A “Gin Blossom”, for the uninitiated, is rosacea or those red blotches around the nose, usually seen in heavy drinkers such as W.C. Fields. That is how the 90s band Gin Blossoms got their name, after seeing a picture of W.C. Fields’ gin blossoms.
The band was big back in the 90s before breaking up in 1997 to go into individual projects. Lead by lead singer Robin Wilson and backed by twin lead guitarists Jesse Valenzuela and Scott Johnson, Gin Blossoms made a comeback of sorts a decade or so later.
I caught the band in concert in Fayetteville, AR, 4 years or so ago in the summer concert series at Northwest Arkansas Mall Ampitheatre. It was a thoroughly enjoyable night, unlike the name of the band’s debut album, New Miserable Experience.
Here is my list of the Top 10 Gin Blossoms songs in no particular order:
Hey Jealousy/New Miserable Experience
This was the first Gin Blossoms song I ever heard from around 1993. A line is the song goes: you can trust me not to think, and not to sleep around, and if you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down. Written by former band member Doug Hopkins who died in 1993, this is the song that first made me a fan of Gin Blossoms.
Mrs. Rita/New Miserable Experience
This is a song about a psychic or palm reader in the band’s hometown of Tempe, AZ. I’m not into that scene, but there are some subtle messages in the song such as: there’s no swimming in the bottle, it’s just someplace we all drown..
Found Out About You/New Miserable Experience
This is a story song about hearing rumors of a cheating partner. Been there. Whispers at the bus stop, found out about you…
Pieces Of The Night/New Miserable Experience
Gin mill, rainfall, what do you remember if at all, only pieces of the night. Another Doug Hopkins penned tune. Another line goes; what the hell did you expect to find, Aprodite on a barstool by your side?
‘Til I Hear It from You/New Miserable Experience
It gets hard, memory’s faded, who gets what they say, it’s likely they’re just jealous and jaded, baby I don’t want to take advice from fools, I just figure everything is cool, until I hear it from you. That says it all, huh?
Lost Horizons/New Miserable Experience
An auto-biographical song written by the late Doug Hopkins who died of an apparent suicide after battling alcohol addiction. Lost horizons I can see are filled with bars and factories, and in them we all fight ot stay awake, I’d drink enough of anything to make this world look new again, drunk, drunk, drunk in the gardens and the graves…
Hopefully, anyone fighting an addiction can learn from Hopkins’ mistake so that he might not have died in vain.
Cheatin’/New Miserable Experience
This is a parody of a country song basically, steel guitar and all. The most memorable line is: It ain’t cheatin’, she reminds me of you. I wonder if Tiger Woods tried that line on Elin Nordegren? Never mind that most of his alleged mistresses look nothing like her…
Allison Road/New Miserable Experience
So she fills up her sails on my wasted breath, each one’s more wasted than the other you can bet, on Allison Road, there’s no telling what I might find, I couldn’t see I was lost at the time, on Allison Road. This song, like so many Gin Blossoms songs features the crackling guitar interplay between Jesse Valenzuela and Scott Johnson.
Of course, the Allman Brothers and others in the 70s pioneered the twin lead guitar concept and Gin Blossoms have taken the baton and run.
Cajun Song/New Miserable Experience
Have you noticed a trend here? In my opinion, New Miserable Experience, named for Gin Blossoms’ problems with their label, is one of the must have albums of the 90s and a rock and roll classic for all times.
This song has a cajun zydeco flavor as you might have guessed from the title, complete with accordions and the like played by session players in addition to the band’s regular lineup. Once that girl was mine, for such a short time, we used to spend every night, now all I do is cry, they say you can’t miss something you’ve never had, so tell me why, why I should feel so bad…
Follow You Down/Congratulations I’m Sorry
The only song on the list not from New Miserable Experience, this follow up CD came on the heels of the success of Gin Blossoms’ debut. The name reportedly comes from what most people would say upon meeting members of the band after the death of Doug Hopkins.
I know we’re headed somewhere I can see how far we’ve come, but still I can’t remember anything, let’s not do the wrong thing and I’ll swear it might be fun, it’s a long way down when all the knots we’ve tied have come undone…
In my opinion, the problems the band had as far as longetivity were largely due to the death of Hopkins. Hopkins wrote half of the songs on NME before he was voted out of the band. Hopkins, who according to reports, was too drunk in the recording sessions to play his parts, was fired just before the release of the band’s debut album.
Congratulations, I’m Sorry had a couple of great songs penned by the other members, but the overall product was nowhere near as good as New Miserable Experience. The songs of NME were the result of several years of work, then the success of NME and the loss of Hopkins left the other members of Gin Blossoms a year or two to write and record a followup.
While Scott Johnson was an able replacement for Hopkins on guitar, he apparently did not possess the songwriting prowess of the late Hopkins. Robin Wilson, the frontman for the band, has written good songs also, but after Hopkins’ departure, no one in the band seemed to be able to come up with a signature sound for Gin Blossoms.
Hopkins had the ability to write songs about dark subjects such as alcoholism in a frank and empathetic way with sweet guitar riffs and hooks galore. Very few songwriters could match this ability to combine such disparate elements into listenable rock and roll. Thus the Blossoms fell prey to the fait of many other good bands and were unable to sustain success due to the material drying up.
In that sense, the song Follow You Down after the death of Doug Hopkins proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Regrettably, Gin Blossoms followed Hopkins down, in a manner of speaking, breaking up in 1997.
I still highly recommend catching Gin Blossoms in concert if you get a chance. It’s a rocking good time of a show with Robin Wilson singing into the cellphone of someone in the front row at times. Even though the band wasn’t able to catch lightning in a bottle a second time, most bands have never cut a record as good as new Miserable Experience.
