Home     Tour     Discography     Pictures     Videos     Audio     Lyrics     Articles     FAQ     Links    Forum     Contact

Articles:

Blind Melon: Reunited and On The Road

Original article from newstime.com (February 27, 2008)

Christopher Thorn's ride to the top of the music charts was an amazing one that included being featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine with his Blind Melon band mates and touring with the Rolling Stones, his boyhood heroes.

But for Thorn, who played guitar, steel guitar, mandolin and harmonica in the alternative rock band, the road to fame would end all too soon. Blind Melon was nominated for three Grammys, sold eight million copies of their debut album and became internationally known for the smash hit, "No Rain." But frontman Shannon Hoon's drug overdose cut the band's career short when he died in 1995.

 
Photo (c) 2008 By RichCianci.Com
 

Now, after a decade-plus hiatus, Blind Melon is back on the road with new frontman Travis Warren, a Texas-based singer-songwriter and longtime fan of the band's music. They'll headline Feb. 29 at the Webster Theater in Hartford. And their new studio album, "For My Friends," is due out April 22.

So were Thorn and his band mates looking for a near-replica of Hoon in their new singer?

"For us, it's like that X-feeling you feel," Thorn said in a Feb. 18 interview from Dover, Pa. "It's so hard to talk about it. It's so hard to dissect it. But there's a feeling that you get when you have this chemistry with people and you know that you can do great things together. You know it would be better than you by yourself. Shannon had this incredible charisma and he had all these incredible qualities. But for us to say, 'Our new guy has to be exactly like this.'

You know what happened? We never found a person that made us feel like, 'OK, this feels great. We should do this.'

"So we stopped looking for 10 years," Thorn added. "And what people don't understand is that this was not a premeditated idea. This was not something where we sat around and said, 'OK, now it's time for us to find a singer.' Never in a million years. We let that all go. We were on our own paths."

For Thorn and bassist Brad Smith, that meant running their own recording studio, Wishbone, in North Hollywood. They produced albums for Anna Nalick, Cheyenne Kimball and others. In fact, they originally began co-writing songs with Warren with a goal of finding him a band and a record deal.

"At some point during that process, he had that X-quality that's so hard to talk about and he reminded me of Shannon in that sense," Thorn said. "He had that charisma. He had that thing that makes you go, 'I'm gonna totally flip my life upside down and be in a band with this guy because I have that feeling I haven't had since Shannon died basically "" that feeling of, wow, this could really be great.'"

Born Dec. 16, 1968, Thorn grew up in the small town of Dover, Pa. His mother played guitar and tambourine in the Sunday Night Merrysville Pickers, which got together to jam and have fun. Thorn's father was in charge of disaster recovery for the state of Pennsylvania.

With other influences including Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, The Who and the Stones, Thorn dreamed of becoming a professional musician "" even as he attended college for two years to make his parents happy. In 1989, he quit school and moved with his girlfriend and now wife, Heather, to Los Angeles.

Eventually, Smith answered an advertisement Thorn placed in Music Connection magazine. The pair went on to form Blind Melon with Hoon, guitarist-pianist Rogers Stevens and drummer Glen Graham.

Demoing songs incessantly, Blind Melon penned "Seed To A Tree," "Dear Ol' Dad" and "Soul One" early on. Still, it wasn't until the band "" especially Hoon "" got away from the distractions of L.A. and lived together in a house in Durham, N.C., that it truly became a cohesive unit, Thorn said.

"It was the most focused time that the band had ever had and it was the best idea we ever had to go there because we wrote songs, we learned how to play, we learned how to be together in a house," Thorn said. "We learned how to live together, and that's really what you have to do when you get in a van for a year or whatever. We learned a lot from being around each other in that house. It was a great experience. I look back on it and I get warm and fuzzy when I think about those days because it was really fun. We were smoking pot and stuff like that, but nothing had progressed to heavier drugs."

Working with Pearl Jam producer Rick Parashar, Blind Melon recorded its eponymous debut, which came out in 1992 and went quadruple platinum. With songs like "Soak The Sin" and the Top 10 hit "Tones Of Home," the album was solid, but it wasn't an overnight success story "" until the guys released the single and video for the No. 1 hit "No Rain" featuring Heather DeLoach as the "Bee Girl."

Samuel Bayer, who also directed Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, came up with the idea of bringing the image of Graham's sister from the album cover to life in the "No Rain" video.

"Obviously it really worked out for us," Thorn said. "It was a great idea. I don't think any of us realized that that image would become bigger than the band at some point. It started to dwarf us. When she's doing 'Leno,' talking about being the 'Bee Girl,' it was pretty crazy. It was definitely a weird time, but it was exciting too. I'll never forget the day we got the first cut of 'No Rain' and just really feeling like, 'Oh, wow, this is special. This looks great.' And at the time it looked really different from all the stark grunge videos that were going on. It was the opposite of that."

In 1995, after touring heavily and opening for Ozzy Osbourne, Guns N' Roses and Soundgarden, Blind Melon released "Soup," a different-sounding album that included the Top 10 hit "Galaxie."

"We were going through some heavy stuff, Shannon was going through some heavy stuff, there were some really, really dark times that came with the success and the drug intake got out of control and that changed a lot for us," said Thorn, adding that Hoon was a great friend and songwriter, who, though intense, was always the first to apologize for his mistakes. "That record was a really, really different record, but I can't say it was by design. It was just who we were at that time."

Following Hoon's 1995 death, the band released a rarities collection called "Nico" in '96. The remaining members pursued their own avenues musically until 2006, when they reformed with Warren on lead vocals. They played their first show in 12 years in 2007.

The title of the band's forthcoming "For My Friends" LP has to do with Blind Melon's diehard fans.

"It is sort of a nod to all of the people that have been there and followed our career even while we weren't making records you know, the sort of 12-year hiatus, so to speak, that we've had," said Thorn, whose son, Devlin, is 2 years old.

"We never would have (reunited) if we didn't feel like, 'Wow, we have stuff we have to finish,'" Thorn added. "Blind Melon just ended one day. There were a lot of unsaid songs and things we didn't get a chance to do. We let that go. And when we met Travis, we felt like, 'We have to do this. This is something we have to do.'"

Theme  Coded  by   Vince  Bertin   |   Designed  for  BeeMelon.com