The Tapes Archive

Shannon Hoon: Then being in America.

Marc Allan: And where are you now?

Shannon Hoon: I’m in Toronto.

Marc Allan: Oh, okay. For some reason I thought you were in New York, so–

Shannon Hoon: No. It almost gets so frustrating that by the time you do get called, you don’t wanna fuckin’ talk, good God.

Marc Allan: Well, you got through. You’re not very late. That’s great. Anyway, well, I wanted to talk to you some about the new record and such, and then about your youth here in Indiana, so–

Shannon Hoon: Okay.

Marc Allan: Let’s talk about the new record first. How frustrating is it to know that you’ve made a better, more interesting followup record and it’s gonna be much more difficult to get people to hear it?

Shannon Hoon: I think that’s something we were aware of when we went in to make the record. I think the one thing that Roger stated about the first record which rang so true is it’s a good progressive growth of the band. He talks about the first record being, it was the musical placenta. It was basically the first songs that we ever had written and recorded together. And I think that since then we have managed to hone in on making more of a record this time around, opposed to a record with a few singles on it. I personally like this new record a lot more than I do the first one. The first record was a good reflection of the time we were at the time we made it, but I think that this record has more of a mix of styles, which is the way we like it. We realize that financially and as far as eliminating a lot of the housewives who probably bought the first record for No Rain, we realize that. But I think that everybody wants to stay as honest as they can about the songs that we write, and keep that, not keep the hit single thing as, not as the focus.

Marc Allan: So, No Rain 2 was not an option, is that what you’re saying?

Shannon Hoon: No Rain 2 wasn’t an option unless it subliminally came through in a different form on this. I mean, I like the fact that you sit down and each song as an even, there’s no obvious singles on the record. That was the first thing that we noticed when we sit down and we discovered which songs were gonna be on the record and which ones weren’t, and I think that after you get done with the sequencing and you get done putting it in and taping it all together, that was one of the first things that I had noticed. I think that it’s a lot better to have a record, I think that’s the point of making a record. Otherwise, you just release 45s all your life.

Marc Allan: Yeah, that’s true. But it just seems like you guys are in with a whole bunch of other people in that you get, your first record did incredibly well and then by the time audiences seem to, like, burn it up and then they just go on to something else. It’s like, by the time the second record comes out, they’re on to something else. Do you have any sense of that and do you have any feeling of why?

Shannon Hoon: Of course I do.

Marc Allan: Yeah?

Shannon Hoon: I think it’s just obvious that human nature these days, there’s a rapid pace going on, things are quickly chewed up and spit out more so today than they were five, ten years ago and I think that people are not going to listen much to something that they might have to listen to a couple of times. I argued a lot of things that are actually quite humorous, because you see some of the critics, they, instead of falling over their tongue they quickly, like, they quickly spit the album as a piece of shit. And to me it’s kinda just, it’s obvious that the person that doesn’t have the patience to really sit down and listen to anything more than one time and it’s like, it’s that whole, don’t bore us, get us to the chorus type of mentality. So, I mean, to me I was always a fan of records that you had to kind of sit and soak with them for a little while. I always liked that about Pink Floyd records. You could never really figure out why you liked it but you always, first, for a certain kind of mood you would always put one of those records on, like, Saucerful of Secrets, there was always this mood that maybe only came around like once or twice a week but it was the kind of mood that ended up being like, three or four times a week, and then the next thing you knew, the thing was permanently locked into your CD player. I just, yeah, we were definitely aware of that, though. I’m in a band where, fortunately enough, there’s five songwriters, so there’s never one guy writing all the stuff so it’s never monotonous. And sometimes people just want, some people like to hear bands that repetitively play the same songs, basically, over and over, just with different words, and I think that we’re a little bit different than that.

Marc Allan: Yeah, and then you go into it and you know exactly what people are waiting for. They are waiting for No Rain 2, and then that’s just gotta be horrible as an artist, to–

Shannon Hoon: It actually is. It isn’t as horrible if you recognize it. If you know that prior to it, I mean, everybody is always like, they pull the beaker out of the tone card, there’s no beakers on this record, it’s like, to me that’s a compliment! It’s like, I don’t wanna live my whole life doing one album by any means, so. I think that all I can really ask, and I think everybody in the band will agree, the only thing that you can really ask yourself is to try to musically move forward. You can’t really judge the satisfaction of a record based upon how many it sells. I mean, all I can do is ask that our playing gets better, that our writing seems to get better, and that we feel like we’ve progressed, and I feel like we’ve did that. I feel like we really sampled out a lot of musical styles that we all were interested in, that maybe we didn’t feel like waiting to the third or fourth record to get to, we just felt like getting started with it now, and if you do that, you do do it at the risk of losing a lot of people. But I think anybody that really, really likes the band realizes, and if they’ve ever seen us, they know that we’re into, we like to change. It’s like, I don’t like to stay in the same genre of music for too long. I like to kinda jump around and sample everything on the table, and then come back and reflect on it. And I think that everybody took the chance of branching out into different styles of music when we decided to write the record and we decided to bring in a lot of different styles that we weren’t used to working with, and working with them. And to me I think that it’s like the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys’ first record was phenomenal, and their second record, Paul’s Boutique, was not so happily embraced by everybody, but you know what? It was one of their best records. And I just, I’m enjoying myself, I’m enjoying where we just started touring, we just got back from Europe, touring, and I’m enjoying playing these songs. They’re fun to play live and it’s just fun to play other songs, after playing the same songs night after night for two years.

