popular consciousness by expressing a distilled politics of 1960s counterculture, yoking the band’s hippie aesthetic to a feminist, punk, and queer dream of the beloved community. Indeed, the gendering of “No Rain” marks its virality, but also spotlights the relevance of various gender perspectives in Blind Melon’s songs (several address female characters and lives).

During our nostalgic tour in this chapter, I’ll locate “No Rain” within the peculiar countercultural palimpsest of 1960s culture that emerged in the 1990s. The Melons layered ‘60s signifiers in their sound, including a novel recombination of classic signatures from the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, and the Allman Brothers, with alternative elements from Jane’s Addiction and grunge, especially the latter’s attention to socially critical lyrics and songs with gendered points of view.^[7] The Bee Girl thus opens conversation into the decade’s singularly repurposed cultural attitudes and affects, many long since faded from youth culture: guitar politics during conservative presidential administrations, ‘dressing up’ 1960s counterculture in the wake of feminism, and viral memes in analog forms.

In the analysis that follows, I hope to help recover Blind Melon, and in doing so bring new attention to the band’s lead singer and songwriter Shannon Hoon. Crazily, the viral success of the Bee Girl came with tragic ironies: For one, her omnipresence swiftly overshadowed Shannon, one of the ‘90s most underappreciated vocalists. By anchoring the band’s sound in “No Rain,” she inadvertently charged negative critical reception to the band’s now classic second album Soup.^[8] This cost Shannon a reckoning with his actual talent, and possibly more. In circumstances particular to the twentieth century and artists’ anachronistic concerns about ‘selling out,’ the Melons sought to escape the song’s success. The turn from the Bee Girl frustrated critics and audiences, setting off a tragic spiral. The lack of an equivalent single to “No Rain” on Soup forced the label and the band to undertake a high-pressure tour to reclaim an audience.

Shannon died in New Orleans on October 21, 1995 from a cocaine overdose on the band’s bus. He had complained to his family before the tour that he wasn’t emotionally and mentally ready to perform. His death sunk into the void left by “No Rain,” and froze the Melon’s story in time. The band later released brilliant, incomplete fragments on the studio album Nico (1996), on the documentary films Letters From a Porcupine (1996) and Live at the Metro (2005), and on the live album Live at the Palace (2006).^[9] We can find even more material today on the Blind Melon YouTube channel, and in the documentary All I Can Say (2019), which edits Shannon’s hours of self-filmed VHS recordings into a film about genius and addiction.^[10] In this chapter, you will discover more about how the Melons and Shannon not only deserve to be remembered differently, but how pointedly their story opens cultural time that remains urgent to historicize.

Gendering Buzz

If you watched MTV during the early 1990s, you remember the Bee Girl played by nine-year old Heather DeLoach. The premise for the “No Rain” video is deceptively simple. It opens with the Bee Girl on a small stage, storified from Blind Melon’s album cover (itself a family photo from drummer Glen Graham’s parents’ house in Mississippi, taken at a dance recital).^[11] The Bee Girl tap-dances for a hostile crowd and runs in tears from their jeers. She meanders through downtown L.A., encountering strangers with kindness. In a dreamy pivot, she finds a bright green field under a radiant blue sky (shot around the Simi Valley outside L.A.), and there discovers other dancers like her: athletic, multiracial, mixed gender. She joins them in a daze of joy. Spliced into it is Blind Melon, dressed as hippies nearby, playing the song.

The Bee Girl’s journey moved uncannily along with the song’s instantly recognizable riff. The simplicity of the story mirrored the song’s simple structure, especially compared to the rest of the album (except “Change,” another melancholy Deadhead track).^[12] The guitar solo lent itself to dancing; during live shows, audiences could twirl and smile. “No Rain” was the closest the Melons came to a romantic pop song. Its ‘alternative’ legitimacy likely rested on its depressive lyrics balancing out the sparkling melody, and on the polite psychedelia of Shannon’s deliciously droned refrain, “it’s not sane.”

If you weren’t there, you might not believe it. The Bee Girl went viral through mass culture, buzzing her way to Jay Leno and MTV’s video music awards; DeLoach is still having fun with the character.^[13] The video surged into MTV rotation via the “Buzz Bin” in summer 1993. The song peaked at #20 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the album spent weeks in the Billboard Top 10.^[14] Blind Melon received Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and “Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group” for “No Rain,” in addition to two American Music Award nominations. The video sparked a huge increase in album sales, helping them land third on the Billboard 200; the record went from gold to platinum in a week.^[15] The video ended up #2 on MTV’s year-end Top 100 countdown. Even as I write, the video has 87 million plays on YouTube, and the song has streamed 407 million times on Spotify.

Capitol Records President Hale Milgrim felt the “first record just captured a moment, and I think the video was the climactic moment in a strange sense.”^[16] Not so fast: The record didn’t explode until after the video. One website describes the video and song as a “comet,” adding the Bee Girl was “as popular as the band, if not more so.”^[17] In July that summer, 500 people stood in line at Sam Goody records in the West Village for three hours to see the Melons jam.^[18] Around the same time, 300 fans were left in the cold outside the Stone Pony in Asbury Park for a sold-out midnight show.^[19] The Melons soon opened for Neil Young and Lenny Kravitz. In November they appeared naked on the cover of Rolling Stone, where they reflected on “No Rain” (what else?).^[20] In January, they performed on SNL -- where they changed the song’s arrangement -- as Chris Farley danced dressed as the Bee Girl, the audience clapping along.

The reason the song and video exploded in tandem can’t be divorced from the contingent power of their latent ideology in the summer of 1993, in the months of Bill Clinton’s first term, the economy expanding, before the Oklahoma City bombing or Columbine massacre. The video inverts the “Dream About the ‘90s” sketch: There is a place for bee people (though not Portland). The bullied and shamed kids can go over the rainbow. The conceit ironically succeeds because it dignifies the same outsiders, artists, and queers the Portlandia sketch rips as naïve loafers.

Such earnestness was attractive. The host of MTV’s 1990s alternative show 120 minutes, Matt Pinfield, considers “No Rain” to be “one of the most important videos of the 1990s,” saying that “there is something really beautiful about the alienation of youth and disenfranchised youth.”^[21] Pinfield’s explanation touches on how the Bee Girl transformed from an odd girl into a symbol of alienation and communal connection. Part of the video’s mass appeal also comes from its rehearsal of childhood angst into adolescent belonging -- pointedly, the Bee Girl finds older dancers in the green field, not other children. More importantly, there’s no prince charming waiting. The song’s romantic need for a special someone to ‘always be there’ slips into the video’s promise of future friends. The pastoral sonnet follows a white rabbit into an off-campus dance party.

Pinfield’s take reminds us how much weight music videos once had. The hope in the Bee Girl’s story connected with the “my life is pretty plain” demographic watching MTV after school, listening to the radio doing homework, and meeting to browse CDs at the mall. The video appealed beyond the Melon’s core audience and floated into other genres, beyond stations playing grunge. “No Rain” was soon an anthem of the white middle-classes between the coasts, from middle school to college, and likely brought along a few baby boomers. The video and album cover rapidly mutated into a gendered, analog meme with few precedents in the history of pop music or rock n’ roll, much less ‘alternative rock’ (many album covers are iconic, but few became popular music videos). Crucially, those consuming “No Rain” would largely be a different demographic than the older crowds listening to college FM radio, and who might have recognized Shannon Hoon from the Guns n’ Roses song and video for “Don’t Cry.”^[22] That crowd was listening to bands like Soundgarden and Pink Floyd (ironically, just like Shannon and the Melons).

