Blind Melon, ’No Rain’: Blind Melon vs The Bee Girl

Blind Melon, ’No Rain’

Highest UK chart position: #17 on December 5, 1993

1. Pour some tea for two

Andy Warhol once said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

This prophecy turned out to be true. Warhol predicted the rise of the microcelebrity, the person who’s famous in a very specific, very limited way. Social media has given us thousands of microcelebrities in recent years, from Chewbacca Mom to Bean Dad to Yodelling Walmart Kid.

The 80s and 90s saw a very specific type of niche microcelebrity: the music video star. These people were not musicians—many of them weren’t even professional entertainers—but their appearance in one pop video transformed them into global icons.

So, for example, you’ve got the girl in ‘Take On Me’, the guy in ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’, and that milk carton in ‘Coffee and TV’. The most successful is Alicia Silverstone, who found fame after breaking through as The Aerosmith Girl.

But the most iconic of these music video microcelebrities is, hands down, the Bee Girl from Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’.

The video for ‘No Rain’ opens with a tapdancing little girl in a bee costume. She’s auditioning for a show, but the judges laugh her off the stage. Bee Girl goes around town and tries to dance with other folk, but they reject her. Finally, she stumbles across a meadow filled with weirdoes in bee costumes. They dance with her and welcome her into their tribe.

Bee Girl was a phenomenon in 1993. She appeared in SNL and a Weird Al video, she befriended A-List stars, and she was one of the most popular Halloween costumes that year. In fact, she became such a big deal that people started to fear a Drew Barrymore/Macauley Culkin-style collapse. Pearl Jam wrote a song called ‘Bee Girl’ which contained a dire warning:

Bee girl, you’re gonna die
You don’t want to be famous, you want to be shy
Do your dances alone in your room
Becoming a star will become your doom

In hindsight, Eddie Vedder was right to foresee tragedy. But he was worried about the wrong person.

2. All I can say is that my life is pretty plain

Blind Melon owe their success to lead singer, Shannon Hoon, and not just for his musical contribution.

Blind Melon met in Los Angeles, but they were all from other states. Shannon Hoon was from Lafayette, Indiana, a place with a small but busy rock scene. His sister, Anna, knew some of the local rockers and, when little her brother said he was moving to L.A., she told him to contact her friends Jeff and Bill, who had already found success in California.

Jeff and Bill did meet Shannon and help get his band signed, but they didn’t called themselves Jeff and Bill anymore. They were better known as Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose.

Hoon was a charismatic guy, and the rest of Guns’n’Roses took a shine to him. He did backing vocals on Use Your Illusion on tracks like ‘The Garden’ and ‘Don’t Cry’, appearing in the video for the latter. G’n’R invited Blind Melon to support them on tour—a great start for an aspiring rock band.

Blind Melon actually had an advantage over Guns’n’Roses. They played psychedelic blues rock that was just about alternative enough to smuggle themselves into the grunge scene that, ironically, was killing off traditional rock bands like Guns’n’Roses). Also, Gen X teenagers were bored of lyrics about cars, girls and parties. They wanted angsty songs with emotional truths. ‘No Rain’, for all its jaunty pop thrills, is as blatantly about depression as anything on In Utero.

Brad Smith, who wrote the song, said:

“I had bouts of depression and the whole, “What am I doing out here? Am I going to go back to Mississippi? I’m never going back to Mississippi.” …I had nobody out here. There was no family, I didn’t know a soul out here at first.

”So the song is about not being able to get out of bed and find excuses to face the day when you have really, in a way, nothing. It was like rock bottom. [The chorus is about how] I’d rather it be raining so I can justify myself by laying in the bed and not doing anything.”

Blind Melon got signed and recorded their debut LP in 1992. Towards the end of the recording session, drummer Glen Graham invited everyone for dinner in his family home. The band sat in Graham’s parents’ living room, browsing the Graham family photo album, when they saw a cute picture of his sister performing in a school play. She was wearing a homemade bumblebee costume.

“That would make a great album cover,” someone joked.

A few months later, Blind Melon appeared in record stores with Graham’s sister on the cover.

3. I like watching the puddles gather rain

Blind Melon came out in September 1992 and vanished without a trace.

In June 1993, the band hired director Sam Bayer to make a clip for their third single, ‘No Rain’. Bayer cast 10-year-old Heather DeLoach in the lead role, dressing her in the same bee costume as Graham’s sister. Bee Girl was born.

Rolling Stone wrote:

“The Bee Girl became a star. She also became a colossal pain in the ass.