Marc Allan: Yeah. You wanna take people through a quick, guided tour of this record? What should they work for and what, and explain things that might throw them for a loop?

Shannon Hoon: Okay, yeah, we ended up where we recorded it in New Orleans, which I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any time there–

Marc Allan: I can’t say I have.

Shannon Hoon: It’s a city that one’s willpower is tested in, that’s for sure. And the metabolism usually doesn’t prevail. But we recorded it with Andy Wallace, we recorded it in, like I said, in New Orleans, in a studio called Kingsway, it’s right in the middle, or, right on the backside of the French Quarter. So, there’s never a lack in anything, or for anything to do. We waited for a long time after the first record to record this one because we weren’t so apt to wanting to jump on the hype of the first record and quickly release the second record. We kinda wanted to let the No Rain thing go away and we kinda wanted to just go away, we just wanted people to just kinda forget about it. We stayed down there for about three months. We brought in a brass band, Kermit Ruffins, who’s like the high-flying horn player in New Orleans. We brought in him and the Little Rascals Brass Band to have, like, add some local flavor to it, and we got done probably about three months ago. It took us about three months to make the record. We didn’t really jump, I mean, to spend time in New Orleans, we knew it was gonna have an effect on the record so we just kinda stayed down there for a while and a lot of the things were written before we went down there but they were never, like, polished and finished off. They were just kinda ideas when we went down there. We kinda wanted to wait ’till we had all gotten together to finish them all up, and we wanted to do that in New Orleans because we knew that would have an effect on us, as well, and it would have an effect on the music. The song is almost recorded in the order that they were on the record. The song Car Seat was a song about the seasons myth from that whole thing. The song, let’s see, here I am, forgetting what the songs are on the record. I never really think about this part of it. I’m the most unpolished off interview guy that you’ll ever meet.

Marc Allan: That’s okay.

Shannon Hoon: No problem with it, I just don’t like, kinda, reanalyze it a whole lot, so unfortunately I forget a lot. The song Galaxie was written about a ’64 Galaxie that I bought while I was in town, there. The song Vernie is about my grandmother, and the song Wilt is about, it’s a combination of a bus driver that we have a time of, who had the worst breath, I think, that anybody could ever possibly have.

Marc Allan: Tell me about Toes Across the Floor, that’s–

Shannon Hoon: Toes Across the Floor is a collage of, it kind of is an extension of the song Skinned, in a sense. The song Skinned is about the serial killer Ed Gein. This guy used to build furniture out of people’s bones. He was the guy they did sort of a spinoff of Silence of the Lambs on.

Marc Allan: Right, okay.

Shannon Hoon: And you should, you know what, actually? You should relay that message to the lady who reviewed the record and said that I showered it. I doubt, my mother read this review, said, Hoon showers Blind Melon’s Soup. You should tell her that you’ve found out what some of the meanings of these songs are before she sets her mentality on the chopping block.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Shannon Hoon: Tell her that when she slams a song like Car Seat, that she needs to realize that she’s slamming a very touching story that I’m sure that a lot of people are affected by.

Marc Allan: Okay, well she’s working in Cleveland now but I’ll definitely relay the message, yeah.

Shannon Hoon: Make sure to tell her, she’ll definitely get some, she does, she’s the kind of person who seems like she’d be the first one to call for, like, free passes to the show. That’s humorous. You get those people, that’s really funny because we keep all these bad reviews. And it’s alright if someone legitimately slams you but when you have no clue, and you can just tell that they didn’t really take the chance of finding anything out before they decided to post their opinion on it, it cracks me up, because usually those are the first people who will call and ask if they can get them and four of their friends into the show.

Marc Allan: No, I–

Shannon Hoon: You always say, yeah, yeah, yeah, and by the time they go through all the parking problems and everything and then they get up to the ticket counter and then they wave through the line, and then they ask for the tickets they give their envelope and it has clippings in it. That’s always a fun thing to do.

Marc Allan: No, it’s interesting, because I gave, I try to assign those reviews based on the, to give it to somebody I think would be sympathetic, or at least likes the style or music. And I did not, I gave her the only copy that I got, and I got a copy, and I gave her a couple weeks later, right after the review ran, and I thought this was a way more interesting record, like, no offense to the first record but I thought that was pretty much a one-note record, and this one I like all the styles and I think you take a lot of chances and it’s different from song to song, which is what I always listen to a record for, so.

