Blind Melon – No Rain

This 1993 song has a sixties feel to it. The lead singer Shannon Hoon did a great job on this track.

Blind Melon bass player Brad Smith wrote this song before he formed the band. He had moved from Mississippi to Los Angeles, where he fell into a down period. He said that the song is about not being able to get out of bed and find excuses to face the day when you have nothing. At the time he was dating a girl who was going through depression  and for a while he told himself that he was writing the song from her perspective. He later realized that he was also writing about it himself.

The video was very popular. It has a very intriguing video featuring a girl dressed in a bee costume. The bee girl, Heather DeLoach, was 10 years old when she starred in it, creating one of the most enduring images on MTV.

The concept for the video was inspired by the Blind Melon album cover, which features a 1975 photo of Georgia Graham, the younger sister of Blind Melon drummer Glenn Graham. DeLoach was the first to audition for the role, and because she resembled Graham’s sister so much, director Samuel Bayer (who also directed Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) chose her.

This song peaked at #1 in Canada, #20 in the Billboard 100, #17 in the UK, and #15 in New Zealand in 1993.

Blind Melon’s songs, were credited to the entire band even when one member wrote most of the song, as Brad Smith did with this one. Brad says that even though he wrote it, lead singer Shannon Hoon took it to a new level with his vocal.

The video made #22 on MTV’s Greatest Videos Ever Made countdown at the end of 1999.

From Songfacts

The bee girl parlayed the role into a credible acting career, appearing in the movie Balls of Fury, a remake of the Shirley Temple film A Little Princess and the TV shows ER and Reno911. She got married in 2017. DeLoach recalled to MTV News her audition for the bee girl: “They told me Sam didn’t look at any other tapes. I went in with my hair in braids and wearing those chunky glasses, because they said to look nerdy. My mom said we had to find some glasses before we went in, so we ran to a local mall right before the audition and bought them, and Sam liked them so much they’re the same ones I used in the video.”

This was a hit on a variety of formats. It reached #1 on the AOR (classic rock), modern rock and metal charts.

The first performances of this song were on Venice Beach, where Brad Smith would do his busking. “That’s where the lyric and the song was inspired from, is just having to write songs,” he said. “Then being in the state of mind I was in and having to come up with material to go play down on the beach for change. I played that song on the beach for change for over a year before Shannon Hoon actually joined the band and really made that song a hit.”

The band didn’t always appreciate this song. When they opened some shows for The Rolling Stones in 1994, they left it off their setlist. Their tour manager, Paul Cummings explained: “They had become one of those bands that hate their hit – at least at that point. I couldn’t understand it, but it’s not my call. That probably would have been the only song that crowd would have recognized.”

A hallmark of Brad Smith’s lyrics a feeling of melancholy, which doesn’t always match the music he puts to the song. He describes the music to this song as a “jaunty little happy halfway island beat,” which sounds like “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” He explained: “A lot of my songs come from a darker place. And if you just met me walking down the street, you’d say, ‘Oh, you’re such a happy guy, Brad. Why the dark songs?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ For me, it just has more meaning if you can get inside someone’s soul and identify with them on a heavier level and try to connect with them on that level. Because when you’re sad and you’re down, you’re the most vulnerable, and you feel the most alone.”

In 1993, Heather DeLoach reprised her role as Bee Girl in the Weird Al Yankovic video for “Bedrock Anthem” (a parody of “Give It Away” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers).

The inertia described in this song sounds typical of the stoner ennui like that described in “Because I Got High,” but you can blame this one on the herb. “I wasn’t even on drugs or drinking,” Brad Smith told us. “It was just a tough point in my life. And the cool thing about that song, I think a lot of people do interpret those lyrics properly and can connect with it on that level, where ‘I don’t understand why I sleep all day and I start to complain that there’s no rain.’ It’s just a line about, I’d rather it be raining so I can justify myself by laying in the bed and not doing anything. But it’s a sunny day, so go out and face it.”

In 2003, this was used in a commercial where a girl in a hot dog costume meets a guy in a Pepsi costume. Love blooms.

Pearl Jam has a song called “Bee Girl” that they first performed in 1994. With lyrics like, “Bee girl, you’re gonna die. You don’t wanna be famous, you wanna be shy,” the track was seen as a very accurate warning to Shannon Hoon that he was on a path of destruction. The song can be found on their Lost Dogs rarities album.

In 2016, the pop singer Mandy Jiroux released a song called “Insane” using many elements of “No Rain,” including the signature riff. Her song has similar but different lyrics, for instance:

All I can say is that my life’s not really plain
I like dancing in puddles that gather rain

In places where Shannon Hoon sang “no rain,” Jiroux substituted “insane.”

