Gin Blossoms: Hey Jealousy [purchase]
Remember back in the 90s, when “Hey Jealousy” was all over the radio? It was a top-25 hit in the US, and was popular on the college/alternative stations. And the follow up single, “Found Out About You,” did well, too, also cracking the top-25, and topping Billboard’s Modern Rock chart. The album from whence these songs came, 1992’s New Miserable Experience, made it to No. 30 on Billboard’s album chart, and the band was riding high. But behind this success was something darker.
One of the founding members of the band, which got together in Tempe, Arizona in the late 1980s, was guitarist and songwriter Doug Hopkins, who was in many ways the “spiritual leader” of the band, which was named after the slang phrase for what alcohol abuse did to W.C. Fields’ nose. After the band cycled through members, gigged regularly and independently released an album, they were signed by A&M Records, and began to work on what became New Miserable Experience. Hopkins contributed both future hits, and some other songs to the album, but his alcoholism became so difficult to deal with, that at the end of the recording sessions, Hopkins was sacked. And because of financial hardship, Hopkins sold his publishing rights for a relative pittance.
So, while the Gin Blossoms were gathering momentum, the guy who wrote their two biggest songs was out of the band. Now, that’s not to say that only Hopkins’ songs were good. In fact, New Miserable Experience is, for the most part, a deep album, with many good songs written by a number of different writers. It is an album that fits broadly into the power pop genre, with influences from Big Star, to R.E.M., to The Replacements, but they often married upbeat tunes with darker lyrics. Personally, I really liked the album and a number of the songs made it onto cassette mixtapes that were played in my car, turning the Gin Blossoms into a favorite of my young son.
In 1992, as the Gin Blossoms were rising, Hopkins, who had taken a job as a pop songwriter for hire, told an interviewer:
When it comes on the radio, I turn it off, because I don't really want to hear that. It doesn't make me feel good or anything. . . I mean it makes me feel like I accomplished something, but it didn't turn out the way I intended. Well, nothing ever does.
Now's getting to be the time when, in a way it would be a lot of fun, because they're on the radio all the time. It's my song but I don't enjoy it. I can't listen to it because it just pisses me off. I started the band five years ago. I spent five years of my life on this, to get it to where it is now, and now it got yanked out from under me, so I'm a little on the disenfranchised side.
On December 5, 1993, Hopkins committed suicide.
The band had a successful song on the Empire Records soundtrack, "Til I Hear It from You," co-written with Marshall Crenshaw (who is probably a good subject for another “Forgotten?” piece), which charted as a single, and the band’s follow up album, Congratulations I’m Sorry, named after comments the band received—“Congrats on your success, but sorry about Doug,” was also successful, if not to the level of its predecessor. I liked it, and there are a bunch of good songs on it. The Gin Blossoms appeared on Leno, Letterman (sometimes with Kiss) (and Paul Shaffer often used their music to go in and out of commercial breaks), and Saturday Night Live. But their momentum stalled, and in 1997, the Gin Blossoms broke up.
Reunion tours in the early 2000s, and a handful of album releases thereafter, including one a couple of months ago produced by the great Don Dixon, have pretty much failed to break through in any real way, and I have not listened to them (although I probably should).
Speaking of Forgotten, the current Gin Blossoms website fails to mention Hopkins at all, which is kind of petty. Although he hasn’t been part of the band for decades, it is likely that had it not been for him and his songs, we might not even know about the Gin Blossoms at all. But, for a few years, Gin Blossoms were blooming everywhere, and maybe this will prompt you to move them from the Forgotten column to the “Oh yeah, I remember those guys” column.