Blind Melon — "No Rain"
A lazy, sun-warmed guitar line and a video that became bigger than the song: the Bee Girl, a kid in a homemade bee costume and big glasses, tap-dancing for a world that doesn't get her until she finds a field full of people just like her. MTV played it constantly, and it still lands.
Blind Melon released their self-titled debut in 1992, and "No Rain" — credited to the whole band, produced by Rick Parashar — went out as its second single in 1993 on Capitol. It became the band's highest-charting song: number twenty on the US Billboard Hot 100, number one on both Billboard's Album Rock and Modern Rock charts, number one in Canada, and number eight in Australia.
But the reason everyone remembers it is the video. Director Samuel Bayer cast young tap dancer Heather DeLoach as the "Bee Girl", modeled on the album's cover photo — a family picture of Georgia Graham, drummer Glen Graham's little sister, in a bee costume. The Bee Girl performs her earnest dance to laughter and rejection, wanders alone, and finally peeks through a gate to find a green field of "bee people" just like her, dancing joyfully — all of it intercut with the band playing in a sunny field. MTV ran it relentlessly, the album went multi-platinum on the video's back, and DeLoach closed the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards doing her Bee Girl dance.
There was no second act. Frontman Shannon Hoon, Blind Melon's singer from 1990, died in 1995, and the band never charted as high again — leaving "No Rain" as a perfect, self-contained artifact: three and a half minutes of sunshine with a bittersweet story on either side of it.
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