Neither Blind Melon’s talent nor the promise of heavy rotation alone would have brought success at scale, however. Rather, the song’s construction of gender opened the possibility of a mass audience, and the marketing executives from Capitol Records seized the potential of the album’s cover, which, like the song’s female-imagined perspective, starred a girl. It was the Bee Girl’s union with a queer, multiracial cast in the field that so dynamically changed the band’s audience. Soundman Lyle Eaves remembers when the video broke during the Neil Young tour and the audience went from “125 people” that “didn’t care” to “seven teenage girls standing by the stage screaming… And the next night, there’s 200 of them.”^[23] As a teenage hippie in the 1990s myself, I distinctly remember both “No Rain” and “Change” being popular with my girlfriends. Pinfield saw the video as “something about finding your own beauty. And the Bee Girl... the idea of that video for me… is you are beautiful.”^[24] Heather DeLoach also emphasizes the video’s “great message… about people who are alone -- who feel different, that they don’t feel that they have support. That there are people like you that are out there.”^[25] The video’s queer emphasis on finding non-normative beauty gendered the meme, decoding Blind Melon from the grunge men moshing at shows.

The screaming girls did not mosh but did gawk. The Melons were ready for their close-up. Like Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, and Kurt Cobain, Shannon and the band were “objectively gorgeous.”^[26] Yet there remained a key difference. The Bee Girl and the dancers in “No Rain” felt like productions from a Lilith Fair set, and Blind Melon’s male peers would never have released such a queer story about a child. The Bee Girl’s escape from mocking male laughter feels like a universal tale of queer art or a feminist parable. Financially and even politically, though, this worked to the band’s advantage. It created a thread of gender fluidity and feminist performance that appeared again during Woodstock ’94, when Shannon wore a dress and eye shadow (not for the last time), similar to Kurt Cobain at the 1992 Reading Festival. Before one interview for MTV, the band went to VJ Kennedy’s dressing room, tried on her clothes, and wanted to “dress up in drag.”^[27] This is the same period when Kurt Cobain French kissed Nirvana’s bassist on Saturday Night Live.^[28] In that respect, the Bee Girl wasn’t alien to the Melon’s project.

Such acts of cross-dressing signaled fidelity to the feminist and queer threads of punk and new wave. They did not merely appropriate radical poses so that cis-het white men could signal their moral virtue, or provide shock value for marketing purposes. They were intended to politicize performances as statements against homophobia after twelve years of Republican rule, including the years when Reagan let AIDS kill thousands, and when the rise of the Moral Majority seeded the culture wars with new hate. This pose also intersected with grunge politics. One of Shannon’s friends and fellow musicians during the Meat Puppet tour, Troy Meiss, considered the success of bands like Nirvana to be a “crazy vindication” for “all the times we were bullied, all the times that we were called ‘faggots’ for having blue hair.”^[29] Indeed, the racist, homophobic white classes always reserved some reactionary rage for white guys who weren’t allies.

Analog Virality

The gendering of the “No Rain” video catalyzed mass culture with the help of FM radio. Former program director for WEQX in the early 1990s, Jim McGuinn, was one of the first stations to pump the song. Broadcasting out of Manchester, Vermont into the Albany, New York market, McGuinn noticed “poppier jam bands” played well.^[30] As a regional program director for one of the few stations selling alternative music nationally, he saw Blind Melon’s song “Tones of Home” connecting with listeners.^[31] His station soon became the first to play “No Rain.” Radioplay then was “becoming a force” for new bands, and McGuinn argues it mattered as much or more than MTV.^[32] Even if “No Rain” had never become a video, the song would have helped the album sell -- but only to a point. As Brad neatly explains, the “formula at the time was to get MTV to play the shit out of your song, and you’re going to sell millions of records. That’s exactly what happened.”^[33]

Analog virality required cable and radio, but these contingencies required the resources of Capitol Records. The success of the song depended on the video, and the video was a product of corporate marketing and art direction. Before the Bee Girl, the album had sold 150,000 copies and the band had toured for a year. VP of A&R Tim Devine felt “nobody thought there were millions of records left to be sold.”^[34] The band had already released three singles and videos for the album. The label was reluctant to spend more money, having already spent approximately $20 a unit already, or something like $2 million dollars for the first 100,000 in album sales.^[35] Their deep investment was expected to pay off years into the future. The depth of capital already fixed in Blind Melon partly reveals just how much the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam changed the music industry.

The fact that Capitol Records were wary of further spending also suggests a lack of imagination about “No Rain.” VP of Marking and Development Jeremy Hammond loved it, however, and led a group pushing a fourth video. They understood the buzz. Seeing Blind Melon at the Wetlands, label director Barbara Prisament witnessed an intense crowd reaction. During the album tour, Devine noticed crowds in different cities singing along to both “No Rain” and “Change,” and the former was chosen as a single for that reason: “[I]t seemed to be receiving the strongest reaction at the live shows -- particularly the ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh” part.”^[36] After a campaign by Hammond and others, Capitol Records forked over $75,000 to shoot a video mirroring the album cover.

One reason the band accepted the corporate idea was a financial one. Before “No Rain,” the Melons were making about $500 a month and living “in poverty.”^[37] Even still, the band first balked at releasing the song. In fact, Blind Melon had already fought Capitol Records over making it a video. The commercial potential of the song was already felt, then, on some level. Blind Melon’s hesitation proved prescient, but worse than they could have imagined.^[38] Drummer Glen Graham recalls live shows became “‘the No Rain show.’”^[39] Lines for shows went around the block in the middle of the country, not just the east coast.^[40] Perhaps worse, “after Blind Melon played ‘No Rain,’ a lot of people left.”^[41]

The song’s orientation to a female perspective didn’t faze Shannon, but the simplicity of its Deadhead pop structure opened a fault line. It was an old Brad song, just like “Change” was an old Shannon one from Indiana. The lyrical structure and the pointed rhyming in the verse contrast sharply with Shannon’s style, and it missed layers of rhythm and distortion, and funkier beats, found on the album’s other tracks. Shannon owned it, however, and his live vocals (see SNL) demonstrate the power of his range, including his distinctive falsetto. Still, Shannon’s songwriting talent and lyrical ability meant he would remain Blind Melon’s “main writer.”^[42] Effectively, then, the surge of the Melon’s mass appeal and their turn of fortune (however ‘earned’ by grinding tours) was mostly forged on Shannon’s performance of a “hippy dippy” ballad by young Brad. Shannon’s mother Nel claimed the song’s popularity surprised him “because it was his least favorite song,” though conceding “that’s why people went out and bought the album,” and adding “I think they probably all learned to hate ‘No Rain.’”^[43] Shannon said fans that only liked the video shouldn’t buy the record.^[44] This fissure in the band’s success never closed and affected the context of Shannon’s death.

The fact Blind Melon delayed “No Rain” as a single and video echoes twentieth century anxieties about high art and mass culture: In midcentury Manhattan literary circles, for example, “there was a kind of snobbery about bestsellers, as if their popularity meant they could not be truly serious.”^[45] At least since Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), rock n’ roll styled aspired to be conceptual art.^[46] Commercial success tied to one song, by contrast, posed problems for bands: Such success suggested luck, not talent. Worse, cheap success collapsed the gap between the corporate label and the band, calling into question artistic integrity. Nirvana ran from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Pearl Jam from “Jeremy.”^[47] A band without distance from its label was a product, a doll, a puppet. Bands wanted to be artists and fans wanted to feel connected to them. Perceptions of authenticity and legitimacy also mattered to peers. Although hard to believe now, success in the ‘90s could create guilt, shame and resentment. Pinfield said that by SNL, the Melons were “torn by the idea of having success.”^[48] You can hear it in their re-arrangement of “No Rain,” and when the audience’s discomfort dissipates as the riff finally starts.

McGuinn explains that “alternative” bands that went “top-40” beckoned a “backlash,” adding that Blind Melon were “penalized for the degree of which they had success.”^[49] Ironically, even Capitol Records president Hale Milgrim called “No Rain” a “kiss of death.”^[50] The video was supposed to bring the label’s spending into the black, but its astonishing success created a fragile bubble. Shannon intuitively understood: “As quickly as it is to come by, it can be gone that quickly too.”^[51] They rapidly made money, but the long-term economics failed: Brad wasn’t writing more love songs, and there were no more cute, vintage photos to pull off the wall. Moreover, the band’s artistic direction was closer to Nirvana and Pearl Jam than the Counting Crows or Smashing Pumpkins. The former purposely wrote less commercial music, while the latter built on the formula of their breakout hits by making sure radio-friendly songs appeared on subsequent albums. Compounding the problem was the Melon’s aesthetic. They were more psychedelic than grunge, and Soup would introduce layers and instruments more evocative of Jane’s Addiction.

