(Gin Blossoms)
I’m thirty-seven years old, and I’ve never heard someone say they hate Gin Blossoms or “Hey Jealousy.” If you’re reading this and you do, please hit me up on social media. I’d be very interested to hear what turned your heart so cold.
I’ve heard that it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert at something, whether it’s quantum physics, guitar, or skateboarding. It’s like college and grad school combined, and I’d say that I’ve definitely logged over ten thousand hours learning songs, so that might be my big skill. When you start out in a band, you’re so far from being an expert, but the excitement is so strong that you just don’t care.
In the spring of 1993, we were on a particularly brutal tour, where we were playing college campuses in the daytime and clubs at night. This went on for about three months, and it was completely exhausting. We were all stuck in a van together for at least twelve hours a day. One guy would get sick, and it would work its way around the van over the course of a couple of weeks. We’d get sick and then well again, but by that point, somebody in the front of the bus had a whole new sickness, which would start the whole cycle over again.
We were literally always sick on that tour. It was a very exhausting and depressing time because it felt futile. It was only a few months before “Hey Jealousy” took off, but it didn’t feel like we were accomplishing much. In the end, that tour did have a lot to do with the band breaking, but at the time, it just felt like we were spinning our wheels. There was a show somewhere in Florida, and I hadn’t really spoken to anyone in the band for a couple of weeks. I was just sick, depressed, and tired.
We were all drinking heavily on that tour, and there was plenty of pot going around, which was how we were spreading the illnesses in the van. Those were our only real vices. No one was doing any hard drugs with any regularity. We’re playing in Tampa, and I was just pouting my way through the show. I wasn’t having any fun, and in between songs, I had nothing to say to the crowd. I was so pissed off and depressed that I was ignoring them.
We were about to launch into “Hey Jealousy,” and there were a few moments of dead air. I was standing there fuming. Our bassist, Bill Leen, looked at me, knowing I was losing it. He gave me a shrug that implied, “What’s the deal?” Off-mic, I said to Bill, “What am I supposed to say to these people? That I don’t give a fuck anymore?” Bill stared at me incredulously and yelled back, “Fuck you, Robin!” Right then, we launched into “Hey Jealousy.” That happy riff started right as we were cursing each other out.
I look back at that as one of our lowest moments. Now I can look back on it in amusement, but at the time, I was breaking down. I just didn’t want to be there. The band formed in late 1987, and I joined in March of ’88. I was hired on a Wednesday, and we played the next three nights straight. For the first show, I only knew eight songs. Originally, I joined as the rhythm guitarist, but after a few months, I became lead singer. I was so relieved because I was so far out of my league as a guitar player. That night in Tampa, it felt like we had been plugging away forever with no results.
We signed to A&M in 1990 and released an EP in ’91. We recorded New Miserable Experience in the early months of 1992. It was released in October of ’92, and we were in the van from October through the next year. It was a very slow build, so when the record finally broke, we felt like we had earned it. It wasn’t an overnight success by any stretch, which made the success sweeter. In the ’80s, there were alternative bands like R.E.M., The Smiths, and the Pixies. In the ’90s, the people who had been working at college radio stations now had commercial radio jobs.
That’s when the programming flipped. Cheesy metal was dominating commercial radio, and suddenly alternative became the new form of popular music. I think it was due to those college music geeks getting real jobs. Nirvana was obviously the watershed moment. In the winter of 1991, we were on tour supporting our first EP, Up and Crumbling. We were playing places like Wyoming and Montana and driving all night long.
We had to put snow chains on the van tires, but we didn’t have the right size. The ones we put on made this incredible noise, and the inside of the van was like being inside a drum. It was so damn loud. I was sitting in the middle of the van. I turned around, and our guitarist Doug Hopkins and drummer Phillip Rhodes had taken pillows and wrapped them around their heads, securing them with belts as a sort of headband. That was their remedy for dealing with the noise.
We were somewhere in the Dakotas at night, and I had finally fallen asleep. Our tour manager was driving, and Hopkins was shotgun. The moment I woke up, I heard Doug say, “Well, here we go.” Right at that moment, we slid sideways off the road on a patch of ice. We crashed into a ditch next to the freeway. It was so perfect how Doug had casually narrated us sliding off the road. Later that same tour, we had bought a bunch of fireworks on our way through New Mexico. Each van had a bunch of bottle rockets and Roman candles, and we were firing them at each other as we drove.
Both vans were driving side-by-side, and the goal was to get the bottle rockets and candles into the windows of the other. We pulled over on the side of the road to pee, and it was the most beautiful night. We were hundreds of miles from the nearest city, so the stars were bright. It was the most stars I’ve ever seen in my life. We were standing in the snow, shooting off all these bottle rockets. I had wrapped myself up in my blanket, and I just stood there, watching the fireworks. I had my Sony Walkman, and I was listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind.
