Gin Blossoms: New Miserable Experience Album Review – Warungku Terkini

The hard-fought breakthrough of “Hey Jealousy” is the kind of story that A&R loves to tell, one that reinforces the idea that with a little patience and persistence—and, yes, an expertly deployed promotional budget—a deserving song can find its audience. But there was far uglier behind-the-scenes work involved in launching Gin Blossoms, too. Midway through the sessions for New Miserable Experience, the label concluded that for the band to have any chance at functioning, Hopkins had to go. The group had been recording at Memphis’ famed Ardent Studios, where their idols Big Star had recorded their holy trinity of albums, and Hopkins was cracking under the pressure, drunkenly flubbing solos in futile pursuit of a perfect take. His tremens had become so violent he could no longer play sober.

Hopkins’ condition had made touring untenable, as well. “Doug was like having this big anvil you had to drag around with you,” Wilson later recalled. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we gotta go to the gig? Well, I gotta go pick up my big anvil.’ And then when the gig’s over, it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I can’t leave yet. I gotta go get my anvil.’” The specifics of Hopkins’ dismissal and its aftermath vary depending on the account, but they’re all ugly. The feud between the guitarist and his former bandmates played out in public; once Hopkins was kicked out of a Tempe club for punching Wilson in the face. In the detail most likely to cast the band as villains, they pressured Hopkins to sign away a chunk of his publishing royalties to the guy they replaced him with. Hopkins needed the $15,000 or so they owed him, so he did. “I understand why they fired me,” he lamented in a 1992 interview, “but did they have to get so fucking cold and ruthless about it?”

The cruel ubiquity of “Hey Jealousy” tormented Hopkins, who was consumed by depression and resentment as the single flooded the airwaves. When he received a plaque in the mail after the song went gold, at first he hung it proudly—what musician doesn’t dream of a gold record?—but two weeks later he smashed it. The song itself, Hopkins insisted, he’d never cared about that much; he barely remembered writing it. That wasn’t the case, however, with the album’s follow-up single.

Another showcase for Hopkins’ vividly dejected storytelling, “Found Out About You” didn’t disguise its melancholy behind sugar rush guitars. A chronicle of being utterly wrecked by a philandering girlfriend, its anguish was front and center, alongside a foreboding churn to match the paranoia of its whispered rumors and nagging thoughts. In an echo of “Hey Jealousy,” “Found Out About You” also includes an uninvited visit to an ex’s place, but this time the scene plays out not as romantic comedy but horror: “You know it’s all I think about/I write your name, drive past your house/Your boyfriend’s over, I watch the lights go out.” Hopkins was proud of the song and had dreamed it could be a hit, but not under these circumstances. Any further success for his old bandmates was just more salt in the wound.

In December 1993, just as “Found Out About You” was taking hold on the radio, Hopkins bought a gun and killed himself. His family had understood he was nearing the end—both his mother and sister had used their last visits with him to say goodbye—but his former bandmates would never have the chance to make peace with him. He died despising them. At his memorial service, a woman approached Wilson with a final message from Hopkins: He wanted the band to know it was him who’d poured sugar into their gas tank.

The band didn’t talk about it much at the time, but the guilt and the grief must have been unbearable. Their success would always be shadowed by Faustian reminders of their loss. It couldn’t have helped, either, that so many of Hopkins’ songs were about the very addiction that killed him. He foreshadowed the end within the first lines of New Miserable Experience’s opener, “Lost Horizons”: “I’ll drink enough of anything to make this world look new again/Drunk, drunk, drunk in the gardens and graves.” Those are heavy words to sing night after night.

Hopkins hadn’t been Gin Blossoms’ only songwriter, and they proved that they could write hits without him—maybe not smashes, but solid hits. Wilson and guitarist Jesse Valenzuela drafted “Until I Fall Away,” a wistful ballad soothed by blissful guitars, while Wilson penned the radiant “Allison Road,” whose sunny jangle was the album’s most explicit callback to early R.E.M. Both deftly balanced bubblegum and pathos, the work of songwriters with a deep understanding of how to make a pop song stick without cloying. But on their 1996 follow-up album Congratulations I’m Sorry, its title a nod to the circumstances of their success, it was clear they were working around the absence of their ace. Where the great songs were supposed to be, there were merely good ones.

Gin Blossoms broke up shortly after, in part to belatedly process the shock of everything they’d been through. Then they got back to it. Since regrouping around the turn of the century, they’ve carried on as a workhorse touring act, sharing ’90s nostalgia packages with bands like Everclear and Sugar Ray and headlining county fairs and gatherings like Canton, Ohio’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival Ribs Burnoff or the Mid-South Great Steak Cookoff at Southland Park Gaming and Racing—wherever masses are charring meat outdoors, there’s a chance Gin Blossoms could be there. It’s not a bad living, really. There are acts with bigger audiences, greater stature, and more recent hits, but in truth the average working band would envy playing for dependable, appreciative crowds as consistently as Gin Blossoms still do.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the band’s gutting backstory—aside from the sheer, gobstopping sadness of it all—is how divorced it is from the popular notion of the group. These days the band will talk about Hopkins with any journalist who asks, but no matter how many times or how vividly it’s told, his story never sticks: Every article about his death always presents it as new information, a lurid piece of trivia you never knew about an act you never thought much about. It’s as if the bitter details cut too harshly against their docile image to become lore. If listeners rarely consider them as a tragic band, it’s because it’s much more gratifying to think of them how they’re most widely known—as just the Gin Blossoms, a group unburdened by expectations of coolness or relevance, whose meek demeanor disguises some undeniable riffs, and whose signature earworms, despite decades of exposure, somehow never seem to burn out. Some bands are defined by their tragedies. Others simply carry on in spite of them.
\

Gin Blossoms: New Miserable Experience