Blind Melon

Can I do the things I wanna do

into a total mess

This is the story of a broken promise.

Of a talent as impetuous as it was resistant to restraint, tossed away far too soon out of sheer carelessness. And of critical reception that wasn't exactly commendable in terms of foresight. It's the story of Shannon Hoon and the record on which he chose to bet everything, one shot only, against his own demons – and it didn't pay off. Winning that hand wouldn't have reversed the outcome of a battle that had been dragging on for years, undermined by too great an imbalance of forces; still, it remains tangible evidence of the alternate version of the story we would have far preferred to tell. The one with an acid, unforgettable voice. Of a rockstar who was still beautiful but no longer cursed, mature enough to free himself once and for all from his self-destructive tendencies. Basically, the story of a young man who, with a different head on his shoulders and a bit more discipline, could have become a small generational hero.

The groundwork for an alternative ending had never really been missing, any more than luck had. Blind Melon had emerged from the alternative underground almost by accident, hitched – by some generous hand, perhaps on account of their honey-blond, Johnson's Baby-shampoo hair and flannel plaid shirts – onto one of the rear cars of the Seattle express, even though they were all transplants to Los Angeles: some from Mississippi, some from Pennsylvania, and – like Hoon – some from Indiana. Their chance to get noticed had come precisely in that great Californian metropolis, thanks to a heavyweight connection: childhood friend Axl Rose, who invited rookie Shannon to sing on a couple of songs that would soon become massive hits everywhere, "Don't Cry" and "November Rain". Their stint as apprentices to Soundgarden and the decision to enlist rising star Rick Parashar, the man behind "Temple Of The Dog" and "Ten", pushed the misunderstanding to its extreme consequences – but for them, small-town kids with everything still to prove, it amounted to a heavenly blessing.

The band's self-titled 1992 record was a success no one could have foreseen. The bogus grunge affiliation that Capitol rode hard worked like a skeleton key, but the real dirty work was done by the cutesy video for "No Rain" with its bee-costumed little girl, played on constant rotation on MTV. A cute, easy-listening tune, but hardly representative of the variety or the shadows within that roots-rock streaked with psychedelia. A mascot song, as they themselves called it. A neo-hippie caricature. One that sent sales rocketing past four million copies, and so, apparently, all was well. The band certainly had no intention of resting on its laurels. Instead, they threw themselves into two years of frenetic touring and consolidation, an important formative experience spent sharing stages with Lenny Kravitz, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, and then, like brothers, with the Smashing Pumpkins, Red Red Meat and Porno For Pyros. Trouble started too, between arrests for indecent exposure and stints in rehab, while the long blond locks gave way to far more drastic haircuts, and mascara ringed the singer's eyes like a panda's at every new live appearance – not least the memorable one at the 25th-anniversary Woodstock festival in August 1994. Still, all of it could easily have passed as narrative choices in a screenplay. And so it went.

Turbulence aside, this was a feverishly creative period for the Melons, who relocated to New Orleans to record, at Daniel Lanois's Kingsway Studio, a sophomore album that was, inevitably, highly anticipated. Predictably, they could simply have rehashed the formula of their fortunate predecessor without facing any backlash whatsoever – and, if anything, further cementing their alliance with radio and TV networks (a telling example being their off-the-cuff cover of "Three Is A Magic Number" from the "Schoolhouse Rock!" series, later licensed for the soundtracks of a string of dopey rom-coms like "Never Been Kissed" and "You, Me and Dupree"). Instead, they decided, with real courage, to head in an entirely different direction – even though the gamble wouldn't pay off. At their side they wanted Andy Wallace, who had already produced Rollins Band, Bad Religion and Faith No More, and who had just come off working with Jeff Buckley on the unforgettable "Grace"; and they rejected every note handed down by Capitol's emissaries, effectively alienating the label. Evidently stirred awake by the cultural climate of Louisiana, the Southern roots of Roger Stevens, Brad Smith and Glen Graham gave the new songs an even more authentic, full-blooded flavor, while at the same time loosening the leash on their frontman's wild-eyed verve. With Cobain dead and buried for about a year, and the Californian punk-pop of Green Day and Offspring now touted as the new fake-alternative phenomenon in place of grunge's tired stereotypes, the quintet chose to definitively disown that long-uncomfortable association and reinvent themselves in the name of radical creative freedom and a sweeping, evidently deeply felt homage to their roots.

Blazing hybrids of hard rock and funk, half-borrowed from their friend Perry Farrell ("2×4"), raw and aching acid-rock crowded with ghosts (such as Jackie Onassis's, in "Dumptruck") or dressed up in a flashy melodic outfit not without its own veil of unease ("Galaxie"), confessions of a dangerous mind (serial killer Ed Gein) penned with black humor and Appalachian-folk ease ("Skinned"), bluesy offcuts ("Wilt"), radiant alt-country elegies ("Vernie", "Walk"), catatonic Zeppelin-esque tableaux ("The Duke"), introspective passages opening onto a chasm of anguish ("Toes Across The Floor"), and foaming-at-the-mouth nonsense rants ("Lemonade") – all set within a bizarre dixieland frame courtesy of Kermit Ruffins and his Little Rascals Brass Band: "Soup" really was the stew its title promised, spiked with bold, jarring flavors, pungent enough not to go unnoticed. After all, what other alt-rock band of 1995 would ever have dreamed of putting harmonica, banjo (overused today, but back then...), kazoo, cello, double bass, accordion, trumpets, flutes and tuba on a record? They did. They dared.

