Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 25, 1994 TAG: 9402250348
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Where we dismembered the Bee Girl," explained guitarist Rogers Stevens.
Instead, Rolling Stone opted for a cover shot of Stevens and his band mates all serious and squatting - and buck naked. (Conveniently, the pose obstructed anything too revealing.)
Nevertheless, the band wasn't happy. The band wanted the Bee Girl, chopped up, bleeding and butchered.
To understand why, you must understand the Bee Girl and what she represents to Blind Melon, who play Radford University on Saturday night. Opening is the Meat Puppets and Alice Donut.
The Bee Girl has a long history.
If you have watched MTV at all in the last year, you have probably seen her. She is the chubby, tap-dancing girl dressed up like a bee in the band's "No Rain" video. She also graces the cover of the group's only album.
She has a real name, two names actually. There are really two Bee Girls.
The original Bee Girl - the one on the album cover - was Georgia Graham, the sister of Blind Melon's drummer Glen Graham. The photograph of Georgia in her bee costume was taken years ago, before a tap dancing class.
Christopher Thorn, one of the band's guitarists, spotted the photo in Graham's family scrapbook, and the band agreed that it would make the perfect album cover.
Then, Stevens, the band's other guitarist, suggested using the Bee Girl in the video for the band's song, "No Rain."
Ten-year-old actress Heather DeLoach portrayed the video Bee Girl, the rejected little outcast who looks so sad and lonely until she discovers a field full of frolicking Bee People just like her.
The Bee Girl and MTV changed everything.
By last summer, the Bee Girl video was in heavy rotation. Blind Melon's debut album, which had been released eight months before and had been selling poorly, suddenly shot up the charts. In five weeks, it sold a million copies.
To the band, the Bee Girl was both a blessing and a curse. She was largely responsible for the group's success, but it was a humbling success. The Bee Girl underscored the power of MTV and the reality that often it is the video that makes the band - not necessarily the music.
The song "No Rain" had nothing to do with Bee Girls or Bee People or even bees.
In other words, without the Bee Girl, Blind Melon would be just another obscure rock band with a peculiar name. In other words, without the Bee Girl, Blind Melon would be nothing.
So, perhaps the group's hostility toward the Bee Girl is understandable. She is a symbol of everything the group disdains about the music business.
Mutilating her on the cover of a national magazine seemed somehow appropriate, almost therapeutic. Guitarist Stevens said in a telephone interview last weekend that the idea was to parody a famous Beatles album cover that has the Fab Four dressed in bloodied butcher smocks, holding meat cleavers, headless dolls and slabs of beef.
Blind Melon simply would have substituted the beef and the dolls with dismembered body parts of the Bee Girl.
"Of course, Rolling Stone is the safest magazine in the world," Stevens said.
It went with Blind Melon in the buff - a less grisly alternative, sure, but arguably no more pleasant.
The cover wasn't very original, either. The Blind Melon issue was one of four different Rolling Stone covers last year that featured naked people on the cover. Stevens complained that the pose said nothing about the band.
The whole experience left him sour.
"I could give a [expletive] about that sort of thing," he said.
Stevens heaped on the same attitude when asked about the band's connection to Guns N' Roses.
Blind Melon and Guns N' Roses share the same management team. Before the Bee Girl album, Blind Melon's lead singer, Shannon Hoon, became semi-famous for appearing in one of the band's videos. Hoon and Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose also come from the same hometown in Indiana.
Last year, Blind Melon opened for Guns N' Roses when the band played in Roanoke.
Stevens doesn't remember that show.
"Thank God," he said.
His comment shouldn't come as a surprise. Blind Melon, leery of becoming too closely associated with the notorious hard rock band, has worked to distance itself from Guns N' Roses.
The connection - in music industry circles at least - certainly helped Blind Melon get noticed. But musically, the two bands shouldn't be compared.
Blind Melon is closer to grunge than hard rock, more Pearl Jam than Guns N' Roses.
The band came together in Los Angeles in 1990. Guitarist Stevens and bassist Brad Smith had migrated there from their hometown, West Point, Miss. Lead singer Hoon arrived from Lafayette, Ind. Christopher Thorn came from Dover, Pa., and drummer Glen Graham came from Columbus, Miss. All of them are in their mid-20s.
The curious Blind Melon moniker was lifted from a nonsensical phrase Smith's father often used to describe his deadbeat neighbors.
Amazingly, it took only a week for the band to attract interest from the record labels.
At the time, the group had worked up only a few songs.
They were enough, however, to land a record deal with Capitol Records.
Coincidently, the record deal came just when Hoon shot the Guns N' Roses video. The exposure from the video suddenly made Hoon and Blind Melon an even hotter commodity. Capitol pressured the group to quickly work up enough songs to release an album.
Los Angeles didn't cooperate. "It was a plastic environment," Stevens explained.
So, the band moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., for six months to rehearse and write songs. The group then traveled to grunge mecca Seattle to record. It has been on the road ever since.
Work on a second album has been delayed while the band continues to milk its debut for all it is worth. Stevens said the band should be back in the studio this spring, and he promises that those sessions will yield a wholly new sound for Blind Melon.
And you can bet, no Bee Girl.
"After this is done, we're moving way beyond," he said.
BLIND MELON: at Radford University's Dedmon Center, Saturday, 8 p.m. $14. Meat Puppets and Alice Donut open. 831-5324.
by CNB