BrianJarrett.com

I was listening to Blind Melon today at work and it finally hit me that Shannon Hoon was dead. I guess I get a little upset when my musical role models do something stupid like overdose on heroin or shoot themselves in the head. It’s not that I had a personal relationship with any of them but these people did influence me musically and probably personally. It’s weird, I remember when I heard that he’d died; my friend Scott Robinson told me. It was October 21, 1995 and my band was mixing down our compilation CD for Cave Records. I don’t remember reacting to it much then or even in the years that followed. That’s strange because, as I said, it usually affects me a bit more.

Actually I saw Blind Melon live in Radford, VA with Scott Robinson, Carl Lucas and Shaun Fox. It was an awesome show, actually my first concert. This was in February of 1994. Shaun’s sister went to school in Radford and her boyfriend was the guy who set up all the shows there at the Deadmon Center so Shaun was able to get backstage. Supposedly he was supposed to be “working” but I don’t think he did too much work when it was all said and done. I still remember when that show started; the band walked out and then Shannon Hoon walked on stage. I can’t remember which song they opened with but when it started the crowd pushed so hard that we all fell down. It was actually a bit scary until we got on our feet. Shaun said that when Hoon walked past him he could actually smell him (Hoon was kind of a hippie and didn’t really bathe that much from what I understand).

So, fast forward to ten years after his death and I’m sitting and work listening to the debut album, an album I’d listened to probably 500 times before. I decide to look Hoon up on the Internet and I find his grave site. That’s what affected me so much and made me want to actually post something about it. Too often these self-destructive, drug-abusing lifestyles are painted as sexy and desirable. This has been a problem in rock and roll since the beginning really. I don’t know exactly how to describe it but the feeling I got when I saw those pictures was eerie. I think it’s because ten years of perspective have changed the way I look at things a bit. I’m looking back now, ten years later at this guy who was on top of the world and was trying to get off drugs but obviously couldn’t. He was a talented songwriter, had a great band with great success and had a newborn daughter but in an instant it was gone, replaced with what you see below.

This is a picture of the cemetary where Hoon is buried. For some reason this struck me as sad and eerie at the same time:

Cemetary

Here are a couple pictures of his grave:

Grave

Grave

I wonder if he would have actually realized that this is where he would end up at age 28 if he would have made the same choices. His daughter is now ten years old and will never know her father. He’ll never know his daughter as well. I’m not banking on them being reunited one day either; that’s highly unlikely. I think that he thought what most of us think, that he could handle it and it won’t prove fatal in the end.But what if he knew that he would end up in that cemetary as a young man? That’s even creepier. Reading some of the lyrics it seems that he might have had some glimpse. We all know that we’re going to die and that theme makes it into our artistic work quite often; it’s when one dies earlier than expected that we start to see the foreboding nature of the references. We saw that with Kurt Cobain (”look on the bright side, suicide”) and countless others.

Hoon tried unsuccessfully to shake his demons but they caught up with him in the end. Is the high worth it? Is it worth giving up everything you really love and ending up alone and dead, six feet underground, while everyone picks up the pieces and continues on without you? Of course not. Hoon, like so many others I think, underestimated how dangerous a path he was on and, end the end, he fell, and this is where he lies.

Unfortunately he won’t be the last.