Blind Melon guitarist Rogers Stevens reflects on 30th anniversary of debut album

Sep. 22—TUPELO — Thirty years ago, Los Angeles-based rock band Blind Melon released its self-titled debut album. The record went on to sell more than 4 million copies.

Everyone has heard the record's hit single "No Rain," but many may not realize three of the band's original members were from Mississippi.

Rogers Stevens, 52, Blind Melon's lead guitarist and a West Point native, is one of those three. He now lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, working as an attorney for the travel app Hopper but continues to play and record with the band.

One of the exceptions

Stevens didn't consider becoming a musician until he was a teenager. He'd listened to music on the radio, but that was the extent of it — until he went with a friend to a Van Halen concert at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis in December 1983.

"We sat in the very top row of the coliseum up in a haze, up where the clouds are, and I was just knocked out by it," Stevens said. "I'd never seen anything like it."

He got a guitar soon after his 14th birthday and played with Blind Melon bassist Brad Smith in a few bands in high school. There's a steep learning curve when it comes to playing guitar, Stevens said, which necessitated skipping school the maximum amount of days he was allowed without failing.

Stevens graduated from West Point High School in 1988 and moved with Smith to Los Angeles soon after. Once there, they recruited Glen Graham, a drummer from Columbus, to join the band, which also included rhythm guitarist Christopher Thorn of Pennsylvania, and was headed by lead singer Shannon Hoon of Indiana.

Both teens had worked at Bryan Foods in West Point to earn money for the move.

"We had a plan that we really didn't tell anybody, including our families," Stevens said. "We were very focused. We had a mission. I knew exactly what I was going to do since I was about 15 years old. I was directed like a missile. Nothing was going to stop me."

It wasn't until they arrived in California that Stevens realized just how lofty their goals were.

"Los Angeles is full of people who have the same dream," Stevens said. "And almost all of them fail. We saw that immediately in vast quantities of people."

Blind Melon was one of the exceptions.

Making the record

Having signed with Capitol Records, the band lived together in a house in North Carolina where they wrote songs in 1991.

Four or five of the songs were near complete by the writer when they brought them to the band — like "No Rain," written by Smith before the band was formed, and "Change," written by Hoon before leaving Indiana.

Songwriting was a collaborative process, with all members contributing. Some of the tunes on the band's debut are "Frankenstein songs," Stevens said, where one person contributed a verse, another wrote the chorus and so on. He had a strong part in writing several, including "Tones of Home," "Sleepyhouse" and "Holyman."

Some recording took place in North Carolina, but the bulk of the album was recorded with Rick Parashar, a producer who had previously worked with Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains, at London Bridge Studio in Seattle, Washington.

"We were kind of a different type of band because we were from a different place," Stevens said. "And we just had this sort of different flavor."

The Southern tinge in Blind Melon's music was unavoidable with three members hailing from the Magnolia State.

"We couldn't not play like that," Stevens said. "It just sort of came out that way. The place where we're from, the pace of existence there, that stuff gets deep in you."

There's no such thing as overnight success

"Blind Melon" was released on Sept. 22, 1992.

From the outside looking in, it may have appeared the band became an overnight success when the "No Rain" music video hit MTV.

But that's not how Stevens and his bandmates saw it.

"The reality is that we went out on the road for a year in a van," Stevens said. "We did like five or six loops around the United States in a freaking van, playing shows that were getting increasingly more full. We sold probably 150,000 records like that."

They had played hundreds of shows and spent night after night on the road watching the crowds grow larger with each passing day. They'd earned and enjoyed success. But there's no denying, "No Rain" pushed the band to new heights.

In 1993, just after the video was released, the band had a tour stop in St. Louis, Missouri. Looking out of his hotel room window at the street below, Stevens saw a massive line of people wrapped around the building and thought, "I wonder if the president is in town or something?"

They were there for Blind Melon.

The lasting influence of 'Blind Melon'

The band's eponymous debut wasn't an obvious hit record.

"We had some pretty weird arrangements, and it wasn't conventional," Stevens said. "You kind of had to dig around if you were going to find a hit on this record, but once it was, it was huge. And it still is."

The single "No Rain" is ubiquitous. Virtually everyone has heard it, even if they don't recognize the song by name.

"That song has gone past, 'Oh, that's a big hit song,'" Stevens said. "Because there are lots of big hit songs that aren't on the radio anymore."

Some songs reach "evergreen" status, and Stevens thinks "No Rain" is one of them.

"It always finds a new audience. People react to it. And we knew it," Stevens said. "Because when we played it live, even through that year when we weren't really selling records, people knew every word of that song. The crowd would sing it louder than the band."

What's next for Stevens and the band

Blind Melon is still making music, but work on a new album was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I had a ticket in my hand to leave like three days after the shutdown happened, to go out to Joshua Tree and finish this record," Stevens said. "We ended up releasing half of the songs over the last two years anyway."

The band plans to crank back up next year, Stevens said. In the meantime, he's written and recorded a solo record that he's in the process of mixing and mastering now.

He'd never sang on a record before, but found his voice during the pandemic.

"I sat outside every day for at least two hours and just sang," Stevens said. "I taught myself to sing by singing every song I could remember growing up, like the earliest songs I could remember on the radio riding around in the car with my mom. I learned hundreds of songs like this. I just recorded myself singing over and over, figuring it out."

With his recording know-how from three decades playing with Blind Melon, Stevens put together a home studio to make his album.

"I've had this lingering feeling that I haven't put out the records that I should've put out because of what happened to the band," Stevens said. "So I'm just going to do that. I'll be like the Grandma Moses of rock and roll or something, start my career late."

blake.alsup@djournal.com