LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) -
“All I Can Say” gets rolling with Shannon Hoon in Lafayette, cruising in his car, as he tells his own camera, “out in the country.”
It ends with him on a hotel bed in October 1995, talking on the phone about how he can get back there – hours before the singer, Lafayette native and McCutcheon High School grad died at age 28 on a tour bus while on the road with his band, Blind Melon.
In the works since 2015 – when Danny Clinch, a photographer, filmmaker and friend of the Blind Melon singer, started working with some 250 hours of camcorder footage Hoon shot between 1990 and 1995 – “All I Can Say” opened in April 2019 at the Tribeca Film Festival.
June 26 marked the streaming debut of what turns out, as promised, to be a video diary tracing the arc of an everyday life that happens to include a rock n’ roll career that rises and falls in those five years.
Along the way, Hoon shot scenes of backstage, of songwriting attempts, of studio recordings, of hotel room boredom, of phone interviews with distant reporters, of addiction he can’t seem to escape, and of home life with family, from the mundane – brushing teeth, among other bathroom duties – to the monumental, including the birth of his daughter, Nico.
“I probably get more out of it than you do,” Hoon tells the camera at one point, decades before an Instagram or TikTok era of constant social video sharing. Later, he tells a reporter: “That’s why I’ve got a video camera. There’s so much happening right now I can’t really sit back and soak it all in. I’ll just watch it later. Little pieces of time I’ll never get back.”
During an Ask Me Anything session recently on Reddit, Taryn Gould – who co-directed “All I Can Say” with Clinch and Colleen Hennessy, with a fourth director’s credit going to Hoon – called in “an intense process” to get the footage to five hours then to four and then under two. (The final version clocked in at one hour and 42 minutes.)
“The challenges of working with the amateur footage were as numerous as the joys,” Gould said during a Reddit session with the directors, Nico Hoon and members of Blind Melon.
“It was so raw and sincere, it charges the film with an immediacy,” Gould said. “It was challenging and there were concessions we had to make but it was always worth it as rarely in documentary do you have an opportunity to tell the story from an immersive first-person point of view. His story had all the traditional plot points of an epic, including the sad ending we followed those moments and then looked further for the larger existential ideas about time and memory.”
For fans who followed Hoon’s career, the plot is familiar:
The move to Los Angeles. The vocal work with Guns n’ Roses on the song “Don’t Cry.” Hooking up with the other four members of Blind Melon. Getting signed to Capitol Records when the band just had a handful of songs. Watching as things change seemingly overnight with the release of the bee-girl video for “No Rain” - a feel-good video that helped define part of the ’90s - a full year after the band’s debut album was released. Brushing up with Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, not to mention ‘90s contemporaries, on the road. The appearance at Woodstock ’94. The cancellation of a European leg of a tour to accommodate a rehab stint. The weight of expectations and one-hit-wonder talk settling over Blind Melon’s second album, “Soup.” The attempts to distance himself and the band from a video threatening to overwhelm everything else they’re doing, just as he’d carefully laid out earlier in his career how he wasn’t just that one guy from the Guns n’ Roses song.
His camera follows a group of reporters racing to talk, as Hoon says, to “everybody but the guys in Blind Melon.”
“I just want to be home with Lisa,” Hoon says at one point late in the film, referring to Lisa Crouse, his partner and mother of Nico.
For those who knew Hoon, or were back in his hometown at the time, the Lafayette references are plenty in “All I Can Say:” Tractor pull action at the Tippecanoe County 4-H Fairgrounds. A promise to get X-rays at St. Elizabeth Hospital for a hand that’s just punched a wall. Nico’s birth at Home Hospital with Lafayette’s Dr. Joel McCuaig attending. The weather graphics on the television screen from WLFI-TV18, used to mark the day Nico was born.
Even the Axl Rose sighting at the Record Plant, a studio where Hoon’s working on backup vocals for Guns n’ Roses, connects back home for the two Lafayette natives, talking on the phone to Hoon’s mother, Nel. Axl offers Nel, “Yo, Merry Christmas.” (But like sign says in the “Don’t Cry” video – “Where’s Izzy?” – Izzy Stradlin’, another Lafayette native, doesn’t appear in Hoon’s footage, either.)
“There’s, like, a little tribe of people in California from Lafayette, Indiana,” Hoon tells an interviewer curious about how he connected with Guns n’ Roses.
The tones of home fill “All I Can Say” from start to finish.
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Source: The Journal & Courier
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