Shannon Hoon: I was a big fan of The Velvet Underground and I think that was what I liked the most about The Velvet Underground, it was that you had Lou Reed who could really, really write words and then all the other people in the band were into different kinds of music. John Cale was like, a complete master of instruments, and like, each song would just, you know there would be a common thread but you couldn’t put your finger on it. There would be a common thread that would intertwine all the songs, but you could never put your finger on what it was. I think that, I mean, the song Lemonade is probably the most bombastic song that is full-on characteristic of New Orleans, it’s just, it was the song that Kermit and the band played on which was a definite highlight as far as the days in the studio. When those guys came in, Kermit brought in, it was like, four other people, and they were a band that played out on the street in New Orleans, and man, they were phenomenal, man. And they were the embodiment of New Orleans. Every characteristic of the city came through in them just as people who, while they were talking in-between takes. So they were so authentic, man. It was like, it was a pretty funny day. And man, they could drink, oh my God! I was just waiting for, just like, bubbles to start coming out of the horns because they were, it was really, really funny. I think we enjoyed ourselves more this time, making a record, because we had done it before and I think on the first record, and no I don’t take offense to it because I also believe that it was our first record and I believe that you’re very apprehensive about feeling comfortable when you go into a studio and you have all this money that’s pumped into making a record, when you’re used to doing recordings for like, a fraction of the cost that it takes, and you realize all the seriousness that surrounds it. I think it took a long time for us to relax and kind of feel comfortable about saying no, we don’t wanna spend that much money on something. We would rather wait, rather than jump on the hype of the band, and wait ’till we’re relaxed and feel like making another record. So, I think there’s a lot of the elements surrounding the record are what makes me like the record more, as opposed, sometimes by just listening to it, yeah, I can like it but I think there’s a lot of things that are surrounding the record that lay very well with me and that was the manner we took about recording it, the manner we took as far as realizing the meshing of what we do together. Each one of us as individuals. Because we’re very different people and if you were ever in a room with all five of us, you would definitely notice it. So, to try to find a common denominator and something to grow on equally, sometimes it’s difficult. There is tension in the band because everybody knows how to write the songs. But I think the common denominator is that everybody wants to make the song as best as it can be. And if there’s only gonna be one common denominator, thank God that that’s the one.

Marc Allan: How did all this feeling about let’s go away for a while, let’s not recreate No Rain, how did that sit with the record company?

Shannon Hoon: Oh, obviously not well. I mean, but at the same time I think that some people’s plans are a lot bigger for us than maybe what we want them to be. I can’t, if it’s because of enthusiasm then I’m not gonna say anything but if it’s just for the almighty dollar bill, I have to sit and go, you know what? You start fooling with the longevity of things. After the first record, and here you’re talking about guys who have never really been on tour and then all of a sudden we got thrust into a two year tour. Our domestic lives have completely crumbled, and I think that there was a lot of foundations that had weakened, and we needed to strengthen them before this could be an honest record, and I think that’s one thing that everybody really, really agreed on quite quickly was that we did want to take some time off and we did wanna repair what had been damaged by the unexpected success of the first record. And I think it probably, and here you start to dislike something you love to do, there’s gotta be something wrong somewhere and I think it was because we were just being, we were catering to the success of a single. You want to do it because people wanna see you play a lot, and you wanna play, but sometimes you really have to sit back and evaluate if it’s affecting you personally, or not, because you insult people when you get up there and you don’t want to be there and you think that they don’t see it. I mean, I notice it, when I go to see a band, if they don’t wanna be there. And I think that that’s the way that the last six months of our tour was, because, and those nights, there were a lot of them. The crowd, their enthusiasm completely carries you, sometimes. That’s where you realize the power of having a following, because they sometimes are the only saving grace of touring. Because it isn’t all cracked up to what everybody thinks it is. It’s fun for about, like, the first couple months and then you start to realize that you’re so sheltered away from, like, reality. You have to quickly remind yourself that this is sorta similar to a carnival, or the 4H fair. It kinda runs along the same lines of it, and you just wanna see a familiar face every now and then, and sometimes that familiar face comes from someone you’re never met before who knows all the words to your song or something like that. So, I think that, yeah, to answer your question in a very long way, the record label, they probably weren’t happy that we didn’t want to record right away but at the same time, they’re not pushy. And I’m not, I think record companies, yes, they make way too much money off the artists who create the records, but I think that I managed to, I’m not Mr. anti-record company. It’s your fault if you don’t look at everything clearly before you sign on the dotted line so I’m not gonna sit here and say in hindsight it’s someone else’s fault. But I’m happy with the record and with what we’re doing now and the pace that we’re doing it at. We’re still doing the small kinda tours. We just went over and we did Europe with Soundgarden, and it was enjoyable because we know those guys and the shows were really big but I think that we’re more comfortable in an intimate environment. I think for us, we come off better–

Marc Allan: Well yeah, you’re gonna play, like, a 15 hundred capacity place, so.

