When Shannon Hoon first heard the news about Kurt Cobain's suicide, he smashed a TV set to the floor in anger and frustration.  Staying at a Manhattan hotel, Hoon and his band, Blind Melon, were about to depart for
CBS to make their first appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman.  An hour and a half later, before going on camera, Hoon opted for a more poetic expression of his grief.  He picked up a felt-tip pen and drew, on his forehead, a question mark.

    Television viewers were left to guess the meaning of Hoon's gesture: Was it his comment on the riddle of how a young, famous, rich and talented artist could be so bent on self-destruction?  If so, it was a riddle Hoon  posed again last Oct. 21 when he was found dead of a drug overdose on Blind Melon's tour bus in New Orleans.  Like Cobain, Hoon was in his late 20s and the father of an infant daughter.

    There was another fact that united Hoon and Cobain: Each had been battling heroin addiction at the time of his death.  Though Hoon's death came from a cocaine overdose, he had recently gone through rehab to kick
  heroin; Cobain took his own life with a shotgun, but many close to him are convinced that his death was directly linked to his heroin abuse.

    Within a week or so of Hoon's death, Michael Greene, president and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and one of many who had tried to help the singer, announced the first industry wide symposium on the subject of drugs in rock.  He left little doubt about what inspired the  unprecedented meeting.  "Heroin has been glorified in some ways that I think we have to at least discuss," Greene says.  "Shannon was the last straw for me."

    But the Breeders' (Kelley) Deal, arrested in late '94 after receiving an overnight courier shipment of heroin, says that concern among industry leaders came lamentably late.  "After Shannon Hoon died people were
thinking, 'Hey, heroin's back'," Deal scoffs.  "Well, no shit.  Hellooo!  This has been going on for a few years."

    Shannon Hoon managed to resist heroin's dubious allure for years.  Although he first started using alcohol and drugs in his late teens, he did not, to knowledge of Blind Melon's manager, Chris Jones, resort to heroin
use until the last year of his life.  "He'd always said that he would never try heroin," Jones recalls.  "He knew how dangerous it was."  But in January 1995, while Blind Melon were recording Soup (the follow-up album to their
platinum debut), Jones received a phone call from Kingsway Recording Studio, in New Orleans.  It was Hoon.  "He told me that he had done heroin and had been doing heroin and had been doing other things," says Jones.  "He was just disgusted with himself and crying."  Despite efforts by several people around him to intervene, Hoon was dead nine months later.

        Despite frequent earnest avowals about his commitment to kick drugs, Hoon seemed bent on self ???.  His mother acknowledged as much in 1993, in the height of the band's success, when she recalled Hoon's troubled late teens and early 20s.  She told Rolling Stone that when her son caught a Greyhound bus from his native Indiana for Los Angeles in 1990, she knew that "he would either come back in a body bag or he would come back signed."

        For Blind Melon's manager, Chris Jones, it was a consuming struggle to keep Hoon from the body bag.  After signing Blind Melon in 1991, Jones' first duty was to arrange the band's move from Los Angeles to North Carolina, to remove Hoon from the temptations of the local dope scene.  The band's rapid rise over the next few years was marched by an equally swift escalation in Hoon's drug use, as the singer tried in vain to cope with pressures of fame.  From pot, booze and coke, Hoon graduated to crack and heroin.

Jones broached the top of treatment with Hoon repeatedly during their four years together:  "I would sit him down every now and again and say, "'Maybe you should get some help; maybe it's just me finding you a counselor and going to some meetings.'"  But Jones admits nothing ever same of such conversations.  "One thing I've learned," he says, "is that I couldn't force him I don't think anyone could - his friends or family or whoever.  If we forced him to go into rehab, he'd rebel, and there are no locks on the door in rehab.  He could walk out anytime he wants."

        On the two occasions when Hoon did enter treatment, he had little choice.  His first stint, in May 1994 for coke and alcohol addiction, was part of a sentence levied after he stripped naked and urinated on a crowd in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Without Hoon's knowledge Jones asked the judge to make treatment a condition of Hoon's probation.  Jones resorted to the same ploy a year later, when Hoon appeared again before the courts for punching an undercover cop in a New Orleans bar.

    By all accounts, Hoon's commitment to rehabilitation was sporadic.  Despite his early cry for help to Jones, Hoon delayed entering rehab for about five months before finally capitulating to the court order.  Though he seemed to make progress at Exodus (where he underwent a rough detox from heroin and other drugs in June 1995).  Hoon signed himself out after just 25 days, against medical advice.  He was soon using drugs again.  Meanwhile, the release of Soup  was delayed from June to August.

