Understandably, the situation sat poorly with him.īeyond "Jealousy," Hopkins also wrote “Found Out About You,” a top 40 hit in 1994 that was about an ex-girlfriend who seriously injured him by kicking him in the head at an R.E.M. “At that point Doug couldn't function as a guitarist or a human being,” Smith said.Īlready suffering from both alcoholism and chronic depression, things got worse after he had been forced to hand over part of his royalties to his Gin Blossom replacement. His physical state was not good, to say the least. Hopkins was a local legend in Tempe, and he soon found himself in another band, though that broke down, too. What'd the band know? Even Doug's best friend, with whom he grew up, was a Gin Blossom. The label had already spent a small fortune recording a first album, which was scrapped. The label mandate was dump Doug-get rid of the guy who built the band and whose songs got the band the record deal-or else. They were young signees of a major record label-at the mercy of the A&R and lawyerly suits who lived in southern California-cliché homes in the hills above Sherman Oaks. His band mates were, to me, total bastards then-but kids, really at least emotionally. A Metro Times piece by his friend, Brian Smith, laid some of the fault at his bandmates’ feet, but most of it at the label’s: Hopkins' bandmates were basically forced into a bad situation by their record label. “Even Doug admitted we couldn’t have succeeded with him in the band. “Without Doug and his songwriting, we never could have signed a record deal,” lead singer Robin Wilson told People in 1994. But Hopkins’ personal problems threatened that success-even though it was his songs that made that success possible. The band, full of lifers in the Tempe, Arizona music scene, were about to see major success. Not that they ever felt very comfortable with that fact. Hopkins was a member of the band until the middle of 1992, just before the completion of this album, when his alcoholism became so out of control that he was fired from the band, which continued to perform his songs. The subject of the song was its author, Doug Hopkins, who wrote some of the best songs on the band’s 1992 album New Miserable Experience. (It lent itself to Top 40 radio play as a result.) But lyrically, the tune did not come from a good place. or The Lemonheads than the sludge from Seattle. Unlike Nirvana or Pearl Jam, the darkness of the lyrics wasn’t matched by a darkness in the melody-the tune, in fact, had more in common with a melodic tune from R.E.M.
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