Shannon Hoon: Yeah, and I think that that’s where we’re most comfortable at doing. And anything else, because that, anything bigger than that, the element of laptop computer starts to come around too much. Everything gets too serious when the shows are bigger than that.

Marc Allan: So, what was it like being on stage at Woodstock?

Shannon Hoon: It was interesting. I think that, by no means did it even come close to capturing what the first one was all about. I think it was a real weak attempt at it, but I didn’t see anybody there who really didn’t have fun, and I think that what made it, the only things that really made it, they were when you heard the remnants of the first Woodstock, was when you saw, we went on after Joe Cocker, and Joe Cocker seemed to be feeling alright, was something that just blew me away. I was like, oh my God, not only am I blown away by this, but we have to play at Woodstock! I mean, I met Peter Max there and that was someone who I always wanted to meet. I asked the guy to sign my guitar, and Peter Max turned my acoustic guitar over and drew a whole picture on the back of it.

Marc Allan: Cool, that’s great.

Shannon Hoon: And I was like, wow, if this rock and roll thing doesn’t work out, this’ll pay the rent for a while.

Marc Allan: That’s right, that’s right. And, okay, well, let me ask you about growing up here. You said your mom sent you the clip so she’s obviously still living here. Did you grow up in Lafayette or–

Shannon Hoon: Yeah, I grew up in Lafayette.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Shannon Hoon: I actually just bought a house there. I live there still.

Marc Allan: You do? Well, okay, oh my God.

Shannon Hoon: I and my girlfriend who I met, we grew up in Lafayette. We went to McCutcheon High School. We just had our first child about eight weeks ago.

Marc Allan: Oh, congratulations! That’s great.

Shannon Hoon: Yeah.

Marc Allan: Boy or girl?

Shannon Hoon: A little girl.

Marc Allan: All right!

Shannon Hoon: Yeah, we were, I had to leave like a week and a half later so it’s hard to say, I would be lying if I said I was 100% enthusiastic about being out on tour right now.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Shannon Hoon: Because I just, I’m like, it’s hard to be away.

Marc Allan: Well, you’ve got four more weeks of crying, shitting, piss and shit, that–

Shannon Hoon: I thought that this messed a man’s sleep up for a living. Doing this, I thought that you lost a lotta sleep and it ain’t nothing compared to parenthood.

Marc Allan: That’s true. But, you wanna be there at three months because three months, you start getting smiles and things like that.

Shannon Hoon: That’s what’s going on. Like, she’s starting to smile right now. She’s found her smile as far as like, honestly and sincerely using it at times when she wants to smile. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it?

Marc Allan: Yeah, yeah.

Shannon Hoon: Well, obviously, you’re a father.

Marc Allan: Well, I have a little girl who’s gonna turn four, and I’ve got another one who’s due November 4th, so.

Shannon Hoon: Oh, wow, congratulations for you too.

Marc Allan: Yeah, so it’s very cool. But we start seeing the things and the little things that they do, yeah, it’s gonna suck for you to be on the road and miss this.

Shannon Hoon: Well, what I’m doing is, I’m buying a mobile home to take out on the road. Me and Lisa, we like to camp and everything as well, and since the baby, now, is healthy enough to be able, we checked with the doctor, he said that it was okay that we could take her out. So I think that we’re going to do a lot of touring with her.

Marc Allan: Oh, good, good.

Shannon Hoon: But I grew up in Lafayette, went to school there, and just moved back there from Chicago.

Marc Allan: Yeah, when Dave Banger, the critic at The Lafayette Paper, he told me a while back, he said, nobody knew about Axl Rose, really, but everybody knew you and that you were very vocal, and you made it plain to anybody who would listen that you were gonna be a star. Is that accurate, or?

Shannon Hoon: I think that’s very inaccurate.

Marc Allan: Oh, okay, I’ll have to ask him again because that’s what I thought he said, but I’ll have to double-check on that. Anyways, so–

Shannon Hoon: Dave’s a really nice guy, though.

Marc Allan: He is, yeah.

Shannon Hoon: He really is. He was, sometimes it’s hard to, it’s not hard to talk to a local paper, but that is where all my friends are and I feel kinda funny because I like being at home, because my friends still tell me to fuck out. And isn’t it wild how you come to miss that? So I still, actually, do you know Mike Kelsey?

Marc Allan: Yeah, sure.

Shannon Hoon: Mike’s with us right now. Mike’s here with us in Toronto.

Marc Allan: Oh, really? Okay.

Shannon Hoon: Yeah, Mike actually played, there’s a hidden track on the record and I wanted, me and Mike played in the first band we were ever in together, and we went to high school together and I brought Mike down in New Orleans because I wanted our producer, Andy, to see Mike’s new age way of music, now, where, I don’t know if you’ve seen Mike play.

