Blind Melon: From West Point to MTV Stardom and Beyond

By: Jim Beaugez

Before Blind Melon’s hit song “No Rain” dominated MTV and alternative-rock radio in 1993, most people only knew the band because of singer Shannon Hoon’s childhood friendship with Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses.

By the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards in September, the song’s popularity had skyrocketed. The “Bee Girl” from the music video, played by 10-year-old Heather DeLoach, became a star in her own right, closing the show by tap dancing across the stage at Los Angeles’s Universal Amphitheatre.

Bassist Brad Smith, the main songwriter of “No Rain,” grew up in West Point, Mississippi, with guitarist Rogers Stevens. Drummer Glen Graham hailed from nearby Columbus. The Golden Triangle area played a significant role in the L.A.-based band’s development.

California opportunities

In West Point, Smith and Stevens played music together, while Graham was known locally for performing with Pat Sansone, later of Wilco, and Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers. “We all knew each other from early on, from Cub Scouts and the swim team,” Stevens said.

High school didn’t captivate Stevens, who skipped school regularly by his senior year to play guitar. “By that time, I had moved away from trying to be like Eddie [Van Halen],” he said. “I’d been listening to the Stones and R.E.M. And we were writing the first Blind Melon record two years after that.”

Smith and Stevens decided to move to L.A. and form a new band. They worked at Bryan Foods in West Point to save money for the trip. In L.A., they met guitarist Christopher Thorn, a Pennsylvania transplant, and Shannon Hoon from Indiana, forming Blind Melon in 1990. Record labels, eager to sign the band due to Hoon’s affiliation with Guns N’ Roses, soon convinced Graham to join as their drummer.

“Glenn showed up, and we started rehearsing immediately and doing these showcases in front of, you know, the president [of a record label] or something,” Stevens recalled. “Every single record company was offering us a deal, and there were a lot of them back then.”

East to West Point

After signing with Capitol Records, Blind Melon headed east to write songs for their debut album. On their way to Durham, North Carolina, they stopped in West Point and rehearsed in a former restaurant. There, they wrote “Soak the Sin,” the album’s first track, and returned to the area several times over the next few years.

They shot the video for “I Wonder” in Tibbee, a community south of West Point, in November 1992. The video, filmed two months after the album’s release, featured the band and extras covered in mud. “We got a bunch of mud out there, and we had this British director who was super cool named Paul Boyd,” Stevens said. “We just spent a day out there rolling around in the mud, pretending like we were playing a song.”

On another visit, after “No Rain” propelled their debut album to sell millions, they rehearsed for a tour and developed “2×4,” a standout from their 1995 album Soup. “We were getting better quickly,” Stevens said. “We weren’t running out of ideas — it felt like it was becoming more focused. You could hear a little more personality in terms of individual songwriters.”

Tragedy struck in October 1995 when Hoon died on the band’s tour bus in New Orleans, halting their progress. Blind Melon later reformed with new singer Travis Warren and released the album For My Friends in 2008. The band has performed sporadically since, releasing a series of singles between 2019 and 2021.

Magnolia Tribune first published this article, and it is republished here under a Creative Commons license.