Change

from the LP Blind Melon, Capitol Records, 1992



By all reputable and official accounts, this was the very first complete song that Shannon Hoon ever composed; he wrote it in the late ‘80s while he was still living in his native Lafayette, Indiana and fronting a band called Styff Kitten (nice!). I spent a brief tenure in Indiana as a young man, flunking out of a small college, so I can attest to the fact that there is absolutely fuck-all going on there except corn and soybeans; thus, Hoon’s decision to cut out for Los Angeles in pursuit of his musical dreams was a practical and necessary one---not to mention, he had apparently rankled the Lafayette police enough to be facing some real trouble had he stuck around. He found himself adrift in the ocean of big hair & leather pants which dominated the Sunset Strip during that time period, so it was surely a stroke of good fortune, or fate, that in a town of that size Hoon managed to meet four other musicians with similar semi-rural backgrounds (ala Mississippi & Pennsylvania), and who shared his passion for classic rock acts such as the Dead, Zeppelin, Skynyrd & the Allmans. The story is that Hoon pulled out an acoustic guitar and played “Change” for guitarist Roger Stevens and bassist Brad Smith the first time he met them at some house party, and it was convincing enough for them to inquire if he wanted to join their group. While the band was busy misfiring under some bad juju which wound up in the shelving of their initial EP, Shannon went about looking up another fellow Lafayette, Indiana ex-pat who just happened to be the biggest rock star in the world at that point, one Mr. Axl Rose; Hoon’s older sister had been friends with Rose in high school, & the two hit it off so well that you can hear Shannon singing backing vocals on a handful of tracks off of Guns’ Use Your Illusion I & II albums! Although this, their debut album, sold poorly for almost a year after its release, everything changed when a certain infamous video featuring a cute tubby girl in a bumblebee costume hit MTV’s airwaves in the fall of ’93; the rest, as they say, is history. Funny thing about growing up in a smaller area is that you pretty much have to go looking for trouble, but when you’re living in a big city and existing as a rock star, well, that trouble sure comes looking for you; sadly, it wound up taking Shannon Hoon’s life while on tour in the fall of 1995. Many people mistakenly assume that he died of a heroin overdose, I suppose due to that being the more familiar route with musicians, but he actually blew up his heart during a cocaine binge after a bad show. I know more than one ex-junkie who has told me that smoking crack was far harder for them to give up than either cigarettes or the needle---it’s no coincidence that rats will continue to self-administer cocaine, even after they have convulsions, until they die. I do not think that Shannon Hoon either wanted to nor expected to die that night, having just welcomed his first child into the world only months prior to his passing; that being said, the lyrics to this, his very first song, became harrowingly prophetic in light of the sorrowful ending to his battle with addiction, “…and oh, as I fade away, they'll all look at me and say, they'll say, ‘Hey look at him and where he is these days’; when life is hard, you have to change…when life is hard, you have to change…” That damn mandolin always encourages the tears from my eyes, and I know I’m not alone in wishing over and over again, almost every time I listen to Blind Melon’s tunes, that he could have found the strength to take his own advice---admittedly, often the hardest thing for us to do in life.