Marc Allan: I’ve seen his video, he sent me something–

Shannon Hoon: Yeah, were he does the acoustic percussion off the guitar, and everything.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Shannon Hoon: Yeah, that’s the exact video that our producer’s seen, and wanted to see Mike. So Mike came down to New Orleans and we ended up, I wanted Andy to record it because we had a lotta extra tape and we had extra time, and I was like, I want Mike to just, this place where we recorded it was like a three-story mansion. It was really killer. And Mike went up in the top. It was really old, so Mike goes up in the top and we set up a Mike right in the hallway because the echo in the hallway was great and it was sorta, you didn’t have to create it through a bunch of technology. It was original and just authentic sounds that he was getting. And he played for like an hour straight, and we recorded all of it. And what we did was, we took the best parts of it and we kinda just made this swirl of, like, weird music and everybody picked an instrument that they didn’t know how to play and it was all based around what Mike had played. And then we took the song New Life, on the record, which is about my child, and Lisa telling me she was pregnant, it was a song that we put on the record. And we took the vocals track from that and we played it backwards over what Mike had done, and it’s the hidden track on the record. And the only way to get to it, which, don’t tell anyone. You don’t have to put this in your interview. I’m actually just telling you, personally, because you know Mike.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Shannon Hoon: You have to lay on the scan button, I believe, and it’ll scan back through it at the beginning of the record. You have to scan all the way through it. And you’ll hear like a , and it stops. And then let off the scan button, and it’ll start.

Marc Allan: Oh, okay.

Shannon Hoon: But, yeah. Mike’s here with us now.

Marc Allan: That’s cool.

Shannon Hoon: He’s gonna play with us at this, we’re gonna take him on tour and he’s gonna play his little thing between the first band and us.

Marc Allan: Great, that’s wonderful.

Shannon Hoon: And he’s up here doing this, it’s for MTV of Canada. We’re doing their Unplugged thing. And, oh, it’s such a pain the butt, but they’re fun to do. But setting them up you have to go in and just do all the crap that does around setting it up is sometimes a real pain in the ass. But Mike’s playing on it with us.

Marc Allan: So, what was the band that you and Mike were in together?

Shannon Hoon: We were in a couple that didn’t even have names, and then we were in a band called Stiff Kitten for a while.

Marc Allan: Stiff Kitten, okay, yeah.

Shannon Hoon: And then we ended up figuring out that we really did like doing this, and so it was like this cheesy cover-tune band that we were in, and we used to just get our kicks out of doing that, and then we just realized that you grow out of that whole 80s rock thing and you think, wow, I really enjoyed the therapeutic value of writing songs. And so we started just, we kind of stayed and wrote songs together. We didn’t really have a band. And then we just started to get into different kinds of music and stuff, like that, and I ended up, I just, I had to leave Lafayette. I got tired of, I like to write so I wanted to go on a vacation and I think my vacation is still going on.

Marc Allan: So, where did you go?

Shannon Hoon: I ended up moving to Los Angeles in, like, 1989. And I always kept in touch with Mike and all that. And I really kinda went out and I wasn’t really looking for a band, was the thing. When I moved out to Los Angeles, I was kinda just wanting to see it, and I was wanting to climb into writing. And I wanted to climb into writing about just traveling around, and I was just a victim of a lot of small town mentality as far as, like, the racist prejudice state of mind that inhabits a lot of small towns. And I needed to see why I didn’t want to be that way. And I think that my point of view was very, very narrow and I needed to broaden my horizons, and I needed to seek myself into a community that had, like, a little bit of culture and a little bit of, I went from, when I was in high school I was a very, very, very small-minded kid as far as anybody whose lifestyle, whether you be gay or whatever, I didn’t agree with it, but I never really found out why. And when I moved out to LA I realized that I wasn’t as prejudiced as what I thought I was. I was able to embrace a lot of people. I didn’t have to agree with it as far as my personal choice, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t understand it. And it was something that, as far as me as a human being, helped me grow more than anything was moving to Los Angeles and having so many different colors and creeds on my block, more so than I had ever come in contact with, from my roommate to the people next door. I had, like, Asians, Blacks, gays, everything surrounding me, and I think that finding the ability to adapt to all that helped me out as far as helping me grow up a bit.

Marc Allan: So it’s kind of funny, in a way, that you’re back.

Shannon Hoon: I think everybody kinda, I’m speaking obviously for me, but I think that the best thing for me was to move away, and one I stepped outside of my home, I was able to deal with home a little better. And I love the fact that I can still feel comfortable in my home town, and there’s not a lot of people that bug me, as far as coming in and ringing my door at three at the morning, I don’t have, a lot of people still don’t give a shit about what I’m doing, and I like that.

