This month we feature the Blind Melon fan site, BeeMelon.com. This selection is notable, in part, as it is the first of our Fan Sites to originate outside of North America, as its founder, Vincent Bertin is French. Here are his words on the site
BeeMelon.com is a 2 years old Blind Melon fan site. It is run by a fan for the fans.
In late 2004, I started mulling over the idea of starting a Blind Melon fan website.
Though there were many BM fans sites at the time, the main one (www.blindmelon.com) had little information of consequence. It provided a place to the fans to get to know each other. When this site closed, I decided to make my own one to show my respect to this band. At the same time, another fan made his own place at www.blindmelonforum.com that quickly grew up and has now about 1000 members, so my project turned into a site with everything a fan has the right to ask for: news about the band, articles, pictures, articles, videos etc…
The band Blind Melon started in 1992 and had their first hit-single in 1993 with the song ‘No Rain’ featuring a girl dressed in a bee costume so the name beemelon has nothing to see with insects or fruit! After the tragic death of Shannon Hoon (the lead singer) in 1995, the remaining members went separate ways: Rogers Stevens (guitar) moved to NY and made a band with his friend Rene Lopez under the name of Extra Virgin .They released an album in 2000 but broke up 2 years later. At the same time Brad Smith (bass) and Chris Thorn (guitar) made a band called Unified Theroy with drummer Dave Krusen (Pearl Jam) and singer Chris Shinn. But the most exciting news is that Blind Melon recently reformed with a new singer. The guys have added former Rain Fur Rent frontman Travis Warren as their new vocalist and have already recorded 11 songs for their new album that should be available around April.
BeeMelon has slowly grown and now welcomes a few hundred visitors every day. I also recently changed the design of the website so people can make comments on my posts. In January, I added a new section about Rogers Stevens side band Extra Virgin: with his kind permission and the help of Matt Flood (the guy who ran the extra virgin official site), you can now download of lot of demos and unrelased songs, get never seen before pictures of the band for free. So check www.beemelon.com out if want to find out what bees and melons have to do with rock’n‘roll!