By Cree McCree
Circus Magazine
November 30, 1993

        Shannon Hoon is pissing in the wind for all the world to see, his sunlit projectory arcing across an open field.  Both the pastoral setting of this recent promotional post card - sent from Capitol records to media outlets coast-to-coast- and Hoon's off handed grin infuse a classic act of bad boy defiance with playful exuberance.  Hoon looks like a guy who "likes to wake up to Nine Inch Nails and go to sleep to Simon & Garfunkel." A guy equally at home wailing with fellow Hoosier Axl in Guns N'Roses "Don't Cry" video, and playing groovy pied piper to the pudgy little "bee girl" in Blind Melon's own MTV hit "No Rain."  A guy whose jump cut from a two month tour with Neil Young/Soundgarden/Pearl Jam grungefest to the band's current European tour with retro rocker Lenny Kravitz was just a natural segue.

        Such is the genre busting spirit of Blind Melon, a bunch of small town boys whose Capitol debut disc was conceived in L.A.'s hard-rock scene; born in a North Carolina farmhouse; produced in Seattle by grungemeister Rick Parashar of Pearl Jam fame; and heralded on MTV, who rotated Melon's "Dear Ol' Dad" on Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes months before the disc hit the stores last fall.  Then the one-two punch of "No Rain" 's MTV breakthrough and the buzz of born again Melonheads sent the disc Top Ten this summer.

        Critics have since stumbled over themselves trying to nail down the band's loopy mix of guitar-driven textures, backbiting beat and, soaring above it all, Hoon's keening vocals.  But forget all the shotgun-wedding verbiage like "Jane's Addiction meets Allman Brothers."  The Melonheads mixing it up on the dance floor of the band's live shows know exactly why they're there.  Like Hoon sings, in an almost unbearably plaintive voice in "I Wonder": "I only wanted to be 16 and free..."

        Tonight, Hoon's sitting cross-legged and barefoot amidst a jumble of pillows in the inner sanctum of Wetlands, a New York City nightspot, where he'll soon be careening off the walls upstairs.  An irrepressible talker whose words tumble out like his somersaulting stage antics, Hoon is eager to riff about anything and everything.  He might still be talking if his road manager hadn't collared him for soundcheck, handing him a brown paper sack.

        Hoon's face lights up when he pulls out a freshly re-soled pair of old black wingtips.  "I got these in Utah, man, in a used clothing store," he says, slipping them on with a grin.  "In big cities, everyone's already bought it all.  Small places, man, they don't know what they got."

      Lars Ulrich named Blind Melon as one of his top ten albums of 1992.  Did that surprise you?

      Shannon: Yeah.  Because our music and their music is completely opposite.  Metallica has a lot of aggression and anger, and they bleed themselves through that.  Which is basically what we do.  Except we try to create a very happy thing.  It's just like opposite ends of the spectrum of the same thing.  Hot and cold aren't opposites - they're just extremes of the same thing.

        It was flattering cause I was a Mellalica fan when I was growing up.  I went through a lot of phases before I was ever into writing my own songs.  I bled a lot of my aggression through Metallica, and Jane's Addiction.  And I went through a long, long, long phase with Pink Floyd.  I love Syd Barrett.  I think he's a sad, mad genius.

      What's the common denominator of all your "phases"?

      My influences are people who create moods.  People who give me this overwhelming feeling of conviction, man.  Janis Joplin did.  She like bared her naked soul for everyone to see, and if you didn't like it, it didn't matter.  That's brilliant.  And Syd Barrett, man - a lot of his songs don't even have any kind of key you can grasp onto but you know what's going on.  And it's his song and he can do it any way he wants.  There's no wrong way to do your own song.

      The songs on your album do seem to follow a few themes 'Home" and 'House' - and the feelings those words conjure up - recur several times.

      Yeah, that's just reflecting.  I think about home and I think a lot about how I ended up becoming an adult.  I go back and look at old pictures and think, how did I get from there to here? Like Bono said, when someone asked him how he reacted to becoming so famous and big: "I wasn't really conscious of it." Because you're around yourself everyday and things are changing so fast you don't really notice what's happening....I don't remember where I was going with that! oh, reflecting (laughs) Things like home.

      You're from Indiana and the other guys in the band are from Mississippi and Pennsylvania.  But are you really from small towns?  I mean, as opposed to suburbs?

        Yeah, we're all from small towns.  I'm from Lafayette, an hour outside Indianapolis.  We have nothing but cornfields.  The kids in my area do tassel corn.  Tassling corn is like when you pull out that little tassel at the top of the corn stalk.  I don't know why you pull it out.  All I know is for a 15 year old kid the amount of money I made pulling those tassels was like heaven!

       Is there any connection between Axl leaving Indiana and going to L.A., and you leaving Indiana and going to L.A., and then your being in the Guns N' Roses video?

       We're both from the same town; he went to high school with my sister.  We ran around with the same crowd, but I never really hung out with him in Indiana because I'm a few years younger.  Out in L.A., there's a handful of people who are from our community.  I'd sometimes run into friends who were from Lafayette and it was such a breath of fresh air.  It felt like you were going home without going back home.

       What about your new home, Seattle? What's your take on the scene?

       Seattle's gotten pretty commercial these days.  But it's not the scene that appeals to me.  It's the scene-r-y.  The mountains, the fresh air.  And I like rain, and it definitely has rain.  And the best pot in the nation.

       True.  But you have toured with a couple of big Seattle bands.  Is there a shared sensibility?

       Soundgarden is one of my favorite bands.  I think they're the pioneers of the whole Seattle thing.  A few of those bands got huge, but all these other Seattle bands are bouncing around the whole spectrum of music.  They don't abide by any formula that makes every song sound the same.

       Neither do you.  You're one of the few bands who could tour with both Ozzy Osborne and Lenny Kravitz.  But when I listen to your music it makes perfect sense.

      Yeah.  That's the point I was making.  And someone who tags our band as like a Jane's Addiction or puts us in the Seattle sound category has obviously just listened to one song.  Or maybe part of a song.  But if you listen to the record as a whole - we rip off everybody! And the unifying force may have nothing to do with music.  Just points of view.  We get everybody at our shows - the groovers, the stage divers and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.

       How do you feel about stage divers?

       Nothing disappoints me more than when I see someone who's lost in the groove and feelin' good and then a Doc Marten smacks 'em in the bridge of the nose.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not preaching against moshing and stage diving.  Because I provoke it a lot and I love to see people have a good time.  But there's a time for everything, and when people start moshing to "No Rain" I have to wonder.

       Because it has no relation to the music whatsoever.

       Yeah, exactly.  It's like an attention thing.

       What you're saying reminds me of what Chris Barron tells the audience when the mosh pit becomes no longer a friendly force.  You guys have a lot in common with the Spin Doctors, actually.  Not so much musically, but the fact they grew pretty organically without any hype, and eventually became huge, just by doing what they've always done.

       You know what it is?  Being real is in.  So a lot of major labels are letting the artists do the art now, rather than mass producing bands like they did in the eighties.

       They're finding out it makes good business sense.

       Yeah.  But I don't really care about good business.  I care about good communication.  They only thing I care about the business is I wanna keep on doing this.