Marc Allan: Now, so, this thing that I was saying that Dave said, that maybe I’ve got completely wrong, so this is not right at all, I mean, you were just quietly going along and playing in bands–

Shannon Hoon: Well I wasn’t quietly, ever.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Shannon Hoon: I don’t think quiet ever fit in personally with me, at all. But I think, I mean, I always suffered from wanting, being somewhere and wanting to be somewhere else. I think sometimes that could be mistaken as what you’re saying. I was never satisfied, but sometimes it wasn’t, that wasn’t a bad thing for me. I’ve learned to deal with it, well, I struggle with it, but I’ve found a way to kinda ease the anxiety a bit. But I mean, I always want to do more. I’m never satisfied with what I’ve done. I want to do more. And I was an athlete all through high school, and as far as being a star athlete, that was something that maybe, a lot of people, because a lot of people knew me from Lafayette, they never knew my musical background at all as opposed to my athletic background. I pole vaulted, and played football, and I wrestled, and I did alright in each one and it was funny because I was looking through journaling career clippings of me pole vaulting and things like that, and it’s really funny because I still have that hunger inside of me that was just like, man, I can remember that. The competitive air that surrounded that, and I loved it. And it was like, I was never satisfied with the second place. And unfortunately that ended up being, actually, it turned out to be very frustrating. I couldn’t enjoy a game of Pinball without wanting to beat my opponent to the point where it wasn’t a recreational game of Pinball. I think I just wanted to get the most out of life. I think that anything that entails traveling and meeting different people and different cultures, and things like that. I think that’s what I enjoyed about going to Europe and taking trips to third-world countries where you go out. Maybe I take a lot for granted. I realize that about what I took for granted when I lived in Lafayette, and now I moved back home so I’m just kind of applying what I’ve seen and learned, trying to build a quiet home life there.

Marc Allan: That’s great. And I guess you had your earlier moments of rock stardom and getting into trouble and making headlines with various incidents, but you were pretty quiet the last years or so, and–

Shannon Hoon: Having a kid does that to you.

Marc Allan: Yeah, absolutely.

Shannon Hoon: I mean, I–

Marc Allan: There’s a lot less time to go out and do that.

Shannon Hoon: I mean, someone told me there’s a reason why, now. And I looked at him and said, you know what? For me there’s a reason why not. There’s a reason why not to do something.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Shannon Hoon: So, I mean, I think that, I look at the big picture a little more now as opposed to the small one, and this, I’m enjoying what we’re doing and at this point in time I would like to think that I have the energy to do it for a long time but I know that there’s a bigger picture, and I think that this is just a small part of it. So I’m just kinda enjoying it now, but obviously the world is revolving around my daughter. And I think that Lisa and I are trying to build a very good home for her, and I don’t think that me being in jail somewhere is the appropriate way to go about that.

Marc Allan: Yeah, funny how that works.

Shannon Hoon: And I was, man, some of my friends called me and they said, “Shannon, did you hear what Bob and Tom “said about your child?” And I’m thinking, I don’t care what anybody says about me, but don’t take it out, my daughter was like a week, not even a week old. And they were calling her hoo-blue-hoon. The air.

Marc Allan: How nice.

Shannon Hoon: Isn’t that horrible? Their element of humor is about the other thing that keeps, I dunno, I don’t really know. All I know is that I could never understand why they’d go, “This is Bob and Tom, and this is Journey on Q95!” This was just such a contrast. But, you know what? Maybe it’s part of the humor.

Marc Allan: Well, I don’t think so. I think they are trying to be so mainstream that, because they say, we’ve got the WFMS listener who’s gonna listen to Bob and Tom and you don’t wanna listen to a song that’ll turn them off and you don’t wanna play a song that’ll turn the easy listening guy off, and you don’t wanna, and it’s like, man, you start mass-marketing yourself that way, and pretty soon every song is No Rain, isn’t it?

Shannon Hoon: Yeah, no kidding. From the hits of the 90s! In 20 years that song is gonna haunt me.

Marc Allan: Yeah, can you ever see a day that you won’t be playing that song live?

Shannon Hoon: You know what, actually, we just started playing it live and I think that now, it’s gonna start being a lot more comfortable. Last time we played it was Woodstock and the other night was the first time we played it since then. And I think we just had to let it rest for a while. Now that you play it in the middle of, like, a bunch of other new songs it’s a little bit more comfortable. And when they request it out of every radio station we went to, when we do acoustic shows, it was like, that was the only thing that a lot of people wanted to hear so we started playing it first off, to get rid of the people who just came to hear that.

Marc Allan: Yeah, I saw the Rembrandts a couple of weeks ago and then they got the problem of having that Friends song, and–

Shannon Hoon: Oh, yeah.

Marc Allan: So they were playing it in the middle of the set and just getting it over with and I think maybe playing it first isn’t a bad idea. Just getting it over with.

Shannon Hoon: The Indigo Girls used to do that too with that Closer to Fine video.

Marc Allan: Mhm, mhm, yeah. That makes sense.

Shannon Hoon: Now. Listen to me, I’m so corrupted by this video age. It’s like, that Closer to Fine video. Instead of saying song, I said video.

