By Darryl Mason

    Blind Melon had some big plans going in to begin recording their new album Soup. None of the band were overjoyed by the end result of their self-titled debut album - despite lavish reviews blaring of the band's talent and singer Shannon Hoon's hypnotic voice, and reams of fan letters telling them how deeply the music and words were reaching some people.

    Guitarist Rogers Stevens said the first album "sounded like a bunch of guys goofing off in a garage", and there was no way, as far as Blind Melon were concerned, that their second album would come out anything less than magnificent, an album of great songs, but with something more, more music, more little touches, more moods, more detailed atmsopheres.

    Most who have already heard Soup will nod their heads in glazed eyes, open-mouthed agreement that with Soup Blind Melon have achieved most of these things.

    "We wanted it to sound like more of an event," says Stevens, "so I wrote these horn parts and got this New Orleans brass band to come in and do this whole conceptual thing where the album starts out with the horns and finishes up with the horns, like a jazz funeral type thing. We had all listened to a lot of Beatles' records, over the years, and we liked all those little touches they had, the sound effects, the studio tricks, the unusual instruments."

    Stevens spent a year living in New Orleans, writing and soaking up the rich musical culture and history of the town, before the rest of Blind Melon arrived and serious work began on the new album.

    "The recording was pretty low tech and seat of your pants style recording, we did it in a studio that wasn't hooked up with all the modern amenities, it was one of those things where you were constantly having to rig things up in order to get something down on tape. I think it adds to the unpredictability of the whole thing, we never knew what we were really going to get."

    Soup was recorded in Kingsway Studios, New Orleans. The studio is actually an 1830s era three story mansion in the heart of the French quarter. Stevens said the house was filled with many, mostly hidden, small rooms and alcoves, and each of these would hold some excellent new little treasure for their discovery -in one room, they found a grand piano, in another a row of old accordions, in another a wheezing harspichord.

    "There's cellos in there, kazoos, picolos, different kinds of harmonicas.....we can't even remember who played what instruments on some of the songs, we just stood around and played these things, and whoever got it right, that went on the tape. With this band getting anything on tape is this weird kind of psychological warfare that we have, basic horrible musical intimidation we force upon one another. It seems to work (laughs)."

    That sort of friendly pressure, pushing each other to try different things, to experiment, to get weird, has flooded Soup with diverse slew of music and instrumentation. For the most part, Stevens said Blind Melon are not all that worried about whether some of the new stuff might be a little too different. He said music listeners have changed, dramatically, in the past few years, that more people are open to more different types of music.

    "Music doesn't seem to be following any specific formula or anything, obviously there are a lot of bands coming out that are derivitive, but at least there are some people who are taking chances and are getting well known for that fact. I'm of the type of thinking that there is room for anybody to go out there and give it a crack."

    Which is, of course, exactly the way Blind Melon went about getting their head start in 1990. The appearance of vocalist Shannon Hoon singing and gyrating with Axl Rose in the video for Guns N' Roses Don't Cry, threw immediate attention on Blind Melon, who were at the time only rehearsing and trying to find a sound they liked. A lawyer saw an opportunity and shopped around the five song tape they had quickly recorded to record companies, who in turn arrived at Blind Melon's rehearsal room to hear more. But there was no more.  Five songs were all they had, so Blind Melon would play those five songs and then say they had finished rehearsals. When they signed up, Blind Melon bipassed the studio for months, instead focusing on getting their live show together, touring and working on songs for their first record.

    The distractive nature of Los Angeles was dished for a five bedroom house in smalltown North Carolina. Stevens credits that house, and the nearby forests and fields and vista views of the mountains as being essential to why Blind Melon's debut album sounded the way it did.

    The album shot through the moon when No Rain, and its infamous 'Bee Girl' clip, began to dominate MTV. So Blind Melon went on the road, with Soundgarden, with Neil Young, with Guns N' Roses, Ozzy Osbourne and John Mellencamp. And then they did a headline club and small theatre tour of the US, then one of Europe, then another of the US, then another, then another......by the time Blind Melon had toured themselves into exhaustion, three years had passed by. It's only in retrospect that the band feels they didn't make the most of that time.

    "Being that that was three years of our lives, and most of them were spent in a drug induced stupor, it's hard to come up with too many actual highlights, it was more sort of like a constant low hum.

    "We're gonna spend more time recording while we're on the road now, to feel like we're being more productive......instead of going to recital and then drinking to forget about it."

    Looking back over how quickly those years of touring went by, and how little they did outside of the actual touring, Stevens is adamant that this time around, Blind Melon will bypass the bar after the show and turn their attentions to recording their third album while they tour Soup. The idea originally came to them when they discovered The Rolling Stones had recorded a number of albums while they toured during the 1970s. The Stones, however, had a massive truck stacked with recording studio equipment. Thanx to digital recording technology, Blind Melon have been able to get studio quality recordings down on tape in the privacy of their hotel rooms, or the ball room, or the basement.  The first of these tapes were made during their last tour, though the band didn't get around to recording as much as they originally intended.

    "We got this thing (a compact recording studio that fits in a few suitcases) that we roll around with us. In St Louis, on our last tour, we rented out the basement of this hotel and rolled the stuff in, we had two days off, we spent fourty eight hours straight in there recording, ordering room service and drinks and recording. We did that three or four times, we got a lot done like that, and the whole huge plan was, we were going to make a record or an EP in hotel rooms and release it."

    The seven songs, mostly different version of Soup tracks, but written and recorded in a concept form similar to the final version of Soup, will find their way onto b-sides over the next few months and may eventually see a limited release in its original form. Although the sound quality wasn't entirely the way Blind Melon had planned it to be, Rogers said the songs fully capture the atmospheres in which they were recorded. And that is on the run.

    "It would be three in the morning, we'd been done with the show, we'd roll everything into one of our rooms, set up our gear, get started, crank it up, and the security guard would inevitably come knocking, so everynight there was this one big run at it, 'we're gonna make this one take before we get shut down'.  We'd have an amp in the bathroom and someone would have a guitar solo to overdub, so you'd crank it all the way up, wouldn't make a sound, put a mike in front of the amp and then just go, and you'd have a couple of minutes to get it right before the banging on the door would start. It was pretty amazing we actually got the thing finished. It's kind of like being in a covert operation, renegade recording (laughs)."

Taken from here