Before (and after) the Bee Girl, there was "Tones of Home," the lead single and video from
Blind Melon's self-titled debut LP, which set the stage for the band's breakout anthem "No Rain."
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Los Angeles-based Blind Melon (frontman Shannon Hoon, guitarists Rogers Stevens and Christopher Thorn, bassist Brad Smith and drummer Glen Graham) signed to Capitol Records in 1991 on the strength of a four-song demo, The Goodfoot Workshop, and recorded the bulk of its first full-length at Seattle's London Bridge Studios under the auspices of producer Rick Parashar, who previously helmed Pearl Jam's grunge landmark Ten. "Tones of Home," a funky slab of backwoods psychedelia topped off by Hoon's Janis Joplin-esque vocals, reached number 20 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart in the weeks following the album's Sept. 22, 1992 release, buoyed by its Samuel Bayer-directed music video, which featured live footage assembled from a variety of Blind Melon gigs.
For the follow-up, Capitol selected "No Rain," a loose-limbed, deceptively upbeat meditation on depression and alienation written by Smith prior to Blind Melon's formation. Bayer returned to direct the "No Rain" clip, drawing visual and narrative inspiration from the heartbreakingly hilarious cover of the Blind Melon LP: a snapshot of Graham's younger sister Georgia posing awkwardly in a makeshift bumblebee costume and tap shoes. Bayer outfitted 10-year-old actress Heather DeLoach in an updated version of Georgia Graham's original ensemble, and centers the "No Rain" clip on the so-called Bee Girl's journey through the streets of L.A. in search of her tribe. MTV added "No Rain" to its tastemaking Buzz Bin rotation in mid-June of 1993, and seemingly overnight, the Bee Girl became a cultural phenomenon, catapulting the nine-month-old Blind Melon LP from number 153 on the Billboard album chart to the number three spot in just seven weeks.
Capitol followed "No Rain" by re-releasing "Tones of Home" with a new video (once again directed by Bayer) that alternates footage of Blind Melon performing live at downtown L.A.'s Tower Theatre with scenes of an older woman seated in a rocking chair and reading a letter containing the song's lyrics. "Tones of Home" concludes with the woman removing the Bee Girl costume from a box and dancing with joy, suggesting that what we've seen is a flash-forward depicting the character's life many decades later.
The Bee Girl's meteoric rise ultimately eclipsed Blind Melon's music, and the follow-up singles "I Wonder" and "Change" failed to chart. From there the band's performance at the Woodstock ‘94 festival earned decidedly mixed reviews, and Hoon's longstanding problems with drugs and alcohol grew increasingly pronounced. Eight weeks after Blind Melon's sophomore LP Soup hit stores, the 28-year-old singer was found dead of drug overdose; it took the surviving members more than a decade to find Hoon's replacement, former Rain Fur Rent vocalist Travis Warren.
"It's really weird how the momentum [behind Blind Melon] picked up because of one video," Smith told Rolling Stone for a 1993 cover story about the band. "The music hasn't changed - it's been on the CD forever. What we do has not changed. The video and the politics behind everything are what's changed. Success has a lot less to do with music than I thought it did." 