Marc Allan: Yeah, and–

Shannon Hoon: That’s a lazy way of thinking it.

Marc Allan: And boy, I hate to ask this, but I know that people are gonna ask. The B-Girl, is that the end of her career? Has she had her 15 minutes of fame?

Shannon Hoon: I don’t know. But I know that that girl is gonna hate her parents one day. Why did you let me do this? Doing the video was okay but then she went out on her own, like, little B-Girl press tour, and it was funny, man. She was annoying as all get out, and her parents were even, like, twice as annoying. And I think if I wouldn’t have been off-the-record enhanced by acid, I would have fuckin’ thrown her to the cows, man. That girl is just, like, she wouldn’t shut up! Not that I leave too many gaps between words. I mean, this girl made me look like a mime.

Marc Allan: Well, that was the whole thing about the early successes. I looked at that and then I listened to their record and I said, this isn’t what this band is about at all. And people have just gotten the wrong, they think you’re the Spin Doctors or something.

Shannon Hoon: And they’ve got this whole hippie thing.

Marc Allan: Right.

Shannon Hoon: And I’m thinkin’, okay, well, I guess we didn’t do too much to dissuade anybody as far as, like, the way our appearance may have looked in the video, or some of the people we hung out with. You know what I just heard that’s really sick, which bothers me? With Timothy Leary. We just did the video Galaxie with him. He’s in the video with us, and we just found out he’s got prostate cancer and is dying.

Marc Allan: Oh, geez.

Shannon Hoon: Isn’t that sad? That guy was a real, I mean, man. What a little boy in a very, I mean, he seemed, he could relate to you no matter. I watched him talking with this young, little boy who was in the video, who played the elf in the video. The little, his apprentice. The wizard’s apprentice, whatever. He was just a 10 or 12 year old kid, and I was just watching Timothy Leary interact with him. And he was just such a kid himself! So young at heart!

Marc Allan: And you can imagine the revisionist’s history that’s gonna go out when he dies.

Shannon Hoon: Oh, God.

Shannon Hoon: It’s gonna be ridiculous. But, just a couple of quick things. When did you, you graduated from McCutcheon in–

Marc Allan: In ’85.

Marc Allan: ’85. And so–

Shannon Hoon: We got beat by Franklin Central in ’83 in the High School State Final Game.

Marc Allan: Uh-huh, and–

Shannon Hoon: I was 10, I was beat 17 to three by David Bridgeforth from Warren Central in my 1984 Summer State Wrestling Tournament.

Marc Allan: Wow, okay. Well, that’s–

Shannon Hoon: And Franklin Central High School’s gym, which was the worst because they had just previously whipped our ass in football. I was such a jock.

Marc Allan: That’s just so hard to imagine. I don’t know why. But it’s really kinda cool. And now you’ve got a whole different life and a whole different career, but, very funny. And so you’re about 28?

Shannon Hoon: I turned 28 this month.

Marc Allan: 28 this month, okay. So, okay, that’s great. And, anything else you want me to tell people, or?

Shannon Hoon: You know what? Just tell Bob and Tom I said hello and I hope they’re doing well. And I really cared for them. Here’s what I was thinking which really made me angry. This was the only thing that made me angry. What if, by chance, we would of had difficulties with the pregnancy? What if there would of been something wrong with our child? I think those are things that they should really think about before they, that’s why I’m saying, I don’t care, I put my own head on the chopping block. You don’t have to set it down there. And I shove, unfortunately, all five of my feet in my mouth. But I’m aware of this, so I have no problem when I’m attacked in any type of manner, at all. I’m used to it. I’m above being thoroughly affected by it, but when you start to talk about things like that, and here I, before we even had a child, one thing that, like, I look at capital punishment and I cannot say that people commit crimes against kids should just murder, are not, that is the one thing that I deem where capital punishment is appropriate. I don’t believe in anybody who has the gut to kill a child has the guts to offer anything to society. And that is the only thing, like, I believe in Amnesty International, but that’s their big hangup is the death penalty. I believe that 90% of what they’re about is so morally correct, and I believe it’s appropriate in third-world countries where people kill people for their political beliefs, but in America I think our judicial system is kinda a little more of a grip than South America. South American cities that we visited where people would walk around with fuckin’ machine guns in the street, in malls and thing, and I was just thinkin’ I was like, yeah, I can stomach a lot of things but when you start attacking children in any manner, I don’t care what it is, that’s something that I feel is so inappropriate. Don’t condemn my child because she’s my child.

Marc Allan: You know what I wanted to ask you, getting back to music for one quick second is, this record, and one of the things that the person who wrote the review for us criticized was your singing, and I think your singing is so much more interesting on this than, I’m getting a lot more from your voice, I mean, I’m getting a real wide range of sounds and such and I’m wondering if that’s just me as a listener or if you’re consciously doing that.

