Stevens and Smith agreed to meet with
Hoon — who’d moved to L.A. on a whim, hopping a Greyhound bus in
Indiana moments after slipping out the back door of a drug house that
was being raided — on the recommendation of a friend who had ties to the
music business and was close to Atlantic Records’ president, Ahmet
Ertegun.
“When Shannon first got to town, he was staying with [Guns N’ Roses’] Axl Rose,”
Stevens explains. “His sister knew Axl from high school and called him
up, asking him to look out for her little brother. So Shannon had been
living at Axl’s place for only a few days when he met Ahmet and sang for
him, and so all of a sudden, Shannon was this hot prospect. So somebody
sent him over to audition for us.”
Hoon entered the makeshift rehearsal
studio in West Hollywood that Stevens and Smith had been using, sat down
on the floor with an acoustic guitar and played the song “Change” from
start to finish.
CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
“My fucking jaw hit the floor,”
Stevens says of Hoon, who died 25 years ago today in New Orleans at 28.
“I thought, ‘That dude’s a fucking rock star.’ I mean, you just knew it
right away. It was just obvious. I looked at him, and thought, ‘He’s as
good as my heroes.’ That’s the way it felt — immediately: he’s a star.
There are a shit-ton of great guitar players out there, but there was
only one of him.”
Days later, guitarist Chris Thorn met
Hoon in a similar fashion: “Brad and I were friends, and he invited me
over. Shannon played me ‘Change,’ and it blew my mind — because I was
writing songs at that point, but I wasn’t writing songs at that level.
Nobody was. That sounded like a song that had been around for 30 years.”
At that time, Thorn was weighing two
offers: one to join Blind Melon and another from a band called Daisy
Chamber, a sleaze rock act featuring Foo Fighters keyboardist Rami Jaffee that dissolved soon after issuing a self-titled, six-song EP through American Records in 1991.
“I kind of had two hands I was
playing. And I remember the night I met Shannon, I went home to my
girlfriend, who is my wife now, and said, ‘He’s it. He’s the guy.’ I had
this image of who a rock star was supposed to be, but I had never met
that guy in Pennsylvania. When I met Shannon, it was like, ‘Holy shit!
Like, this is one of those guys.’ That’s when I decided to go with Blind
Melon.”
In 1992, Blind Melon released their
self-titled debut, featuring “Change,” “Tones of Home” and, of course,
their signature song, “No Rain.” Three years later, after touring with Ozzy Osbourne, Guns N’ Roses, and Soundgarden (and performing as part of Woodstock ’94), Blind Melon issued their sophomore record, Soup.
Two months after their follow-up, after an all-night binge, Hoon was
found lifeless on the group’s tour bus, dead from a cocaine-inducing
heart attack.
By all accounts, Hoon was an
exceptional but flawed talent — a charming, munificent presence with no
pretense, whose engaging, eruptive nature could be both invigorating and
draining. His music has endured all these years later, and “No Rain”
remains a classic even beyond alt-rock radio.
“He was the funniest, most charming
dude around — the most magnetic person in every single room I was ever
in with him, and that includes just about anybody we toured with,”
offers Stevens — something he says is evident in All I Can Say,
the band’s newly released documentary on the frontman. “He couldn’t sit
still, he couldn’t stop talking, he couldn’t stop engaging with people,
and he couldn’t stop singing. He was an exceptional human being, and
when I think about him now, I can hear his voice, clearly in my head. I
can’t really say that about other people I was close to in my life that
have passed.”
“If you hung out with Shannon for
even 20 minutes, he was your best friend,” Thorn adds. “That’s just who
he was. And it wasn’t fake. He just was completely engaged — whether
talking to the janitor at the arena you were playing or some dude on the
street.”
CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
However, Shannon’s demons usually cropped up after drinking alcohol.
“He’d turn into Mr. Hyde,” Stevens
says. “That first night we met, we went out drinking and ending up back
at Brad’s place, and I remember Shannon said something really stupid —
which he did all the time — and I started laughing at him. Before I knew
it, he was in my face, with veins bulging out on his head, getting
ready to kick my ass. I mean, he was ready to go — he didn’t give a
fuck. That’s about the only time I didn’t see him hit somebody in that
sort of situation.”
Because Hoon was capable of flying
off the handle after heavy imbibing, Shannon was also a master at
reconciliation. “The next morning, and this was without fail, every
time, he apologized profusely,” Stevens recalls. “I always accepted his
apologies because they were always so sincere.”
Adds Thorn: “Shannon was the type of
guy who could sleep with your wife, but he was so sweet the next day,
and he’d be so apologetic, you’d kind of forgive him. Shannon had fucked
up so much in his life that there was no one better at apologizing.”
Thorn also says Hoon would disrobe
randomly, if he thought it’d get him a laugh. “He once walked out naked,
in front of 80,000 people at a stadium, to deliver a pizza to Guns N’
Roses during their set,” Thorn explains. “Who has the balls to do that?”
CREDIT: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
Months before Soup’s
release, Hoon, a new father to daughter Nico Blue, entered rehab. It
was decided the band would tour with a counselor joining on the road to
assist with his recovery; that individual was fired not long into that
trek. After Hoon’s death, using a wealth of Shannon’s vocal recordings,
Blind Melon created 1996’s Nico
as a tribute to him. Proceeds from the album’s sales went to Hoon’s
daughter and funded programs to help musicians dealing with addiction.
“It was hard and painful, making that
record, but there was something about us all being together, in a room
together, that felt good,” recalls Thorn, who thinks about his late
friend at least once a day. “It did feel like he was there and like we
were making a record with him, but it was absolutely painful. People say
things like, ‘Time heals.’ I don’t know, man. There’s still a wicked
fucking scar there, and … I mean, it’s not an open wound anymore, but
you know what, it can become an open wound.”
Both Thorn and Stevens, who recorded
and released four new Blind Melon songs online over the last two years,
including the moving “Too Many to Count,” also still think about what
could have been: Soup, they say, really captured a band that was only just getting started.
“When Shannon was around, he was the
life of the party, every single time, but the other side of that was …
he was a deep dude,” Stevens says. “He was capable of a level of
self-reflection that really comes through in those songs, and he was
able to take his experience and make it universal because he was really
in touch with something magnanimous about the human spirit. That’s a
fucking rare gift.”