The bubble economics of Blind Melon’s ascension presaged collapse. The video’s success was world-making and devastating, a lesson in creative destruction. The price of success was steep: They lost control of their identity. Eddie Vedder wrote a song called “Bee Girl” with the foreboding lyrics, “Bee girl, you’re going to die,” and “Becoming a star will become your doom.”^[52] The Bee Girl market couldn’t support a band that was fundamentally experimental, and, as Soup and Nico show, also committed to dark stories, psychedelic props, and left politics. They became trapped, hostage to the meme. Spotify’s global head of rock Allison Hagendorf speaks for many who lament the band “as sort of a one-hit wonder,” a sad impression underscored by clickbait like “17 One-Hit Wonders From the ‘90s: Where Are They Now?”^[53] Such impressions extend from a belief that the band “was never able to follow up on the success of ‘No Rain,’” or that Soup “failed to live up to expectations.” Remembering that moment, booking agent Shelley Shaw said the Melons didn’t feel the song “was representative of them.” The “No Rain” video became embarrassing. They were “annoyed because it was associated with this ‘cartoon’… the band had this thing that they had shame around -- that they had to try and get away from.”^[54] The success of “No Rain” effectively split the Melons into two bands: the one in the Bee Girl video and the one called “Blind Melon,” the retro-grunge group with a vocalist flashing Janis Joplin textures.^[55]

Shaw’s words clarify one of the problems with selling out, and puts their “kiss of death” in relief. The band’s embarrassment wasn’t limited only to overnight success, but to the ‘cartoon’ manufactured by Capitol Records. The “shame” the band felt came more from the video than the song, and the shame was gendered. They were dudes striving to be taken seriously by other guys -- not exclusively so, but the serious grunge bands were fronted by angry young men: Vedder, Cornell, Cobain, Weiland, Staley. Blind Melon opened for Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, and toured with Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Lenny Kravitz, and the Meat Puppets. They did not open for classic women-led bands like Fleetwood Mac or Patti Smith nor tour with women-led acts. The split in the band’s identity was inseparable from how “No Rain” aggregated gender in their mass audience. Neither the band nor the label ever really found the right language to explain that.

When Soup came out, they released “Galaxie” first because it was a “fucking blasting rocker” and thus contrasted with the “pussy-esque” vibe of “No Rain,” as Shaw relates.^[56] It was a rebellion against the Bee Girl, against typecasting, against selling out. “Galaxie” must have also felt phallic and masculine. Their choice surfaced a contradiction in the gendered fissure cut by “No Rain.” For a band at home with acoustic ballads and with roots in folk rock traditions, there was anxiety about being tough. During the recording of the first album, Brad felt the Melons might believe his song “Soul One” to be a “ballad pussy song,” and it didn’t appear until after Shannon’s death, on Nico.^[57] Taken together, worries over femininity are hard to miss -- the band didn’t take pride in their female fans. Yet the problem was at odds with their values -- this was the same band that recorded the Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says,” a song written by Lou Reed from the perspective of a transgender woman.^[58]

The fissure wrought by “No Rain” misgendered critical reception to their entire second record. The band was surprised Rolling Stone panned Soup in part because they expected “everyone’s going to say, ‘Good for you. You didn’t make ‘No Rain Part II.’”^[59] In reality, Rolling Stone, like the new leadership at Capitol Records, were sore at the lack of sequel. Travis Stever from Coheed and Cambria remembers people’s disappointment there was not another “No Rain.”^[60] When writing material for Soup, Shannon told his friend Kurt Kitson that if the record company wanted another “No Rain,” they were going to the wrong source. Even then, Shannon had to remind everyone it was Brad’s song.^[61]

Twenty years later, however, Rolling Stone (among others) lauded Soup as one of the best albums of the ‘90s.^[62] It was written as a concept album, with careful attention to track order. Some of the best material from the recording sessions was acoustically driven -- including the beautiful, haunting namesake “Soup,” as well as “Pull,” “Walk,” and “Mouthful of Cavities.”^[63] Those tracks were potentially more radio-friendly than “Galaxie,” all arresting and original. “Soup” and “Pull” later appeared on Nico; despite their power, they either didn’t fit or felt too “pussy-esque.”

Nostalgia as Authenticity

The analogy virality of “No Rain” depended on more than an ability to attract a mass audience. It was emblematic of the ‘90s dream of the ‘60s. The obvious hippie aesthetic of Melons in the “No Rain” video signaled a self-conscious lineage. When Travis Stever from Coheed and Cambria first heard “No Rain,” it felt “neo-hippie.”^[64] At a show, Capitol Records VP of Marketing Jeremy Hammond noted that Shannon “came on stage with bare feet -- he was a hippie.”^[65] Brad also recalls a “severe hippie phase.”^[66] Melon guitarist Christopher wondered why MTV didn’t invite them to Unplugged since they were “hippies.”^[67] Meat Puppets bassist Cris Kirkwood thought “No Rain” a “cool, catchy song,” but also an “obvious nod to some of the stuff that had come before.”^[68] The President of Capitol Records at the time (and self-professed Deadhead) Hale Milgrim thought the band “different from that time period” (the ‘90s), also comparing their sound to the Grateful Dead.^[69] Christopher felt “No Rain” and “Change” to be Dead songs; former editor of Rip magazine described “No Rain” as the “Grateful Dead song that Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter never wrote.”^[70]

Looking back, the analog virality of “No Rain” speaks to the debts the ‘90s owes to the ‘60s (real and imagined). For one, Shannon’s friend Troy notes many children of the ‘90s grew up on their parents’ and older siblings’ music.^[71] In the ‘90s, norms about labor and gender also became subjects for pop music (and fashion, film, and art). The first half the decade consolidated a second wave of Reagan-era counterculture, one riddled by the AIDS epidemic and made buoyant by queer activism and post-Roe feminism. There was ample fuel for sonic booms exploding with visual, sartorial, and aesthetic symbols that entangled contradictions about gender, class, and race.

Even though pop music today contests social norms with radical lyricism and sonic affects, especially in hip hop, rap, and R&B (Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé), the presence of guitar-driven, culturally relevant songs as avant-garde mass culture are long gone. Remembering the kids of the ‘90s as the children of the ‘60s, literally and figuratively, we understand better not only why “No Rain” went viral, but also why Blind Melon tells us something important about the history and power of rock n’ roll.^[72] Many alternative kids were the biological and cultural children of the counterculture, and the music their parents played came with stories about rebellion, drugs, parties, and politics.

In this respect, the Melon’s trajectory, music, and performances capture the ‘90s digestion of the counterculture. Politically, this took the form of commodifying signal artists and sounds, but also through attempts to re-capture a politics.^[73] It is paradigmatic to learn that while on tour with Neil Young, he stopped the buses between cities and invited Shannon to ride together. Neil loaned Shannon one of his motorcycles he carried on a tour trailer, and they rode forty minutes to the next stop.^[74]

The largest element of countercultural legacy of course was music. Glen Graham, the band’s drummer, grew up on the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Buffalo Springfield.^[75] Around the time their demo was circulating, Glen introduced the band to the Allman Brothers, and he encouraged Christopher to return to Zeppelin; later, they discovered Robert Plant liked their music, calling their live show “amazing.”^[76] When Shannon’s future partner Lisa Sinha first met him in Indiana, he was listening to Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, the Dead, and, unsurprisingly, Neil Young.^[77] Shannon did informal covers of Pink Floyd and John Lennon, including the latter’s “Working Class Hero.”^[78] Capitol Records VP of A&R describes their “classic sound… within the lineage of the Crosby, Stills, & Nash’s, the Neil Young’s, the Blind Faith’s.”^[79] Flowerhead guitarist Bud Zoller described their live vibe as “‘60s, groovy, psychedelic.”^[80] Like Young and Joplin, Shannon could hit the high registers with his voice.

