Blind Melon are most famous for arguing, around 1992 or so, that slightly overweight girls in bee costumes are people too, and that they might, after an initial period of disgrace, find acceptance and brotherhood. The video for the band’s hit single/single hit “No Rain”, in which this thesis was advanced, is more famous by far than the song itself, and the song is more famous by far than the band, whose hippie aesthetic (long hair, naked Rolling Stone cover shoot, jittery guitar sound that didn’t flirt with jam-band so much as take it home for a disconnected series of one-night stands) wasn’t right for the grungy early ’90s; they disbanded in 1999, three years after releasing their final album and four years after the death of their lead singer, Shannon Hoon. To listen to Blind Melon’s three albums now is to imagine an alternate 1990s in which mainstream bands name-dropped Neil Young and Led Zeppelin instead of Husker Du and the Pixies: Blind Melon, Soup, and Nico are imperfect albums, meandering and a little superficial; but that’s why you can imagine them succeeding.

Blind Melon had more than one moment of bright, sloppy guitar-pop grace. “Paper Scratcher” balances frenetic, mewled verses with a slower, deeply satisfying chorus, and the moments of clarity with which Hoon’s acquired-taste vocals are peppered include lines like “on the day I die, thank God my soul will be released,” which is the kind of thing you can imagine being no fun at all in a Smashing Pumpkins song. It’s a high point of the album, but it’s not unrepresentative of the rest (not in the way, say, “No Rain” is): Blind Melon is rambling, slightly overlong, and full of chugging, wailing Southern rock—its closest early-’90s sibling is probably that period’s R.E.M.—and the album’s fifty-five minutes contain not a single deviation from ’70s classicism. It’s kinda cool, actually.

The band’s second record, Soup, was drug-drenched, dense, loud, strange, still too long, and did not contain “No Rain.” It was not successful. Critics who had slammed the first album for being a pale imitation of the ’70s-rock heroes it invoked had a field day with this one—”There’s a difference between Blind Melon and the empty riffs and cosmic slop of Yes,” read Rolling Stone’s review. “Blind Melon don’t have any riffs.” But nestled between “Soup”’s craggy, mountainous songs are valleys of true strangeness: “Skinned,” a banjo-driven warble reminiscent of one of those White Album tracks you keep forgetting exist, is in its brevity and amiable dementia almost a parody of the standard-issue hard-rock song about a serial killer, and Hoon’s mid-song declaration that he’s “caught here in the middle making rib cages into coffee tables / I’m just makin’ them into coffee tables” suddenly recalls Isaac Brock at his most weirdly frivolous. After Hoon’s death, the remaining band members cobbled together Nico from vocal tracks left in the vaults; the album’s most immediately appealing moment is “No Rain (Ripped Away Version),” a deconstructed death-rattle mockery of the band’s hit. It lacks the deft sunniness of the original, and pushes the listener’s tolerance for Hoon’s high-register wail dangerously far, but its ramshackle, woozy feel—the sound of a band getting really, really sick of a song—has an alienated charm that’s hard to deny.

Blind Melon were never a great band, and Shannon Hoon’s classic-rock fetish was never enough to make a great album. But worse bands have been remembered as better, merely by dint of being in the right place at the right time. Blind Melon were firmly in the wrong time, though they might have been in the right place—it’s hard to imagine an ostentatiously ’70s-oriented Los Angeles band not being successful, say, today. Or in the 1970s. Not sure how well the bee thing would play.

[buy stuff here]