Listen to the Shannon Hoon interview

By Marc D. Allan

Shannon Hoon says he “always suffered from being somewhere and wanting to be somewhere else.”

During his years at McCutcheon High School in Lafayette in the mid-1980s, he wanted to leave small-town Indiana. So he moved to Los Angeles and, eventually, joined a band.

When that band, Blind Melon, scored a massive hit single with No Rain, and its self-titled debut album sold more than 2 million copies, the singer with the rough, high-pitched voice and his bandmates took time off.

“We wanted to let the No Rain thing go away and we wanted to go away,” he says. “We wanted people to just forget about us.”

Now Blind Melon is back with a new album, Soup, and a tour that will bring the group to the Murat Temple’s Egyptian Room tonight. And Hoon, 28, who has moved back to Lafayette, probably would rather be at home with his girlfriend, Lisa, and their 10-week-old daughter, Niko Blue.

“I was never satisfied,” Hoon says, “but that wasn’t a bad thing for me. I want to do more. I’m never satisfied with what I’ve done.”

A “jock” in high school

Look in the McCutcheon High School yearbooks from 1983 to 1985 and you’ll notice that about Hoon. He wanted to be everywhere. And he was: football team (punter, defensive back); track team (pole vaulter);  wrestling team. Nine varsity letters in all.

“I was such a jock,” Hoon says. “I couldn’t enjoy a game of pinball without wanting to beat my opponent.”

Hoon participated in music clubs, pep club – even one year in euchre club. His classmates voted him class flirt and class trend-setter. (Ironically, not “most musical.”)

Jake Burton, the athletic director at McCutcheon, remembers Hoon as “a little ornery, but for the most part a good kid.” “He was a great competitor – small in stature but big in heart,” Burton says. “He was stubborn and bull-headed and all those things that at times make you a really good athlete.”

After a little prodding, Burton recalls a confrontation he and Hoon had one day when Hoon was visiting with friends on the baseball team during practice. Burton says he tried to shoo Hoon away.

Hoon’s response? He was ready to fight.

“He had either a brown or black belt in karate,” Burton says. “I knew that. So I was smart enough not to take any jabs at him.”

Scrapes with the law

Burton figured Hoon would end up being hugely successful – or in jail.

Right on both counts. Hoon has had his rock-star scrapes with the law. He was arrested once for urinating on a stage in Vancouver, another time for punching and kicking a security guard and police at the American Music Awards, yet another time for being drunk and disorderly while the band was in New Orleans to record Soup.

Now, he says he’s calmed down.

“A kid does that to you,” Hoon says by phone from Toronto, where Blind Melon was getting ready to tape an “unplugged” show for Canada’s equivalent of MTV. “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 it.”

Those antics didn’t hurt his standing in the music world, where the notoriety made him a personality in an otherwise anonymous band. Until then, Blind Melon was better known for the “Bee Girl” – the pudgy pre-teen who danced in the No Rain video dressed as a bee.

“(Shannon) is a rock star in every sense of the word,” Blind Melon drummer Glen Graham said in an interview last year. Hoon started cultivating his future back in high school, where he played popular hits in “cheesy cover bands,” including one called Stiff Kitten. He grew out of that and realized “I really enjoy the therapeutic value of writing songs.”

In 1989, Hoon left Lafayette for a vacation that took him to Los Angeles.

“I just wanted to see it,” he says. “I was wanting to write. I wanted to write about traveling around. I wanted to get the most out of life. Anything that entails traveling and meeting different people and seeing different cultures, that’s what I enjoy.”

Hoon thought of himself in those days as small-minded. Los Angeles opened his eyes to different people and cultures. It provided a personal grounding.

As he sang in the song Tones of Home: “All my friends patronize me and they say, `Yo, hey boy!’ Have you found what you’re looking for?”

No Rain too successful

He had, in many ways. Blind Melon burst on the music scene in 1992 with a disc that contained “basically the first songs we had ever written and recorded together.”

Those songs, especially the loose, neo-hippie sounds of No Rain, caught on and kept Blind Melon on the road for nearly two years. The longer the group stayed on the road, the more it played No Rain, the more unhappy the members became.

“When you start to dislike something you love to do, there’s something going wrong somewhere,” Hoon says. “We were catering to the success of a single. You want to do it because people want to see you play and you want to play. But sometimes you have to sit back and evaluate whether it’s affecting you personally. 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.”

After Blind Melon had wrung as much as possible from the debut disc, the band members went away for about a year. Hoon wound up moving to Lafayette, where he, Lisa and their daughter now have a house.

The time off gave Hoon a chance to recharge. And Nico Blue has given him an entirely new focus. One of the most affecting songs on Soup is New Life, in which Hoon describes how he felt when Lisa told him she was pregnant:

‘Cause now she’s telling me she’ll have my baby

And a faithful father I am to be

When I’m looking into the eyes of our own baby

Will it bring new life into me?

It has. Hoon could talk about his daughter for hours. He and Lisa are talking about buying a mobile home so they can travel together during the tour.

“I would be lying if I said I was 100 percent enthusiastic about being out on tour right now,” he says. “It’s hard to be away.”