At one point they recorded in Bearsville Studios, built by Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan and the Band.^[81] At Woodstock ’94, they watched Joe Crocker open the same show they played. They opened for the Rolling Stones and later Page & Plant. In New Orleans, Brad had a console used by Creedence Clearwater Revival.^[82] One of their lyrics on “Toes Across the Floor” was about the Dead’s Robert Hunter’s dog.^[83] When they toured with Neil Young, they hung out on Young’s “old Buffalo Springfield bus,” which Young had “decked out… like a hippie boat inside.”^[84] When recording Soup at Kingsway in New Orleans, they played through speakers used on Abbey Road; the board they used was from Electric Lady Studios.^[85] Christopher would one day receive a mandolin as a gift from Robert Hunter. More ominously, Shannon smoked crack with Timothy Leary during the video shoot for “Galaxie,” one of the era’s great songs about addiction.^[86]

Left politics mattered, too. However naïve or not in hindsight, the music of the ‘60s counterculture was intended to represent or alter political consciousness; the link with music and drugs, and the sharing of drug-induced conscious states, was inseparable from hopes to discover new politics, new creative energies, new forms of solidarity. Effective or not, the politics of music and performance of politics still mattered in the ‘90s: Farm Aid began in 1985, and in 1993, the Melons tried to join Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp for “Flood Aid” in Mississippi.^[87] Channeling counterculture practices of improvisation and hippie style, not to mention performing with countercultural legends like Neil Young, intended a vision.

From his vantage in L.A., Shannon was direct about the stifling racial, gender, and political norms back in Indiana: “I was raised in an environment where if you were far left in any manner, you were pretty much condemned.”^[88] Similarly, he connected his experiences to the guys in Blind Melon, all from “small towns,” and believed listeners might feel their vibes because “a lot of people come from repressed environments.”^[89] Also from a “really narrowed-minded” small town where it was “scary to be yourself,” musical collaborator Jena Kraus said the band taught her to embrace difference.^[90] When some friends returned to Indiana for Shannon’s funeral, one claimed to “understand that ‘small town thing’ that Shannon was talking about. The narrow mindedness of people.”^[91] Such insinuations are almost always about misogyny, homophobia, white supremacy, and anti-communism. They probably also refer to the insufferable monocultures pressuring those starved for difference.

With Shannon from Indiana and the rest of the band from Mississippi and Pennsylvania, their common interest in countercultural bands helped them gel amidst what Shannon called the “shattered glass” of the L.A. music scene in the early 1990s. Shannon felt meeting Brad and Rogers Stevens was “refreshing.”^[92] In L.A. they bonded on new bands, turned off by the glam and metal scene: Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction made an impression on both Shannon and Brad.^[93] Farrell gave them permission to “write your own songs from the heart” and not necessarily for radio. Their soundman at the time, Owen Orzack, said the first album was “the Allman Brothers meet Jane’s Addiction.”^[94] Shannon also listened to Tom Waits, Liz Phair, Tom Petty, Social Distortion, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Meat Puppets, Alice Donut.^[95] Behind Blind Melon’s success was Shannon’s relationship with Axl Rose, also from Lafayette. Shannon partied with Axl for years before Blind Melon was formed. Axl and his crew were among many who felt Shannon was a “fucking hell of singer.”^[96]

Blind Melon tied together ‘60s and ‘90s guitar vibes with the personalized styles of Ferrell, Lou Reed, and Neil Young. The Melons sparked unique forms of sonic synthesis, style, performances. Their music worked because all of it, “No Rain” included, felt freshly familiar. Their sound sparked feelings of legitimacy and authenticity, the kind of ‘reality’ people see in a mirror. The first album’s “purity in terms of performance” created what Brad calls a “realness” that reflected their live shows.^[97] Jena Kraus recalls hearing the Melons at the Limelight in New York City in 1991 as “really real.”^[98] Senior VP of Promotion at Capitol Records John Fagot also tagged Shannon’s on-stage presence as “real.”^[99] Notably, he perceived a “‘hippie thing,’ that was kind of leftover from the ’60s/peace and love thing.”^[100]

What Brad, Jena, John, and others found compelling was how the Melon’s sonic techniques and songwriting triggered memories about bands and songs they already found meaningful. The perception of authenticity attributed to Blind Melon and Shannon’s vocalization reflects an intersection of culture and history in their audience, the white middle-class children of the boomers. As Phillip Ausland writes, authenticity “is an effect not just of the music itself but also of prior musical and extra-musical knowledge and beliefs.”^[101] To be sure, negative comparisons to heavily produced and sampled music contains overtones of race and class.

Christopher, Glen, Rogers, and Brad were skilled and original instrumentalists. Like Shannon, they grew up on classic rock. Like Shannon, they experienced the long tail of hippie culture kept alive by the forever tours of the Dead, an outlaw subterranean culture ingesting marijuana and hallucinogens, and the regular touring of musicians who had achieved iconic status, especially ‘godfathers’ of guitar like Neil Young. With Shannon’s instantly recognizable singing voice and songwriting talent, Blind Melon attracted a core audience -- before and after “No Rain” -- who affirmed their place in that countercultural tradition. The more one knew countercultural music, the more likely one understood Blind Melon.

On their albums, Blind Melon tapped tradition by using guitar-driven riffs and vocal cadences that ‘sounded live.’ For one, the recordings captured the band live, which created a combustible coherence. The countercultural echoes gave their music ‘authenticity’ they reproduced through the recording process. The band completed each track in two or three takes, with “no chopping on the tape machine” and only some guitar and vocals overdubbed.^[102] Brad describes a “real sense of musical purity” and “really honest sounding.”^[103] Shannon felt authenticity to be an expression of the acoustic guitar, linking “human touches” to “the guitar being hit by the pick.”^[104] Having toured with them, Buz Zoller championed how they were “really true to their instruments. I don’t think they used effects or anything -- they just plugged their guitars into their amps and played.”^[105] Rogers mentions Shannon struggling to hit notes “before the days of auto-tune,” and Brad mentions a process “before ProTools.”^[106]

Affirmations of authenticity belie a tacit acknowledgement that legitimacy came from innovations on the collage of blues, funk, pop, punk, and rock. Indeed, there’s no mistaking a Blind Melon song, both because Shannon’s voice crackles, flutters, howls, and carols as few can, and because the band’s thick choral instrumentation rely on each member’s timing without the obvious fingerprints of heavy production or digital effects.

Furthermore, the band improvised in live shows, creating singularities shared by the band with crowds. Allison Hagendorf saw their “jammy element” open live songs into unique variations, allowing fans to feel connected in personalized ways.^[107] Of course, such performances point back to earlier movements and legacies, including analog cultures of bootlegging and recording, and also on the countercultural tradition of jamming, a rock n’roll practice inherited from blues and jazz, and popularized by the Dead.

Shannon contributed as many lead singers do: through bodily performance and vocal innovation. Milgrim describes walking into a show in Costa Mesa and Shannon singing to him, explaining that moment was “exactly what that band was about -- this improvisational moment.”^[108] Cris Kirlwood mentions an ability to “translate a whole reality simply through their body and their voice.”^[109] Zeynep Bulut calls the voice a “‘fleshed’ sound,” emitting a singular interiority, oscillating between here and there.^[110] Bulut writes about the “politics and ontology of the voice, on the questions of which voice, whose voice, why voice, and how voice is heard and how it sings and speaks.”^[111] Shannon’s voice was a signature of culture, a singing locus of recognition and catharsis that could shake a crowd. Shannon could switch words, play with his delivery, face directly at eyes. Swollen with charisma and pain, his voice cracked edges like broken glass. Shannon’s personality leaked into notes and tones, embodying lyrics with memory. Don Idhe writes that it is “in extraordinary voice, the dramaturgical voice, that sounded significance can be amplified.”^[112]

