Special Guest Blogger: Shannon Hoont

If you were a teenager or a young adult in the early 1990s, you knew the music of Blind Melon, our hit single 'No Rain', that one with the tap dancing bee girl, was everywhere.
I was a normal teenager, with a girlfriend, the occasionally run-in with the law, and enjoyed a bit of weed every now and again and thought i could be a musician.
I made a band called Styff Kytten and in 1990 LA was where the music scene was and it was at a Party that i found my bandmates and taking the name from a 1920's Blues Musician, Blind Melon was born.  
We began playing around LA and writing music and Capitol Records came around and offered a record contract and I got in touch with an old friend of my sister’s who had also moved to LA, Axl Rose, who asked me to sing backing vocals on the band’s 'Use Your Illusion' albums so next time you listen to 'The Garden', 'Live and Let Die', and 'November Rain', that's me singing in the background.
Hard Rock was not where i wanted Blind Melon to go though, we were not a rock or grunge band so we moved to North Carolina away from the influence of the hard rock scene in California and went down a more pseudo-psychedelic sound.
Rick Parashar, famous for producing Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, worked with us on our debut album and the single No Rain with the young girl dressed as a bee with was big on MTV and people were paying attention to Blind Melon and we opening for major acts like Guns N’ Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, and Soundgarden then the rock and roll lifestyle opened its enticing and dangerous doors to me.
During the next two years of touring i was fully into the rock star lifestyle, alcohol and substance misuse became a problem for me and ended up doing multiple stints in rehab and then went to record the second album and although grunge music was one of the most successful styles to emerge in decades, we were determined that Blind Melon was brave enough to be different regardless of whether or not that was what the world wanted which it turned out it didn't.
Our later singles and albums tanked but we went ahead with the tour anyway and the record company employed a drug counselor to help me through any difficult times but the counselor was fired after only one week, I decided that an all-night binge was the answer to my problems  and if my problem was being alive it did because i crept back to the tour bus and promptly died from a drug overdose.