“Thanks in no small part to Heather DeLoach, the 10-year-old actress who portrayed her in the video and has since parlayed the role into an extended world tour, the Bee Girl has developed an alarming cult following. She’s also been packing a serious ‘tude — flitting around with an entourage, signing autographs and hobnobbing with the heavy hitters.”

You might think Rolling Stone published this quite nasty attack on a child many years later, perhaps in a review of ‘No Rain’s legacy.

Nope! This is from November 1993, before ‘No Rain’ had even entered the UK Top 40 yet.

The band got tired of DeLoach real quick. She made the most of her 15 minutes, tap-dancing at the MTV Music Awards, cameoing in a Weird Al video, and befriending people like Madonna. She was a legitimate celebrity, even if it was a limited, Warholian kind of microcelebrity.

Meanwhile, Blind Melon were in danger of becoming the Bee Girl Band. In one interview, they’re congratulated for making such an uplifting video. Shannon Hoon grimaces and says, “It’s cute…I hate cute.” Saturday Night Live invited them on, where they played a grunged-up, angry version of the song… after a skit with Chris Farley dressed as Bee Girl.

There was only one way to save themselves from novelty record hell.

They needed to kill Bee Girl.

4. It rips my life away, but it’s a great escape

Not literally. Don’t worry.

But Blind Melon did strike against the Bee Girl. Their next video, ‘Tones of Home’, stars an old lady who, we discover, is actually Bee Girl at the end of her life. She dances around her yard, while Blind Melon play a high-energy gig to a packed auditorium.

The message is clear: Bee Girl is in the past now. Hoon confirmed this in the Rolling Stone piece:

“She’s just going to grow old really fast,” says Hoon. “We’re putting her life in fast-forward.”

The singer says he has no qualms about putting little Heather DeLoach in the unemployment line, either. “She’s probably going to live happily ever after in Malibu,” he says, laughing.

The plan did not work. ‘Tones Of Home’ was not a hit, nor were any of their follow-up singles. And nobody can blame Bee Girl, because the real problem was something much more simple.

Blind Melon weren’t a great band.

They weren’t terrible. They still have some passionate fans, so they clearly had some talent. However, Blind Melon simply weren’t good enough to sustain an A-List pop career that matched the highs of ‘No Rain’.

Something similar happened elsewhere in 1993 with Spin Doctors. They, like Blind Melon, were a talented band with a retro feel who could have developed a small cult following. Both bands, almost by accident, managed to write a pop song that sounded very different from their usual fare. And both bands existed in a weird cultural moment when alternative and mainstream rock overlapped.

For both bands, this was their 15 minutes.

Soup, Blind Melon’s second LP, was certified gold but still a commercial disappointment. Some critics were savage. Rolling Stone, once so enchanted by them, gave Soup one and a half stars, calling it, “slight fare—and no kid in a bee suit.”

The band went on tour to promote Soup, but it descended into chaos. Hoon, who had always struggled with addiction, was using heavily and performances were going badly. In October 1995, he was found unconscious on the tour bus after an all-night cocaine binge. Hoon later died in hospital. He was 28; his daughter was just a few weeks old.

Blind Melon still perform and make music. Hoon’s daughter, Nico, sometimes performs with them. She’s now older than her dad was when he recorded ‘No Rain’.

5. Stay with me and I’ll have it made

What of Bee Girl then?

People seemed to think a post-fame burnout was inevitable; that when the media lost interest, she would turn to crack and get arrested for crashing her car into a 7/11.

However…she was fine! DeLoach’s acting career didn’t quite take off, but she appeared in the Oscar-nominated A Little Princess and had small parts in films with Natalie Portman and Christopher Walken.

She’s now living a normal life with a family and a job, occasionally popping up to talk about being the Bee Girl. People Magazine recently featured her talking about becoming a mother for the third time. “Our little hive is complete!” she said.

Of Blind Melon, she said:

“I cannot believe how much has happened in life since 30 years ago when we did the Blind Melon Music video. This video changed my life forever and I am always so very grateful to all of the fans and their love and support throughout the years.

“I am lucky that I still get to do small projects over the years to represent the bee girl and all of her nostalgia. She will forever be a part of me, no matter how many years pass. I cannot wait to do some fun Halloween Blind Melon-themed family costumes one of these days and have the kiddos dress up with me.”

Her most recent TV appearance was in 2021, when she appeared on the very dumb gameshow I Can See Your Voice in her familiar bee costume.

It’s hard to listen to ‘No Rain’ these days without feeling the mournful shadow that hangs over the song. It’s sad Shannon Hoon died; it’s sad he left a young family behind. It’s sad his 15 minutes didn’t bring him joy.

But at least things worked out for Bee Girl. Like her character in the video, she eventually found her place in the world. It’s nice that she got her happy ending.

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