Ernst van der Wal observes how “the field of Black performance studies offers a vital point of entry into the entanglement of race, voice and the performative body.”^[113] Van der Wal tunes to the ways voices are perceived as raced and queered, sounding white or Black, straight or gay, and to the ways stereotypes and reductions skew such perceptions. His attention rests on the “queer potential of the human voice -- that is, its ability to destabilise and question conceptions of what the gendered, sexualised and / or raced body is supposed to sound like.”^[114] Similarly, Josefine Ziebell surmises how the “the queer voice creates sentiments and desires between strangers via vocal textures of emotion and affect.”^[115] That queer potential swirls in Shannon’s smoky high registers, his southern twangs, his Joplin-esque scratches, his falsetto echoing AC/DC’s Brian Young, the wallowing highs of Neil Young. There is no deep crooning like Elvis or Eddie Vedder -- on “Toes Across the Floor,” his high octaves blur the liquid ambit of gender. Under the YouTube video for his Woodstock ’94 performance of “Soup,” Dismas Arayan writes: “The male incarnation of Janis Joplin!!”^[116]

Shannon’s Lives

As with many lead singers of the era, Shannon’s instrument was his body, and Blind Melon’s improvisations occurred through his gestures, dance, and touch. He joined crowds and crowd-surfed; for example, Brad’s brother Chris remembers how Shannon’s body jammed: “They did this thing in the middle where they broke the song down and went into this instrumental jam. It lasted ten minutes -- just amazing. Shannon jumping into the crowd -- you could tell he was so into it.”^[117] Dig guitarist Johnny Cornwell often saw Shannon “upon the barricades and really with the people.”^[118] For his part, Shannon said their “best shows” were when “the club was so full that there was that element of danger, where you really didn’t know whether you were going to make it to the next song.”^[119] His reflection now sounds like an admission of something else, an unintended reference to the blend of shared risk and communion possible in small shows, radiating with sexuality and drugs.

The latent 1960s counterculture included drugs that altered consciousness, especially hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin variates. Tripping was an opportunity to re-experience a fantasy of rebellion, but also a method of reshaping consciousness for art, in the spirit of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”^[120] Shannon recalls first taking LSD around 18 and listening to Pink Floyd.^[121] Funnily enough, the name “Blind Melon” was a stoner phrase Brad’s dad yelled at his hippie neighbors, taken from a Cheech and Chong record. The song “Deserted” from the first album was about returning from a desert concert by Liquid Jesus outside L.A., everybody on acid.^[122] Shannon took LSD during the “No Rain” shoot, the “I Wonder” video, and, famously, for Woodstock ’94.^[123] Hallucinogens, unlike opiates, encouraged introspection, reflection, and intimacy. One could dream awake, share visions, cry on a shoulder. One’s interiority externalizes and estranges. One could also lose the light.

Shannon’s tripping through so many recordings is notable. Drugs fed musical experimentation, including the impulse to liquify gender norms. Shannon’s improvisation became apparent at Woodstock ’94, the pinnacle of the ‘90s rehearsal of the 1960s. He improvised: He surprised the Melons with the dress Allison Hagendor felt “so fierce and fearless and badass.”^[124] Christopher tied it to “what was great about him… you didn’t know what you were going to get.”^[125] For Tim Devine, Shannon “grabbed the spotlight and captured the world’s attention. Between the crowd, the press, and a live international video broadcast, literally the whole world was watching.”^[126] On that day, Shannon resembled the Bee Girl before her screaming fans; like her, he twirled and danced in the green field.

Shannon’s performance at Woodstock ’94 pinpoints a particular moment. It’s regarded as “one for the record books” and the “biggest show of their career.”^[127] His rendition of “Soup,” a song inspired by Cobain’s suicide, reveals an artist and vocalist conflating personal admission with public pain: “the defining moment of their time on the stage.”^[128] Blind Melon assistant Nicholas Bechtel remembers standing by the stage and weeping.^[129] Shannon’s affecting performance, his capacity to communicate loss, to scream poetics, was conditioned by LSD. If the acid brought him closer to himself, what he performed was lonely, burnished by the threat of his own disappearance: “I’m going to make you all go away.” Shannon’s performance, so applauded and so vivid, marks dark genius. His old friend Riki Rachtman saw him that day, but Shannon didn’t recognize him: The “drugs fucked Shannon up.”^[130] Shannon’s life was a contradiction exposing a lingering anomie at the heart of the counterculture afterlife, a joyful despair.

Glen described the undrugged Shannon as “terribly depressed” or “terribly manic,” and his wife Brooks said there was no doubt he “had some sort of chemical imbalance in his brain. It probably would have been called manic depression.”^[131] Shannon traces this somewhat on the Melon’s first album, but on the second album Soup he faces the story directly, or what the story had become. Addiction is an assemblage of forces, an interaction between genetics and social culture, an economics of chemistry. Chemical hunger is a dialectics of bodies and matter oscillating within an extractive economy; one’s body becomes capital, surplus arising from maintaining a disordered equilibrium, value realized by the body’s unconscious work, the re-programming of autonomous systems inside.

Shannon didn’t hide his problems. The tragic shock of his death in 1995 from a cocaine overdose (perhaps worsened by underlying health conditions) resonated much less than Kurt Cobain’s suicide the prior year. Yet it fit the pattern of drug-related deaths by peers past and present. As Cobain’s note made famous mention, the club of dying young included legendary countercultural figures like Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison, to say nothing of Billie Holiday and Elvis. For those that loved Blind Melon and Shannon, his sad passing might mean shutting down, avoiding triggers. His death was not incidental to the countercultural legacy, either, even if it was also not inevitable.

More than one person connected Shannon’s death to Cobain’s.^[132] Like Cobain, Shannon supplemented confession with acts of witness; in mood if not style, Soup mirrors In Utero.^[133] Like Cobain on MTV Unplugged in New York, Shannon on Soup worked demons during the recording process in New Orleans.^[134] They spilled over. Soup like Unplugged is a fugue, a confession, and a rehearsal. While recording, Shannon pulled Christopher aside one night during a binge, afraid his “soul would attack him,” that he “had a black heart.”^[135] Jena remembers him eating a bowl of cereal and crying that “he didn’t want to die.”^[136] He called his mom during the Soup tour, concerned about a “friend that’s really bad on drugs -- I think he's going to die.”^[137] After his daughter Nico was born, Shannon bluntly stated “staying alive” as a new “consideration.”^[138] There would be one more ride on the roller coaster.

He burned out. Shannon’s manic depression propelled his drug use, but also fed his genius. Such reflections are not dissimilar from Cobain. Revealing that “we knew he was doomed basically,” Glen adds that Shannon also didn’t feel like “the rock star… on top of the world.”^[139] Like with Cobain, some of his self-loathing was a consequence of untreated mental illness, sunk by addiction, edged with guilt: “[H]he knew how he swindled people on an emotional level.”^[140] By the “Galaxie” video, he had become an “asshole… sweet but evil.”^[141] Like Cobain, Shannon was surrounded by people who loved and adored him; he also had a young daughter, born before he could get clean. Glen said that Cobain’s death freaked Shannon out; Shannon identified with Cobain’s fatal drug use.^[142] When the Melon’s played Letterman after Cobain’s suicide, Shannon drew a big question mark on his forehead.^[143] What, or who, was in question?

The gesture was appropriate. Shannon came from a working-class family in Lafayette, Indiana. His father Dick laid brick and drank, while his mother Nel managed a bar in Dayton. His Indiana upbringing bred prototypically macho traits. Drinking socially led to cocaine use, and Shannon would fight. His fights expressed chaos and insecurity, but also rebellions at confinement and repression. They exteriorized his depression, possibly already his addiction. During one period of intense using in the 1980s, Shannon called Lisa and told her he was suicidal. He ended up getting his stomach pumped at the hospital.^[144] Another friend, Shelley Shaw, recalls Shannon telling her in 1991 about a kid who overdosed at a party: Shannon sat next to the body in the kitchen, looking into his eyes, “contemplating his own behaviors.”^[145] In Detroit after a show at St. Andrew’s Hall, Shannon and the band witnessed a young woman jump to her death from a 20-story building. “She just suffered from depression,” Shannon later reasoned, adding, “[I]t could have been anybody.”^[146] He probably meant himself.

