By Steve Bloom
High Times Magazine

    The drug overdose of Blind Melon's lead singer Shannon Hoon has many questioning what pushed this brilliant young talent over the edge.

    On October 28, Blind Melon were set to perform at The Bridge benefit concert on Neil Young's ranch in Northern California. Scheduled to arrive a day early for the bar-b-q, Shannon Hoon, the band's lead singer, was psyched. He beamed every time he thought of performing alongside his hero Young and the all-stars lined up for the show.

    Virtually three years to that date Blind Melon crashed through the wall of notoriety with a pulsating performance at New York's Irving Plaza in front of a packed out-of-town CMJ crowd. There had been a buzz on the band that primarily had to do with Hoon's friendship with Axl Rose. Both hailed from Lafayette, Indiana, and Hoon went to school with Rose's kid brother and sister. Axl invited Shannon to sing along on Guns N Roses' "Don't Cry" and he even made an appearance in the video.

    But Hoon wasn't a metal kid. He was a latter-day hippie who rejected his jock upbringing. "I was just pretty bored with what my home town had to offer about reality," he told me the day after the Irving Plaza show. "I wrestled and played football and pole vaulted. I liked to pole vault. What a rush! Pole vaultin' is a rush. I don't know how many times I went straight up and came straight back down--never fuckin' hit the mat.

    "I was in a few different bands, but nothin' that really bled what I wanted to bleed out of myself," he said. In March of 1990 Hoon moved to L.A. seeking a career as a rock singer. He met Rogers Stevens and Brad Smith, a guitar-bass tandem out of West Point, Mississippi, then Chris Thorn, a guitarist from York, PA. Filling the drummer's seat, Glen Graham left Mississippi to join the fledgling band.

    They recorded a demo that drew immediate response from the L.A. labels. Once signed by Capitol, Blind Melon left L.A. for Durham, NC where they recorded their first album. Blind Melon was released in September of 1992. It introduced a band that found a way to integrate the hard edge of Jane's Addiction with the mellowness of the Doobie Brothers. Hoon's feathery falsetto downshifting into a rough growl tattooed itself on the memory. Stevens and Thorn cranked out riff after riff, ebbing and flowing with the songs' unusual tempo shifts. Smith's laid-back bass and Graham's jazz-inflected drum style held it all together.

    Influenced by the Allman Brothers, Traffic, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Sly and the Family Stone and Soundgarden, Blind Melon were ripe for comparisons. "I'm into Simon and Garfunkel right now," Hoon deadpanned, "but you know everything kind of comes and goes. Everyday your influences sort of change--it depends on what kind of mood you're in."

    Hoon's mood was fine until success happened. After a year of touring but little radio acceptance of the first single, "Tones of Home," Capitol went all out to promote "No Rain" with a video featuring the "bee-girl" who appeared on the cover of the album. Musically, its buoyant guitar parts, finger snaps and Hoon's bright vocals were a winning combination, but it was the girl's antics in the video that seemed to get the most attention. By September, "No Rain" was a hit and Blind Melon soared
into the Top 10.

    Something, however, wasn't right for Hoon. He was arrested in Vancouver for pissing on the audience and was hauled out of the '94 American Music Awards for being drunk. Following a rehab stint at the Betty Ford Clinic, Hoon prepared for the band's Woodstock appearance. He painted his face with makeup, donned a white dress and sashayed onto the Saugerties main stage. It was the last time I'd ever see him in person.

    Except for Thorn, who moved to Seattle, the band relocated to New Orleans, where Hoon had once been arrested. He again ran into problems with the law when police busted him for drunk and disorderly behavior. Hoon, who was found with pot, kicked out the police car's window. "Shannon could get obnoxious when he was drunk," said Marlon, a photographer's agent who became one of his most trusted friends. "He didn't like himself like that."

    The Shannon Hoon I knew smoked pot and enjoyed the flights of psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, a handful of which he bestowed upon me the first time we met. "They're really good," he said with a wink. "They're so moldy, man, it's pathetic."

    Unfortunately, Hoon had a taste for hard drugs as well. Cocaine use landed him in rehab in early 1995, and he had begun to dabble with heroin. After Blind Melon recorded their second album, Soup, they geared up for a new round of touring. But first, Hoon's girlfriend, Lisa Crouse, had a baby to deliver. Nico Blue was born on July 11.

    Critics blasted Soup with a vengeance, as if Blind Melon were responsible for world hunger.  Entertainment Weekly graded it "D," and branded Hoon "rock's most annoying singer." Spin called his lyrics "either indecipherable or full of baloney." And Rolling Stone, who featured a practically naked portrait of the band on its cover in late 1993, tore into Hoon's "incomprehensible" writing and the band's "disarray," giving it merely 1-1/2 stars. In mid-October, Soup fell off the Billboard 200 album chart after only two months.

    "This was all causing concern," explained Domenique Leomporra, the group's former publicist at Capitol. "They didn't understand it to a certain degree. That was the gist I was getting from Shannon.  They believed in what they were doing, but they weren't sure whether they were pissing in the wind."

    After a show in Houston on Oct. 20, Blind Melon piled into the tour bus, heading east to New Orleans. They arrived at 7 a.m. and parked outside of the venue, Tipitina's. Hoon got off the bus with everyone else, then went back inside. Five hours later, their sound man Lyle Eaves couldn't wake Shannon up. At 1:20 p.m., he was declared dead. The coroner said Hoon had been dead for several hours.

    Announced as an "accidental drug overdose," friends speculated that coke and/or heroin were to blame. "He was a professional partier," said Marlon. "Night would come and he would party to whatever hours of the morning and then go to sleep."

    "He was Mr. Extreme," said Danny Clinch, the band's photographer. "It was like with his music, it was like that with his video camera, it was like that with his cars--he's got seven cars! As emotionally extreme as Shannon was, I don't feel he really wanted to check out. He just had a little girl. He was really excited about life. He was in good shape. He didn't want to die. He'd told me, 'I have a child.  I'm a changed man.'"

    "He was definitely not himself the last year, without a doubt," Marlon said. "He went in and out of being himself. Like when he sings on the new album, 'This skin I'm in...isn't mine.' That line struck me because sometimes he wasn't in his own skin. All I can say it was a privilege to know him, because I don't think you meet people like that everyday."

    I was also touched by Shannon Hoon. For a while, he called everytime he came to New York. We must have had a dozen get-togethers. One occasion was at Jones Beach in New York on August 20, 1993. Blind Melon had just opened a show headlined by Neil Young and Soundgarden. The night before we hung out at the hotel smoking bowls. "You know," Hoon laughed, "I'd rather have a gold bong than a gold record." The next day I painted a cheap bong gold and brought it to the show.
After their set, I went backstage and made the presentation.

    "The first annual Golden Bong award goes to my favorite new stoner band--Blind Melon," I proclaimed. Everyone cheered and we lit up a huge joint. Shannon stood at my right admiring the bong. That's how I want to remember my friend and midnight toker, Shannon Hoon.

(article taken from here)