Gin Blossoms: The Amazing Band from Tempe You Probably Forgot
They should have been so much bigger
If you were around in the summer of 1993 there was one song you simply could not escape: “Hey Jealousy,” by the Tempe, Arizona band Gin Blossoms. The song was everywhere, and has continued to be a mainstay on both radio and those dreaded in-store playlists (in 2017, Gin Blossoms guitarist Jesse Valenzuela joked to Rolling Stone that “you can hear it at Lowe’s hardware”).
If only the band itself was still that ubiquitous. Nearly 30 years ago now, it certainly seemed like they would be, but fate sometimes has other plans. The band is still recording and touring with the core group from 1993 (Robin Wilson on vocals, Jesse Valenzuela on guitar and vocals, Bill Leen on bass, and Scotty Johnson on guitar, with drummer Scott Hessel having replaced original member Phillip Rhodes). But the expectations of a long, productive career with albums every few years never materialized.
The band may have been victims of their own early success. Their second album, New Miserable Experience, was released in August of 1992 and went, for the most part, nowhere. They toured relentlessly in support of the album, and it did get a lot of play on college radio, which may be what convinced A&M Records to try what was essentially a second release of the…