One can feel those moments in “Mouthful of Cavities” and “St. Andrew’s Fall.”^[147] His performances became intertwined with addiction, amplifying the depression. Performance and writing complicated the junkie experience of “chasing the dragon,” or using to escape withdrawal more than finding high.^[148] Rogers remarked that his “fucking stupid substance abuse problem was tragic” in that it “fueled what he did, and in other ways, it hindered him from being as great as he could have been.”^[149] The charisma he wielded, and the genius he effortlessly deployed composing songs of lasting intensity, fused cycles of addiction and recovery: The repetition of ritual, the announcement of inner life, of voicing trauma, the exhaustion of authenticity for thousands who consumed it.

Early on, Glen saw Shannon as a “future Jim Morrison -- over-the-top guy, running on fumes, with no ability to put on the brakes.”^[150] More than one person compared Shannon to Andrew Wood, the lead singer of Mother Love Bone, the grunge legend from Seattle who overdosed on heroin in 1990.^[151] Buz Zoller saw Shannon’s death through the lens of counterculture music, its dark histories, its geniuses snuffed out by addiction: “[T]the whole band had a kind of ‘tie to the history of rock n’ roll. They had a respect for the past and classic rock thing -- obviously, he idolized the way that the stereotypical ‘60s rocker’ would go, and the things he would do. Dying young is probably something that he thought about.”^[152]

Part of the performance business is manufacturing euphoria, selling fictions as dreams. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) shows how performers become trapped by the drugs that fuel voices and bodies so eagerly consumed by crowds and on screens.^[153] In her autobiography, Billie Holiday lauds her public, saying “I could kill myself if it wasn’t for them.”^[154] She also admits that “public acceptance is a big anonymous thing, and a girl can’t live on that kind of love alone.”^[155] Performance can save your life even as you die from it. On the podcast Nostalgia Trap hosted by David Parsons, we reflected on the spiritualized forms of the rock concert, with its roots in the Black church and in the alienated desire of the blues.^[156] We consume more than music in performances: When Elvis broods in “Suspicious Minds” that “we’re caught in a trap,” he drools through exhaustion, a product exploited by manager Colonel Tom Parker.^[157] But Elvis is trapped by the stage, by the intimate love of strangers, by the shared need to find transcendence. He feels the slow death of losing life in the silence after the curtain. The performer holds our gaze and creates love, but also exploits that love for currency -- financial and emotional.

Where does the performance end? Chasing euphoria can breed amnesia. Glen explains that Shannon “made an art out of dismissing things. It was almost a ‘performance part’ of his personality.”^[158] Glen was talking about getting clean, but he hits on how performances go beyond the stage. The rock performer inherits a spiritualized tradition of altered states, the shaking of the Great Awakenings, bodies moved by soul, calls to be saved. Matt Pinfield describes Shannon’s ability to communicate “human vulnerability” as a quality he shared with Chris Cornell.^[159] Shannon describes the rush of feeling uncontrolled during his improvisions as treading between “sanity and insanity.”^[160] The show becomes hallucination, a risk for performer and audience, a shared transgression. We become the avatar we created.

By 1995, Shannon was recreating Shannon on and off-stage, method acting with himself. Like Elvis, most everyone agrees with his friend Kurt Kitson, who said Shannon had “it,” an unruly presence that attracted love. Still, Shannon wasn’t elitist or entitled. Many recall him as Kurt does, as a midwestern boy, humble and beautiful. His “it” shone beyond norms, though, and after “No Rain” fed a whole world. Shannon’s friend Troy observes that Shannon, like Cobain and Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots, was born in 1967. He came from a generation that read books about Zeppelin and the Doors; the stories became real by acting them out, joyfully and fatally.^[161] It wasn’t merely a question about burning out, but life pushed to the other side. Rogers linked Shannon’s songwriting success to the “crazy stuff that he did” because it “gave him stuff to write about,” so that when he performed the songs “they came off as totally real.”^[162]

Remember that “music is a healing force,” and imagine that Shannon used music and performances to transcend, not just escape.^[163] Does it work? Not always. After hearing our Nostalgia Trap on Elvis, my dad texted me: “It made me realize that we put abused children on stage and give them a false hope that they are getting the love they always wanted and then watch them descend into death for our own entertainment.”^[164] Does it work? Sometimes yes: Below the Youtube video for “Soup” live at Woodstock ’94, ancapdrummer92 writes the lyrics and adds, “This line made me cry all the time in H.S. as for I had a bad childhood, with drugs and sexual abuse. This line just made me feel good.”^[165]

Perhaps Shannon knew he was consuming himself. In the 2019 documentary All I Can Say, he left behind hours of video recordings. Lisa explained him as “just the type of person that wanted to document his life.”^[166] His fascination is plain. Capitol Records publicist Dominque Johansson explained his interest as a “‘collector kind of attitude, when you’re discovering bands and you have to have everything the band did -- every rare outtake and bootleg.”^[167] Shannon was bootlegging his own life. He told Kurt how in awe of his life he felt, how amazing it was to tour with Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, how his story was the exception not the rule.

His tapes are an archive of boredom, love, and madness. He keeps company with himself, talking to the camera, his own best friend, a constant audience, a consumer of spirit. He was highly conscious about collecting, and dramatizing, his performances, but the line between the stage and backstage, crowd and house, was porous. When we remember his addictions, his fear of dying, his contemplation of others’ deaths, his long hours with the camcorder take on significance. He preserved a life indivisible from the fear, or knowledge, of dying young.

In 1995, months before his cocaine overdose, Shannon expressed profound hesitation about the Soup tour, tying it to capital’s demand for labor: “I’m not a business.”^[168] (In the film, Elvis tries to fire Colonel Tom Parker, telling him you bled me dry and still want more.) There must have been something deflating about getting clean and then using again. There’s using as a new father, but also the need to perform as the voice of Soup, an album about addiction and dying, the label abandoning the record, the critics waiting for another “No Rain.” Lisa described Shannon’s depression as part of “show business… where you’re selling your heart and soul.”^[169] Performances can save lives and destroy them.

Shannon’s voice lives on. He spoke with Kurt Kitson about Charlie Chaplain movies, about the eternity that comes with the preservation of performance. When you document something, Shannon said, whether by video or audio, you capture something forever. The past remains present: Watching a Chaplain movie, he’s right there. Likewise, on the YouTube video for “Galaxie” one of the top comments is by Mt. Zod, posting about three years ago: “In the last 6 months i’ve begun getting sober. Getting rid of the booze was easy, getting rid of the coke was much harder but I did it, and finally gave up the opioids and that’s the hardest and most painful. If I hadn’t rediscovered this song i might’ve caved in by now. Thank you Shannon.”^[170] In the video, Shannon sits on the hood of the car in red shades, psychedelic imagery behind him, the song’s ending repeating, “no, no it isn’t me.”

Shannon’s voice has filled my life for almost thirty years now, illuminating dark times, switching me on when numb. I love Shannon as only a stranger could. He helps me access grief for my brother Laszlo Scott Kehoe, who died in 2019 due of a toxic (prescribed) drug reaction. During the screenings for All I Can Say, director Danny Clinch said many who attended would stop him and the film’s other two directors (Colleen Hennessy and Taryn Gould), crying and hugging them, talking about loved ones lost to addiction.^[171] Shannon’s preservation on video was insurance -- he was still around. When my son and I drove to his grave in Indiana last fall, we left a brownie on his grave and spoke to him about ourselves. We read the lyrics from “Change” etched into his gravestone: “I know we can’t all stay here forever, so I want to write my words on the face of today.”^[172] Inexplicably, when we returned to the car and turned it on, the song was suddenly playing and we heard exactly those lines. The strange coincidence felt like intention.

Shannon is also present on the cassette he gave Kurt in Chicago thirty years ago, the morning he woke Kurt early after partying all night. They drove around with a guitar, and while riding Shannon popped in an early version of “Skinned,” a song from Soup about Ed Gein, a crazy grave-robber and murderer from Wisconsin.^[173] Kurt laughed and laughed. He told Shannon they should release it as the first single, which cracked Shannon up -- nothing was further from “No Rain.” Telling me about that morning and laughing, Kurt repeated how much he missed his friend. He proudly said, too, that he still had the tape: Shannon remained recorded there, singing through time into our smiling grief.