        Shortly before the release of the album, with Hoon apparently still hooked on hard drugs, Jones arranged a meeting between the band and Exodus' Dallas Taylor at the Mondrian Hotel, in West Hollywood.  "The point of the Mondrian meeting."  Taylor says, "was to run a family session with the band to allow them to express their feelings about Shannon's apparent unwillingness to get sober and stay in treatment.  The band was really angry with him." But when Hoon refused to attend, the meeting took place without him.  Taylor told the band and Jones that Hoon was not ready to tour.  "He fucking wasn't even sober," Taylor says.  "He could not stay sober.  He needed to get six months of intensive treatment under his belt before he could go out on the road."

    But the pressure to get the band on the road only intensified after the new album was released to savage reviews and dismal sales.  Capitol Records had launched the album with an expensive advertising campaign, and Jones says he felt the pressure to get the band out touring.  "I was faced with the label asking me every day: "OK, what are the tour plans?  What are the tour plans?  What are the tour plans?"

        Although Jones considered scrapping the tour, he went ahead despite Taylor's warnings.  "Dallas was really the only person who made that statement:  "You shouldn't go on the road,'" confirms Jones.  But Jones says there was a mixed message, because in the same breath, Taylor added: "But if you do, take my guy." Taylor's "guy" was a biker named Bobolu who had previously served as a baby sitter for a touring rock musician who need to be kept away from drugs.  Jones agreed to hire Bobolu.

    In consultation with Timmins, Collins and the Exodus center, Jones constructed a clean tour modeled on the Aerosmith approach.  "I demanded that there was no alcohol on the tour," Jones says.  "The crew, at my instructions, were told not to drink backstage or on the bus.  Two bands who would have been great support acts for us, I didn't want to even consider because of their history of heroin abuse."

    Blind Melon's U.S. tour kicked off Sept. 19 in New Jersey, two days before their second appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman. Hoon's baby sitter, Bobolu, joined the tour on Oct. 11 as the band rolled east from Los Angeles.  Bobolu says he was not exactly welcome:  "The whole vibe on the bus was, 'Now we got a fuckin' (Narcotics Anonymous) Nazi...We can't get loaded or do what we want with this guy around.  Let's get rid of him'"  Jones confirms that various members of Blind Melon and their road crew complained about Bobolu's presence from the start.  After only three days with the band, Bobolu says, he caught Hoon smoking crack in the back of the tour bus.  "He got rid of the shit," Bobolu says, "then we spent the rest of that night, since he was wired up pretty good, driving out to Arizona, talking."  According to Bobolu, Hoon spoke about having moved back to Indiana, about his newborn daughter and about reconnecting with his family.  "He seemed like he was actually trying to pull it together," Bobolu says.  But a few days later, when the tour reached Boulder, Colorado, Bobolu was fired by Jones.

    Jones declines to say on whose orders he acted.  Dallas Taylor speculates that Hoon had at least a part in the firings.  "I'm sure Bobolu was fired because Shannon didn't want him on the road," he says.  "I'm sure that Shannon, being the lead singer and leader of the band, was very much in control of what was going on."  Within days of Bobolu's leaving the tour, Hoon was found dead.  Though widely reported as a heroin overdose at the time, the substance that ultimately carried Hoon off was cocaine.

    Seven months later, there are still some unanswered questions.  Should Capitol have pressured Blind Melon to tour?  Having worked closely with Nirvana, Capitol Records president Gersh was obviously no stranger to the toll heroin can take on a performer.  "History tells us," Gersh admits, "that it is hardest for people who are drug addicts to be on the road touring and dealing with their habit."  But Gersh adds that the severity of Hoon's condition was not known to him: "I'd speak to his management company.  Every so often I'd speak to Shannon and see how he was doing.  You get the best information you can possibly get, and you deal with it accordingly...Believe me, there's no hindsight that says to us we should have not had them on the road.  Everything told us that Shannon was in better shape."

    Jones admits that Gersh wasn't close to Hoon, but NARAS' Greene clearly felt it was too soon for Blind Melon to tour.  "We'd been so closely involved with Shannon's rehabilitation," says Greene, "and we knew it was the wrong thing to do to take him out this early to tour."  Asked who else shared this opinion, Greene raises his voice "Everybody, Everybody, Everybody!"

    Jones, who must live with his decisions to put the band on tour and fire Bobolu, says grief rather than guilt is his primary emotion.  "Hindsight being 20-20, I wouldn't have put him on the road," he says.  "I would have stopped everything.  However, I would love to pose that question (What would you have done?) to anyone after they've been in my shoes.."  Jones agrees that "the industry machine" helped propel Hoon toward his death, yet insists that the ultimate responsibility lies with Hoon himself.  "People blamed Gold Mountain for Kurt," he points out.  "But they didn't tie off the arm; they didn't put the needle in."  He says the same was true of his relationship to Hoon.  "Ultimately, there' nothing that killed Shannon except Shannon.  It wasn't the industry.  It wasn't touring.  It was that he gave up.  Or he didn't believe that he had the problem.  He lived in denial, and that's what killed him."