A now-matured band found itself drawing on every ounce of virtuosity and eccentricity it possessed, placing itself entirely at the service of a Shannon more inspired than ever. Few noticed at the time, but the album had everything it needed to stand among the cornerstones of Nineties roots-rock – following, however, an entirely personal, almost stray-dog path, not unlike the guy on the cover. There would be no more filters shielding the ugliness, no more holding back the inner monologues summoned to spew out, with the necessary cruelty, tales of addiction and abuse, in spite of that damned, saccharine, obese little girl dressed as a bug. Death would be the guest of honor, but seen through adult eyes – a presence to be exorcised by plunging headlong back into one's own exhausting present without taking anything for granted anymore ("St. Andrew's Fall", something like their own "A Day In The Life") and, whenever possible, embracing every new sprout of life as a chance to get back on the right path (the lysergic "New Life", a song about impending fatherhood and, in the end, an opportunity that stayed only on paper).

But at the same time there was room for tenderness, for acoustic caresses, for the tear-jerking memory of a generous grandmother, and for more than one ecstatic hook, from the spine-tingling duet with newcomer Jena Kraus on "Mouthful Of Cavities" to the sinuous arabesque and distilled spoken word of the little gem "Car Seat", so ambitious that it elevates a sad, sordid story – pure tabloid fodder – into something almost lofty, while cannibalizing a poem written by the singer's ancestor, Blanche Bridge, more than a century earlier.

The record denied itself nothing in the name of radio appeal, which was necessarily sacrificed, and had no fear of presenting itself under a dark atmospheric cloud, with a sound that, in open defiance of that era's obsession with pristine technical polish, embraced reverb and impurity as genuine blessings. Almost obliquely devoted to revivalism, as if on a deliberate mission, it even indulged in reviving the by-then-outdated convention of the "delayed title track" (already honored in a distant past by heavyweights like the Doors and Led Zeppelin): and so a superb song bearing the very same title skipped its own turn, only to resurface posthumously, on the next record.

With sheer ineptitude and not a shred of embarrassment, the critic on duty at Rolling Stone panned "Soup" because it "betrayed the band of 'No Rain'". Verbatim. Wanting to evolve beyond the trivial formula of their own wildcard hit somehow became a fault, not a virtue. There was no shaking off the one-hit-wonder label they'd been branded with, unfairly, of course. No mention of how the five of them had grown as musicians and songwriters, after more than three hundred shows played down to the last drop of sweat, night after night, striving to get better. The trouble was that Capitol felt exactly the same way, and the record went almost entirely unpromoted. The American band's final live performances showed a Hoon who was furious, intense and demonic, his voice like sandpaper, his mascara melting under his eyes, amplifying the sinister omens already scattered abundantly across the grooves of the two LPs they'd released. The road ahead was perhaps already set in stone for a fragile, bipolar artist, but it's plausible that disappointment and disillusionment played their part in speeding things toward their end. And, deep down, he'd admitted as much himself, hiding behind a car metaphor in the dizzying refrain of "Galaxie": the family he'd just started was like the Cadillac, a luxury he knew he couldn't afford, paralyzed as he felt behind the wheel of his beat-up, filthy old Ford.

After one last show, apparently played in a state of total confusion, on the morning of October 21, 1995, the frontman was found dead on the tour bus, from a cocaine overdose. Death, as everyone knows, always sells extremely well in the gilded world of show business. Curiously, with Shannon Hoon it made an exception. No one exploited the tragedy: not his bandmates, who as loyal friends chose to keep a low profile and preferred a resigned fade-out to the cynicism of opportunists; not the record label, which from that moment on let silence fall over Blind Melon and carefully avoided promoting an album that had, after all, come out only a couple of months earlier; and not, finally, MTV or the other networks, who passed up from the start on what – from their point of view – would have been a tempting chance to promote, across every channel at once, a new Kurt Cobain, evidently already too busy squeezing every last bit of value out of that other miraculous, still-warm corpse. And so Hoon was spared the inevitable process of deification, much as would happen to the late Layne Staley, simply because he passed away far later than everyone expected (and some hoped). "Soup" quickly slipped into obscurity, just like its talented, extraordinary vocalist.

The band's breakup, and its return with a new singer a decade later, is another story altogether. So is "Nico", the homely, genuine posthumous collection released in 1996. What remains, on the margins, is that towering What If..., which leaves behind more than a little bitterness. As with every broken promise worth its name, it's the taste of regret for what could have been and never was that makes all the difference. If that aftertaste still feels so sharp today, the credit belongs above all to "Soup".

An unforgettable "soup", precisely because it was bitter, not reheated leftovers like so many others.

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22/11/2015