Meeting Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon

On stopping things before they start

My friend and former colleague, Anne, has a newsletter featuring her writing and thoughts on creativity called Glisk* In a recent issue, she wrote about… me, and this newsletter. She wrote about how music can bend time. To me, that means how hearing music can put you in a time, or a place. My daughter Meredith talks with clarity about the first time she heard various songs. Where she was, what she was doing. All of this makes me think of… Blind Melon. All these years later I still remember this feeling. And the noise and the sweat.

One of the best shows I ever saw, and there are those who roll their eyes at this, was Blind Melon playing at Northwestern. My roommate freshman year was Jon R. (Side note, I have never lived with someone who wasn’t named Jo(h)n or Pam). Jon had gotten their CD for Christmas and we played it on repeat when he got back. So we were excited when they came to campus. We were right up front. The stage was less than a foot tall, and the ceilings were low so the band was right on top of us, rocking and sweating away in the tiny space.

Shanon Hoon, photographed by the great Danny Clinch.

It was still in heavy rotation in my room the next year, with a different Jon, Jon M. We would play it loud on Friday afternoons as we cleaned the room in advance of hosting parties under the disco ball of rm 121.

Years later, I was again excited to see them at Metro. I had a phone interview before the show but didn’t get a chance to actually meet Shannon Hoon. He’d just had a baby and was full of hope for the future.

Yet just weeks later, he died of a drug overdose while on that tour in New Orleans.

There are a million lessons here but all I can say is that it’s far far easier not to start something than it is to stop it. Shannon knew that and fought it, but in the end, it got to him. John Popper, the singer from Blues Traveler, talked about his own struggles and his band’s with addiction. His issues were with food and weight. But one of his band also had issues with drugs. “He went to New Orleans. That’s like if I went to live in a Burger King. It’s not going to end well.” New Orleans is many kinds of city, but largely a city of temptation.

Sadly, the interview I did with Shannon ran in some papers after he had died, so I wrote a follow-up obituary we could distribute quickly. A couple of years ago, I contributed to a kickstarter film about his life, from photographer Danny Clinch.

And I still listen to Blind Melon when I’m cleaning the house.

Here’s the I original piece wrote for CoverStory, which was an entertainment magazine I interned at while I was at Northwestern. It was way out in Des Plaines, which was a million miles from Evanston. In the mornings I would take the purple line downtown and then take the blue line back out almost to O’Hare. In the afternoons I’d hitch a ride home with my friend Wally who was also interning out that way. Sometimes he’d let me shift the gears in his little Honda, which is as close as I’ll ever come to driving stick.

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Shannon Hoon is no stranger to the criminal justice system, but he's got it all figured out now. He's had a lot of scrapes with the law. "I always seem to end up on the wrong side of the stick - literally!" he says from his hotel in Seattle, where he's checked in under the name Bob Evans. His most recent run in was in New Orleans where Blind Melon recorded their new album, Soup. While trying unsuccessfully to play moderator, he wound up in a fight with an drunken off-duty SWAT team member.

He was taken to a jail so cold that all he and the other prisoners did was try and conserve energy, not fight back or complain. "If I was to make a jail, that's how I'd do it," he says.

He's trying to put his past behind him, though. "I'm a new man now," he says, "I've come to realize that that type of behavior takes away from what I could really be learning and what I'm trying to do."

He also has some strong views on capital punishment which come through in songs like "Toes Across the Floor" ("Doesn't anybody feel that all these killers should be killed") and when discussing the subjects of "Skinned" and "Car Seat (God's presents)" both of which deal with famous murder cases. "Car Seat" is about Susan Smith, who was convicted of killing her children. "I don't believe that the world really has a place for people who kill children. I believe anybody who kills children should be put to death. There is nothing that can happen to anybody that can validate that type of scenario," says Shannon.

The driving force behind his views and his new, shaped-up image these days is Nico Blue Hoon, his new-born daughter whose ultrasound appears in the CD booklet.

Nico is the daughter of Shannon and his high school sweetheart, Lisa, with whom he has been together for 10 years. "We've been wanting to have a child for a long time but we had to wait until I stopped acting like one before we could think about having one," he says.

Have you stopped now?

"We have twins! One's just a little bit taller than the other."

Shannon's relationship with his parents has always been an important one in his life even if it has been unstable at times. For now though, his status with Nico is fairly common: "The relationship between her and I right now is just made up of me cleaning her butt and trying to keep mine out of trouble."