The guitarist who wrote the album’s biggest songs isn’t on the cover of Gin Blossoms’ New Miserable Experience, but the tour van he once poured sugar into the gas tank of is. By the time the band had finished their long, uncertain climb to the top of the charts, they’d fired Doug Hopkins, and he spent the rest of his short life rueing their success and decrying their betrayal. He’d founded the group and written half their album, including the two achingly personal hits that made them famous. They were profiting off of not only his work but his experiences—his suffering, fuck-ups, and humiliations.
New Miserable Experience went on to go quadruple platinum, and the album cover was just the last in the endless series of do-overs and recalibrations it took to make the record such a sleeper hit. A first pressing of the CD featured uninspired artwork of the Arizona desert, a nod to the band’s roots in Tempe, Arizona, a college town far off the music industry’s radar. The revised cover, while similarly junky, was at least more personal, reflecting the band’s faces in the windshield of the van in which they’d logged years on the road while they waited to see if their long-shot record deal with A&M would pan out. By 1992, that deal was looking like a bust. A first attempt to record a full-length had failed, yielding instead only an EP of usable material, Up and Crumbling, which was released in 1991 to little notice. The sessions for New Miserable Experience had also been a debacle, largely because of Hopkins’ worsening alcoholism, and the meager sales and lackluster reviews that greeted the album upon release suggested A&M had funded another flop. But the label, likely sensing the opening created by the zeitgeist-shifting success of Nirvana a year earlier, remained committed to breaking their single “Hey Jealousy,” an incongruously upbeat romp about a fuckup drunkenly trying to reconcile with an ex under the guise of needing a place to crash. A&M commissioned three videos for the song, each with a vastly higher budget, before one finally passed muster with the gatekeepers at MTV. Perhaps it was fitting that it took a few tries to make the “Hey Jealousy” video stick, since the song itself was a redo. The band had recorded it years prior on their 1989 independent release Dusted, in a far more shambolic form that belied their early debt to the Replacements, with a blitzing cadence and a basement punk band’s sense of rhythm. That they buried the song as track 9 on the back of the record suggests they hadn’t fully realized what a gem they’d written. New Miserable Experience producer John Hampton certainly did. Spruced up with a slower tempo that accentuated the euphoria of its riff and the sting of its lyrics, the song’s major-label makeover crunches, sparkles, and soars. It’s such an undeniable hit that you have to wonder why it took so much arm-twisting to make programmers play it.New Miserable Experience beefed up the band’s guitars just enough that Gin Blossoms could pass as part of the early-’90s modern rock boom, although at its heart their sound was a throwback to the crystalline jangle of ’80s college rock, with a heartland tinge that felt old-fashioned in the wake of grunge. Their true differentiator was the blue-eyed lilt and unabashed softness of frontman Robin Wilson, an uncommonly tame singer during an era of furious, loud ones. Compared to the cage match roars of Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Chris Cornell, Wilson sang as if he was serenading a baby bird he was nursing back to health with an eye dropper. Yet that tenderness, that wimpy sincerity, was key to the friction at the foundation of their sound: Their guitars were pretty and their vocals were sweet, but they sang about the kind of hard living mostly found in Charles Bukowski novels and old country songs. Ahead of acts like Third Eye Blind and Matchbox 20, Gin Blossoms had recognized a market for deceptively sordid minivan music. That lived-in, flaws-and-all realism elevated them over most of the flood of tame, light alternative and post-grunge bands that followed in their wake—bands like Tonic and Sister Hazel, which never had the same understanding of how a pleasant song can still capture shittiness and moral ambiguity.
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.\
