Interview: Shannon Hoon, Blind Melon

TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

"I can't really pick what song I like the best or shit like that. It's not that simple to me, man. It's more like a collage of moods," answers BLIND MELON frontman, Shannon Hoon, on the line from Seattle.

He's right, as the band exude a refreshing, loose-structured, jazz-tinged, mellow music encompassing folk and late '60s acid rock.

Jazz is an essential element.

"The whole jazz thing comes from Glen [Graham]. He's not like a rock n' roll drummer. He's into people like MAX ROACH, this jazz drummer. He has shows of him that are the spotlight of what's really going on, as opposed to that rock show shit. So, when Glen joined he added a new ingredient to adopt and make into a musical whole."

At the heart of this 'musical whole,' integrity's equally important.

"Yeah, I find that just as I therapeutically release myself through our music, I also release myself by conversation."

At the time of this conversation, the band were coming down from their American tour. Still, the guy sounds very up and spilling over the brim with enthusiasm and sensitivity, albeit with the help of mind-expanding substances. And on he raves.

"Even when touring starts wearing me down, there's one thing that I always enjoy, and that's when I meet people from different walks. And we've met through the common bond of using music as a therapeutic tool to make it through the day, to get to what's really important, to get to the big picture."

It's somehow apt that their music goes off on tangents, as he starts talkin' drugs before I bring it up.

"I hear all this 'Just say no to drugs.' Fuck that! I've been able to remove myself from myself, to look at myself and realise a lot of places where I have a lot of problems, because of drugs. LSD gave me the power to just do that, deal with it and understand it. It's totally up to the individual on what you can be constructive or destructive with."

Some of you will be aware of Hoon's involvement with GUNS N' ROSES, singing back-up on Don't Cry with ole Indiana Red. And Hoon, like Axl, hails from Lafayette. How does he see the bad boy press portrayal of his buddy?

"You sell magazines when you make the guy look bad," he says acidly. "In my association with Axl, the only thing I can say about him is that he's a very giving human being. The mediator between what Axl's doing and the people he's trying to reach is a distorted human being who feeds off bullshit!"

Mark Liddell
Riff Raff
July 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!

5 comments:

Unknown14 January 2011 at 16:45
Very disturbing reading a past story about a guy who says drugs helped him. In only two years he would be placed in the ground because of them. How ironic and sad. Everything is not alright. You can be sympathetic and responsible for others feeling and the importance of life without the help of a mind numbing substance.
Colin Liddell21 January 2011 at 00:25
Fair comment considering what happened to him, but there are also a lot of rock n' roll survivors who abuse their systems but continue to walk the Earth.
Anonymous24 July 2011 at 00:19
also acid is quite a bit different than heroine.
Williampson23 September 2011 at 16:53
LSD is not a mind numbing substance. And it didn't kill Shannon, cocaine did.
Unknown15 June 2012 at 14:10
does it really matter what killed him. He was lyrical genius who moved everyone he performed in front of. Its easy to bash someone that is not alive, or in your presence.