It was the second time that I had really listened to the album, and I remember that as one of the magic moments in my life. The stars shining down, with the light shimmering off the snow. We were young and laughing, shooting off bottle rockets. I can still remember that sensation of complete satisfaction. There was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be at that moment.
Doug’s alcoholism started affecting our live shows soon after. One time, he was in the middle of a solo and threw up into his own mouth. He inhaled it and got really sick. He was in the hospital for weeks with pneumonia. There were times when he would just abandon the show. Doug didn’t care much about his equipment, so his cables and effects pedals were really fucked up. They were constantly shorting out, and he didn’t replace or repair anything.
For as much pride as he took in the band, along with his guitar playing and songwriting, there were so many things that he was lazy about. Early on, we were playing this frat party. It was a speakeasy theme, so all of the kids were dressed up like the cast of The Untouchables. The fraternity was on probation, so there was no alcohol. It was the most sober show we had played at that point, and we were feeling kinda stupid. There were only about twenty or thirty kids there, dressed up in silly costumes.
We were on stage, and Doug’s equipment was so bad that if I stepped anywhere near his effects pedal, it would short out. He started getting mad at me, saying that I was screwing up his equipment. He yelled, “Don’t do that!’ I yelled back, “What? All I did was move!” He told me to stay the fuck away from him, and at some point, I was feeling good and jumped in the air as I was singing. I landed with a thud on the stage, and Doug’s equipment shorted out.
He started screaming at me again, calling me a motherfucker and everything else. There was no way I was going to allow him to blame me for this, so I got right in his face. The show came to a grinding halt, and I jabbed my finger into his sternum really hard. I screamed, “This is your fucking fault!” That physical show of aggression on my part caused him to completely lose his shit. He yells, “I’m gonna kick your fucking ass,” but he stormed off the stage instead. We thought he left, and these college kids in their stupid gangster costumes were staring at us, completely shocked that we had derailed on stage.
We figured the show was over, so I went outside to have a cigarette. Doug was sitting alone on the staircase fuming. After twenty minutes of arguing, we limped back on stage and made some attempt to finish the show. There’s a lot about Doug’s death that’s really private, and a lot of it is still really painful for me. What we’re now realizing is that Doug was bipolar. We didn’t know that at the time. We had no way to predict how he was going to behave, and he became very jealous and bitter towards me in particular.
This was a notorious moment in the band. Few people know about it. Doug and I had written a song together called, “Hold Me Down.” To this day, it’s one of my favorite songs on New Miserable Experience, and it’s the only song that Doug and I share co-writing credit. We wrote it as our first single and wanted it to sound like Cheap Trick and The Replacements. Doug went off and wrote the verse and chorus, then turned it over to me. I wrote the second verse and threw in the bridge, which is a direct Cheap Trick ripoff.
When we finally got into the studio to record the album, Doug was out of it. His alcoholism and depression were runaway, and he wanted to rewrite all of my “Hold Me Down,” lyrics. He didn’t want to give me the co-writing credit, but he was too lazy and fucked up to do it. My version of the lyrics got recorded, and we were in the control room arguing. He said to me, “If I even liked you, I would give you half of ‘Hold Me Down’.” That was so hurtful to me, and the whole band was shocked. Everybody looked like they had been hit in the face.
We knew that something was terribly, terribly wrong. We thought we were never going to be able to finish the record. Doug wasn’t even in the band when the record came out. His alcoholism was so out of control that we had sent him home. He was still fighting for sole credit on “Hold Me Down,” and he called me up one day. He said, “You get to go on tour. You get to be in the band. All I have is the publishing, and I want full credit.”
I said, “Doug, this is something we did together. I won’t take any of the publishing money, but I am taking my credit for that song.” He screamed at me, “You coattail-riding son of a bitch!” Then he hung up.
Privately, he would confide in other people that he knew he had brought everything on himself. He spent his last days talking shit about the band and that I had ripped him off. Where he had so much talent and was, in many ways, the leader of the band, he didn’t have it in him to move to the next level. He could have stepped up and been one of the biggest rock stars of our generation, but at some point, all of his problems got away from him.
We did manage to reconcile before he died. The band was talking about releasing “Found Out About You” as the second single, which would have been August of ’93. I came into town and really wanted to talk to Doug about it. I didn’t want it to be the single if Doug didn’t support us doing it. I asked a friend to connect me with Doug, and within twenty minutes, Doug showed up at my house. There was a lot of tension, but we got to say our piece. I know that I said my piece to him. We only saw each other twice more before he died.
I’m proud that I still get to sing Doug’s songs and that they’re a part of people’s lives. As a grown man who’s been through a lot, I look back and wish we could have worked it out. I wish I could go back in time. I regret that I didn’t have more time with Doug as a songwriting partner, and I can only imagine what we could have done together. Mostly I look back on those days and smile. I think about the fun stuff, like that time out in the snow, shooting bottle rockets at each other. That night was magic.