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76. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/queer-and-trans-prison-voices

Notes

1. “Dream of the ’90s | Portlandia | IFC.” YouTube video, 3:25. December 1, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hShMEk1Ew: 0:33.

   ↑

2. While unalike in many ways, the grunge rocker and the urban hipster share more than a few elements: both wrought as narcissist young white men fomenting gentrification, both scolded for naïve takes on their unearned privilege, both scorned as all-too-earnest, self-declared outsiders to capitalist culture, all the while sitting at the center of its middle-class life.

   ↑

3. “Dream of the ‘90s,” 1:03-1:06; Reality Bites, directed by Ben Stiller (Universal Pictures, 1994.)

   ↑

4. “Dream of the ‘90s,” 1:43.

   ↑

5. No Rain, Music Video, directed by Sam Bayer, performed by Blind Melon (1993, Capitol Records); Blind Melon, “No Rain.” April 23, 2010. YouTube Video, 4:07. https://youtu.be/3qVPNONdF58?si=WUxQzdf1DOBshtIW; Blind Melon, Track 7 on Blind Melon. Capital, 1992.

   ↑

6. Greg Prato, A Devil on One Shoulder and an Angel on the Other: The Story of Shannon Hoon

   and Blind Melon (Greg Prato, 2008), 73; “No Rain by Blind Melon,” Songfacts. Accessed July 28, 2022, https://www.songfacts.com/facts/blind-melon/no-rain

   ↑

7. For example, see Nirvana, “Polly,” Track 6 on Nevermind, DGC, 1991 and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle,” Track 5 on In Utero, DGC, 1993; and Pearl Jam, “Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town,” Track 10 on Vs, Epic, 1993 and “Better Man,” Track 11 on Vitalogy, Epic, 1994.

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8. Blind Melon, Soup, Capitol Records, 1995.

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9. Blind Melon, Nico, Capitol Records, 1996; Letters From a Porcupine, directed by Steve MacCorkle (1996, Blind Melon); Live at the Metro (1995, Blind Melon); Live at the Palace, Capitol Records, 2006.

   ↑

10. All I Can Say, directed by Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould, and Colleen Hennessy (2019, Oscilloscope Laboratories).

    ↑

11. Prato, Blind Melon, 80.

    ↑

12. Blind Melon, “Change,” Track 6 on Blind Melon, Capitol Records, 1992.

    ↑

13. Greg Prato, Shannon (Greg Prato Writer, Corp. 2021), 222.

    ↑

14. Prato, Blind Melon, 109.

    ↑

15. Prato, Blind Melon, 122.

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16. Prato, Blind Melon, 247.

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17. Daniel, “8 Facts About the 90’s Bee Girl From the Blind Melon “No Rain” Video,” ContentBASH.

    November 20, 2020. https://contentbash.com/facts-90s-bee-girl-blind-melon-no-rain-video/

    ↑

18. “Melon Mayhem!” The Capitol Times. July 21, 1993.

    ↑

19. “Blind Melon Held Over for Second Night,” The Capitol Times. July 21, 1993.

    ↑

20. Kim Neely, “Blind Melon: Knee-Deep in the Hoopla,” Rolling Stone, November 11, 1993. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/blind-melon-knee-deep-in-the-hoopla-66295/

    ↑

21. Prato, Shannon, 13-14.

    ↑

22. Guns n’ Roses, “Don’t Cry.” YouTube video, 5:13. October 8, 2009. https://youtu.be/zRIbf6JqkNc?si=CwCOnGjQuy_vENsE

    ↑

23. Prato, Blind Melon, 116.

    ↑

24. Prato, Shannon, 14

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25. Prato, Shannon, 225.

    ↑

26. Prato, Blind Melon, 18.

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27. Prato, Shannon, 36.

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28. Nirvana, “Territorial Pissings,” January 11, 1992 Saturday Night Live, TV Series, 50 Seasons, NBC, 1974-Present.

    ↑

29. Prato, Shannon, 90.

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30. Prato, Shannon, 23.

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31. Blind Melon, “Tones of Home,” Track 2 on Blind Melon, Capitol Records, 1992.

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32. Prato, Shannon, 25.

    ↑

33. Prato, Blind Melon, 109.

    ↑

34. Prato, Blind Melon, 104.

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35. Prato, Blind Melon, 105.

    ↑

36. Prato, Blind Melon, 105.

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37. Prato, Blind Melon, 123; Prato, Shannon, 140.

    ↑

38. Prato, Blind Melon, 109.

    ↑

39. Prato, Blind Melon, 109.

    ↑

40. Prato, Blind Melon, 110.

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41. Prato, Blind Melon, 141.

    ↑

42. Kurt Kitson, interviewed by author, February 1, 2023.

    ↑

43. Prato, Blind Melon, 111.

    ↑

44. Prato, Blind Melon, 111.

    ↑

45. Darryl Pinckney, Come Back in September (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 205.

    ↑

46. The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol Records, 1967.

    ↑

47. Nirvana, “Smell Like Teen Spirit,” Track 1 on Nevermind, DGC, 1991; Pearl Jam, “Jeremy,” Track 6 on Ten, Epic Records, 1991.

    ↑

48. Prato, Shannon, 11.

    ↑

49. Prato, Blind Melon, 26. Meat Puppets’ bassist Cris Kirkwood remarked that fame and financial success made drugs easier to access. Prato, Shannon, 82. Also see page 96.

    ↑

50. Prato, Blind Melon, 111.

    ↑

51. Prato, Blind Melon, 111.

    ↑

52. Pearl Jam, “Bee Girl,” Track 14, on Lost Dogs, Disk 2, Epic, 2003. The song was written in 1994 and released in 2003. Some speculate Vedder was speaking to Shannon’s drug use. Raul, “Shannon Hoon Loved Pearl Jam but Eddie Vedder Apparently Did Not Like The ‘Bee Girl,’” Feelnumb: useless info. November 11, 2009. https://www.feelnumb.com/2009/11/11/shannon-hoon-loved-pearl-jam-and-eddie-vedder-did-not-like-the-bee-girl/#lightbox/1/

    ↑

53. Corey Irwin, “17 One-Hit Wonders From the ‘90s: Where Are They Now?” UCR: Classic Rock and Culture. November 7, 2022: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/90s-one-hit-wonders/

    Also see “The Pitchfork Staff’s Favorite One-Hit Wonders of the ‘90s,” Pitchfork. October 4, 2022:

    https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-best-one-hit-wonders-of-the-90s/

    ↑

54. Prato, Blind Melon, 110.

    ↑

55. Prato, Shannon, 106.

    ↑

56. Prato, Blind Melon, 245. Blind Melon, “Galaxie,” Track 2 on Soup, Capitol Records, 1995.

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57. Prato, Blind Melon, 289. Blind Melon, “Soul One,” Track 5 on Nico, Capitol Records, 1996.

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58. The Velvet Underground, “Candy Says,” Track 3 on The Velvet Underground, MGM, 1969.

    ↑

59. Prato, Shannon, 3.

    ↑

60. Prato, Shannon, 176.

    ↑

61. Kurt Kitson, interviewed by author, February 1, 2023.

    ↑

62. Prato, Shannon, 4.

    ↑

63. Blind Melon, “Soup,” Track 3 and “Pull,” Track 11, on Nico, Capitol Records, 1996; Blind Melon, “Walk,” Track 6; and “Mouthful of Cavities,” Track 13, on Soup, Capitol Records, 1995.

    ↑

64. Prato, Shannon, 173.

    ↑

65. Prato, Blind Melon, 84.

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66. Prato, Blind Melon, 289.

    ↑

67. Prato, Shannon, 35.

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68. Prato, Shannon, 79.

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69. Prato, Blind Melon, 46.

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70. Prato, Shannon, 114, 133. Compare “No Rain” to Grateful Dead’s “Touch of Grey,” especially the guitar solos. Grateful Dead, “Touch of Grey,” Track 1 on In the Dark, Arista, 1987.

