I try not to let myself think to much about some of the
might-have-beens in music. A lot
of great people left us way to early.
In the 90’s alone the names Cobain, Nowell, Wood, and Buckley come to
mind right away, but I’m sure there are others. All we got is the few works they left us. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon is no
exception.
Blind
Melon technically put out 2 studio albums their self-titled and Soup. If you’re not familiar with Blind Melon
then they wrote that song No Rain that still gets extensive airplay on
alternative stations today. That
single helped catapult the album to #3 on the 200. If that’s all you’ve heard of them then there’s a lot you’re
missing out on.
Shannon
Hoon, though I can’t speak much for his character, was a gifted songwriter with
a voice that yearned and ached in a way that very few can. When he left in late 1995 he took with
him hopes of any new material.
These guys had released their first full length less then three years
earlier, and now he was gone, and the band soon followed. When the smoke cleared all that was left was Nico: a handful of unreleased and unfinished stuff named after Hoon's newborn daughter.
In
the opening track, The Pusher, the band does a sudo-cover of the Steppenwolf
song. The direction they choose to
take is a bit different from the original, for instance they change a lot of
the lyrics, and add a banjo part. The most striking change, however,
is the way Hoon, singing in his weak desperate voice, sounds against the growing,
animalistic voice of Steppenwolf ‘s John Kay. If Kay’s character is angry then Hoon’s is on his last leg,
which is made even more serious by the circumstances of the album.
Along with the other songs in this
album (including a John Lennon cover) this posthumous album is pretty solid,
and by no means a last ditch effort to cash in on the hype. Maybe we’ll never know what Blind Melon
could have been, but this is what they are…and it’s awesome.
No comments:
Post a Comment