This prompted Blind Melon to file a lawsuit using the same lawyer who won big bucks for Marvin Gaye’s estate in the “Blurred Lines” case. Had Jiroux simply covered the song, it wouldn’t be an issue, but Blind Melon claimed that she created a “derivative work” that requires licensing.

The suit is unusual in that the plaintiff is trying to prove that the defendant didn’t make the song similar enough.

This song was featured in the 2004 comedy movie Without A Paddle.

No Rain

All I can say is that my life is pretty plain
I like watchin’ the puddles gather rain
And all I can do is just pour some tea for two
And speak my point of view but it’s not sane
It’s not sane

I just want someone to say to me, oh
I’ll always be there when you wake, yeah
You know I’d like to keep my cheeks dry today
So stay with me and I’ll have it made

And I don’t understand why I sleep all day
And I start to complain that there’s no rain
And all I can do is read a book to stay awake
And it rips my life away but it’s a great escape
Escape, escape, escape

All I can say is that my life is pretty plain
You don’t like my point of view, you think that I’m insane
It’s not sane, it’s not sane

I just want someone to say to me, oh
I’ll always be there when you wake, yeah
You know I’d like to keep my cheeks dry today
So stay with me and I’ll have it made, I’ll have it made, I’ll have it made
Oh, no, no, you know, I really wanna, really gonna have it made
You know, I’ll have it made

…

Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player.

43 thoughts on “Blind Melon – No Rain”

  3. that bee girl lives on in 90s trivia history! The song wore thin on me a bit because of overplay, but it was fairly good. They might have become much more than a one-hit wonder if not for Hoon’s early and unfortunate demise. Which reminds me of something off their topic– I watched a doc on Terry Kath of Chicago (speaking of stars who died young) this weekend, called ‘In Search of Terry Kath” I think. Pretty interesting, I never gave a lot of thought to the guitars in Chicago, but he was quite a talent.

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    1. Oh he was great…Hendrix really liked him also I believe…when you get praise from him…that is a good thing. I’ll have to check that out…just a sad thing. Chicago would have sounded much different with him.

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      1. that was one thing they mentioned in it, Jimi saw him play in the early days of Chicago (or CTA then) and said the guy was better than he was on guitar. I’m told one of my sweetie’s older brothers (the rather obnoxious one) played guitar as a teen and young man and was always, always raving about Terry Kath back in the early-70s.

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      2. Yes and it’s odd he was in a horn based band…You can’t tell by some of their hits but I’ve heard some album tracks where he really wails.

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      6. I know…I said that on purpose like huh? as in memory… After I did that…I thought about my strange sense of humor and I thought…she is really going to think I meant it.

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      7. I get your humor. Heh. The one word response in a comment section, not so much. Not enough context. And, WP on your phone does not reflect who is talking to who very well nor does it make it easy to get back to comments. I get app errors all the time, trying to get back to a conversation. At least the Reader tells you who is talking to who.

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      8. It must be more problems with androids…I hardly ever get an error on my iphone for some reason…in the comment section…it looks basically like the right hand side of the pane on a computer.
        I will not post from my phone though.

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      9. I guarantee that there are Android issues. Apple seems to make a better phone but, GEEZUS the cost…and don’t get me started on the “throttling down” I read about to force owners to buy new phones.

        I don’t know what language Apple uses for phones but, Android/WP uses Java.

        I tried posting from my phone…twice. Never again.

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      10. It’s about the same cost when you factor in the time. I had my IPHONE 6 for around 4-5 years. I know co-workers who go through 4 androids during that period…but I get what you are saying

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  5. Great record, i heard it first on one of my Florida theme park holidays and bought the cd single in the UK when I got back. So sad when Hoon died I felt they had promise and the song became poignant. Drugs are such a problem for people in high pressure jobs with too much money. Especially the music biz.

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  6. Oh, man, I know that song – great tune! I didn’t recognize the title. I also never watched MTV when it still was a music channel, mostly because I didn’t have access.

    I really only started to watch music videos when I came to the U.S. to study in 1993. My landlady had VH1 as part of her cable line-up and generously allowed me and the other students who shared the house with her to use the TV that was in the living room. I did so frequently in the evening. I also dug VH1’s “Behind the Music” series.

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  12. I still love this song. I also remember another band that grabbed some of their name, I guess trying to capitalize… Remember Cravin’ Melon?

    When I read, back then, that Hoon had committed suicide, I was thinking “Well, there goes another good band” (in reference to Cobain). Two years later, Michael Hutchence went. Then, in 2002, Layne Staley died of a speedball overdose (curiously dying on April 5, the same day of death for Cobain).

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    1. LOL…yes I’m stretching myself! I think the newest song I wrote about (and wasn’t a classic artist) was “Jerk It Out” by the Ceasars … that song just hooked me.

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