Shannon Hoon: You know what? I think after the first tour, to be honest with ya, I tore my vocal chords to pieces. And I think that, I was never, I always would go and consult a doctor to make sure that I wasn’t getting the throat nodules. And when I found out that I wasn’t, I was like, well, God, it sure feels like I do. And I’ve always been a fan of the raspy singer. I always loved that about Janis Joplin. And I think that a lot of people, it’s a love-hate thing. You either like it or you don’t. And I think that on this record, I think that because I was more apt to finding the conviction of believing of what I was singing about and the conviction of executing it, I think I really didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the singing proper way which is what I loved to, I don’t wanna be perfect. I don’t want to sing every line perfectly, pitch-wise, or whatever. I’m looking more for the feeling of satisfaction and I feel like if you have that, then whatever it sounds like is about as authentic as it can get, as far as if you’re trying to really capture the meaning of what you’re saying or what you’re singing, and I think that I’ve finally got my throat to the worn-out, damaged way that I’ve always wanted it to be, to be honest with you. I’m more comfortable now with the way I sing than I ever, I don’t feel insecure about it anymore. I don’t feel like I’m trying to sing something that I can’t sing and whereas, I mean, I can listen to the first record and I can hear the insecure person that I was before I was sure that I wanted to do this. When we made the first record we were like, wow, we have a career! And none of us wanted a career in anything. So all of a sudden, I have to go, shit, now we gotta go out and follow this thing that, you know, everybody in the band is into different things other than music, so it’s like, now we have this engulfing all of our time, it was like, well, I’m gonna have to get comfortable with doing this so I think after the course of time I’ve developed the voice that I have now which I feel on the record is, if you’re looking for someone with perfect pitch and perfect execution, then I’m not your guy! But I mean, I’m comfortable with it, and I’m, it’s someone’s opinion and they have a right to it, and there’s–

Marc Allan: I was just thinking of range. The first one, the first record, I thought, this is very Perry Farrell-like. It sounds like that. But then you listen to this and there’s a song that reminds me of Jon Anderson and Yes, and there’s a song that’s weird but it reminds me of Jose Feliciano. So it’s sort of, so you hit the smooth stuff and you hit the rough stuff and it was just, I just thought it was a more interesting range of stuff, so that’s, so, anyway, this is great and you’ve been more than kind with your time and I’ll see you–

Shannon Hoon: You know what? Great conversations are, they take the interview out of the interview, you know?

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Shannon Hoon: I mean, plus, with the kid thing I could talk to you all day about that.

Marc Allan: Yeah, I could do the same.

Shannon Hoon: Weird how I feel when you look into your child’s eyes, how you feel like the baby. And they take on the appearance of, like, an old human being, that’s about a million years old, who’s come back to see how you’re doing.

Marc Allan: Well the thing that your child will do, it’s just amazing, the things that’ll happen all of a sudden, I mean, when she starts to crawl. And one day I went out for a little while, I came back, my wife said, “Look at this!” And my daughter was crawling up the steps, which I just thought, oh my God, this is the end of the world, now we’re–

Shannon Hoon: I’m quttin’ my job!

Marc Allan: We are dead. She is gonna come down the stairs and just fall down the stairs and just, so you spend your life worrying about stuff like that, but when she–

Shannon Hoon: So sad!

Marc Allan: When she starts talking to you and when she starts walking around, and–

Shannon Hoon: How old are you?

Marc Allan: I am 36.

Shannon Hoon: And you have two children>?

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Shannon Hoon: Wow, good for you.

Marc Allan: One and one on the way, so.

Shannon Hoon: Man, that’s incredible. The calm demeanor is something that my child didn’t inherit from me.

Marc Allan: Yeah, but that’s hard. You’ll see things that just, I look at my daughter sometimes and I think, man, she just looks, I see me in her, which scares the shit out of me, because my wife is a hell of a lot better looking than I am, so, you don’t wanna see that. But you see things that she does and she picks up things that you do and say and you just go, oh my God, why those things? Why can’t she pick up my good habits? The other things.

Shannon Hoon: Nico looks like Lisa, and then when she gets mad she looks like me. The expression on her face, and her eyes and everything change into me, and it’s really horrible! Oh no!

Marc Allan: Oh, yeah. That’s the same thing that I experience, too. I just think, man, she gets mad, and that is me right there. The little body, little 30-pounder going nuts, and being stubborn as shit.

Shannon Hoon: That’s so funny.

Marc Allan: And that’s my traits.

Shannon Hoon: Well, Marc, it was a pleasure talking to you, sir.

Marc Allan: Same here.

Shannon Hoon: And if you can, come out the show when we’re there.

Marc Allan: Oh, I’ll be there.

Shannon Hoon: Alright!

Marc Allan: See you in a couple weeks.

Shannon Hoon: Come up and grab me by the elbow.

Marc Allan: Alright.

Shannon Hoon: Take care.

Marc Allan: See ya, bye.