    ↑

71. Prato, Blind Melon, 96.

    ↑

72. Hagendorf relays the “hippy vibe” as a “bohemian.” Prato, Shannon, 21.

    ↑

73. At the same time, it became difficult to divorce the success of the counterculture from its commodification. It had always been easier to sell a revolution of love than redistributing wealth, just as it’s easier to raise money for benefit concerts than raise taxes on the rich.

    ↑

74. Kurt Kitson, interviewed by author, February 1, 2023.

    ↑

75. Prato, Blind Melon, 17.

    ↑

76. Prato, Blind Melon, 132, 154.

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77. Prato, Blind Melon, 242.

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78. Prato, Shannon, 123.

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79. Prato, Blind Melon, 294.

    ↑

80. Prato, Blind Melon, 89.

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81. Prato, Blind Melon, 132.

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82. Prato, Blind Melon, 210.

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83. Prato, Blind Melon, 213. Blind Melon, “Toes Across the Floor,” Track 5 on Soup, Capitol Records, 1995.

    ↑

84. Prato, Blind Melon, 117. The band first sought David Briggs to produce their first record because he worked with Neil Young.

    ↑

85. Prato, Shannon, 52, 65.

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86. Prato, Blind Melon, 229.

    ↑

87. Prato, Blind Melon, 101.

    ↑

88. Prato, Blind Melon, 3.

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89. Prato, Blind Melon, 79.

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90. Prato, Blind Melon, 300.

    ↑

91. Prato, Blind Melon, 283

    ↑

92. Prato, Blind Melon, 29.

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93. When Shannon first met Christopher, he played him “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction. Jane’s Addiction, “Jane Says”, Track 9 on Nothing’s Shocking, Warner Brothers, 1988.

    ↑

94. Prato, Blind Melon, 79. Rami Jaffee of Foo Fighters said that the Melons were Jane’s Addiction meets Grateful Dead. Prato, Shannon, 113. Stever also mentions Lynyrd Skynyrd. Prato, Shannon, 173.

    ↑

95. Prato, Blind Melon, 242.

    ↑

96. Prato, Blind Melon, 22.

    ↑

97. Prato, Blind Melon, 62.

    ↑

98. Prato, Blind Melon, 60.

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99. Prato, Blind Melon, 84. Italics in original.

    ↑

100. Prato, Blind Melon, 84.

     ↑

101. Phillip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 66.

     ↑

102. Prato, Blind Melon, 62.

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103. Prato, Blind Melon, 62, 297.

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104. Prato, Blind Melon, 63.

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105. Prato, Blind Melon, 89.

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106. Prato, Blind Melon, 132, 297.

     ↑

107. Prato, Shannon, 18.

     ↑

108. Prato, Blind Melon, 119.

     ↑

109. Prato, Shannon, 82.

     ↑

110. Zeynep Bulut, “Theorizing Voice in Performance: Gyorgy Ligeti's Aventures,” Perspectives of New Music 48, no. 10 (Winter 2010): 46.

     ↑

111. Zeynep Bulut, “On Voice, Walter Benhart and Lawrence Kramer (EDS),” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 1, no. 2 (2016): 220.

     ↑

112. Don Idhe, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, Second Edition (Ithaca: State University of New York Press, 2007), 165.

     ↑

113. Ernst van der Wal, “The Fire in the Voice: Umlilo and the Performance of Queer South African Life.” Whatever 2, (2019): 103.

     ↑

114. van der Wal, 105.

     ↑

115. Josefine Ziebell, “Queer and Trans Prison Voices: A Podcast Archive on Prison Abolition.” Master’s Capstone, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2022.

     ↑

116. Dismas Arayan, “Woodstock 1994 Highlights – Soup – Blind Melon – 8/12/1994 – Woodstock ’94.” Youtube video, 4.28. https://youtu.be/EMVBUvvYisQ?si=P_nMRvJ7HITgn5bC

     ↑

117. Prato, Blind Melon, 69.

     ↑

118. Prato, Shannon, 104.

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119. Prato, Blind Melon, 98.

     ↑

120. The Beatles, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Track 3 on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, Capitol Records, 1967.

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121. Prato, Blind Melon, 7.

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122. Prato, Blind Melon, 75.

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123. Prato, Blind Melon, 85; Blind Melon, “I Wonder.” YouTube video, 3:15. October 12, 2012. https://youtu.be/raFcoygsfFI?si=vZYGGSow0ZdRxuQS

     ↑

124. Prato, Shannon, 19.

     ↑

125. Prato, Blind Melon, 179.

     ↑

126. Prato, Blind Melon, 182.

     ↑

127. Prato, Shannon, 129.

     ↑

128. Prato, Shannon, 129; Blind Melon, “Soup,” Track 3 on Nico, Capitol Records, 1996; “Soup Live at Woodstock ’94.” YouTube video, 4:07. April 10, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBjdAj1SUg

     ↑

129. Prato, Blind Melon, 183.

     ↑

130. Prato, Blind Melon, 184.

     ↑

131. Prato, Bilnd Melon, 150.

     ↑

132. Prato, Shannon, 42.

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133. Nirvana, In Utero, DGC, 1993.

     ↑

134. Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York, DGC, 1994.

     ↑

135. Prato, Blind Melon, 203.

     ↑

136. Prato, Blind Melon, 203.

     ↑

137. Prato, Blind Melon, 261.

     ↑

138. Prato, Blind Melon, 238.

     ↑

139. Prato, Blind Melon, 312.

     ↑

140. Prato, Blind Melon, 220.

     ↑

141. Prato, Blind Melon, 230. Prato, Shannon, 216.

     ↑

142. Prato, Blind Melon, 144.

     ↑

143. Blind Melon, “Change,” April 8, 1994, Late Show with David Lettermen, TV Series, 23 seasons, CBS, 1993-2015.

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144. Prato, Blind Melon, 11.

     ↑

145. Prato, Blind Melon, 41.

     ↑

146. Prato, Blind Melon, 218.

     ↑

147. Blind Melon, “Mouthful of Cavities,” Track 13; “St. Andrew’s Fall,” Track 11 on Soup, Capitol Records, 1995.

     ↑

148. Prato, Shannon, 85.

     ↑

149. Prato, Blind Melon, 303.

     ↑

150. Prato, Blind Melon, 33.

     ↑

151. One was Susan Silver, the manager for Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. Prato, Blind Melon, 56.

     ↑

152. Prato, Blind Melon, 279.

     ↑

153. Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann (Warner Brother Pictures, 2022).

     ↑

154. Billie Holliday and William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006), 194.

     ↑

155. Holliday and Dufty, 169.

     ↑

156. David Parsons and Justin Rogers-Cooper, “I Need Your Love,” Episode 349. Nostalgia Trap. Podcast, February 3, 2023, https://www.patreon.com/posts/78198738

     ↑

157. Elvis Presley, “Suspicious Minds,” Track 13 on From Elvis in Memphis, Sony Music, 1969.

     ↑

158. Prato, Blind Melon, 231.

     ↑

159. Prato, Blind Melon, 14.

     ↑

160. Prato, Blind Melon, 100.

     ↑

161. Prato, Shannon, 96.

     ↑

162. Prato, Blind Melon, 303.

     ↑

163. Prato, Shannon, 14.

     ↑

164. Allan Cooper, text message to author, February 4, 2023.

     ↑

165. Ancapdrummer92, re: “Soup Live at Woodstock ’94.” YouTube video, 4:07. April 10, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBjdAj1SUg

     ↑

166. Prato, Blind Melon, 311.

     ↑

167. Prato, Blind Melon, 102.

     ↑

168. Prato, Blind Melon, 250. Also see the words of Chad Taylor on Shannon’s death and the need to tour: “We need a new product.” Prato, Shannon, 162.

     ↑

169. Prato, Blind Melon, 263. Prato, Shannon, 135.

     ↑

170. Mt. Zod, re: “Blind Melon – Galaxie.” YouTube video, 3:12. October 12, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktZoUHcP0wI

     ↑

171. Prato, Shannon, 190.

     ↑

172. Blind Melon, “Change,” Track 6 on Blind Melon, Capitol Records, 1992.

     ↑

173. Blind Melon, “Skinned,” Track 4 on Soup, Capitol Records, 1995.

     ↑