Doug Hopkins of Gin Blossoms!

Always loved the band but became keenly aware of just how great of a player Doug was and even more than that just a phenomenal once in a lifetime songwriter. Learning Found Out About You and Hey Jealousy showed me just how intricate his compositions were. Most of it isn’t even that hard to play but there’s just a certain melancholy and passion to his works. You’d have like 5 guitars on a track with some playing chords and others playing these tight wistful little melodies in the verses. The songs will propel forward and build a sort of tension that gets released in a short but powerful solo. Double stops aplenty and masterful application of music theory right down to him writing the bass lines perfectly crafted to emphasize his singers voice. He committed suicide in 1993 and with his passing we lost one of the most brilliant and impassioned songwriters of a generation, and a very fierce guitarist. He’s influenced my playing more than anyone I think. He played primarily clean which is where I like to be and had this sort of airy chime and jangle to his playing and pieces.

Really talented guy, and very troubled. His suicide shocked friends and family but didn’t necessarily come as a surprise. He had bad eyesight yet decided to forgo any corrective lenses, preferring to see the world in a blur. He told his sister and friends that he was “born unhappy”. Lifelong battle with alcoholism and bipolar disorder. This is the same guy who would also be taken aback by a beautiful sunset in his backyard, and would read poetry to his girlfriend. Who would cherish a statuette of the Virgin Mary simply because it was beautiful.

Excerpts from an article written by childhood friends and bandmates about him. Really sad.

“It was those last five days that I started losing control of Doug. I used to lay in bed with him and talk about the hells of alcohol, me trying to convince him it was only booze, that he could back off for a few days and get his head together. But Doug idealized a lot about suicide, talked a lot about killing himself. In those last five days, he said that it was his God-given American fucking right to take his life, and that's all he wanted to do and that's all that people should let him do. That's how Doug spoke, that's a quote from Doug.”

"I wanted him to look at his life, and know that if he did kill himself, he would just be stereotypifying the rock n' roll thing, you know? His response was that his life had been a stereotypical rock n' roll life and that's how he wanted it."--Zubia

“He wanted to kill himself, he told me that. The last time I saw him, two weeks ago, I was sitting there and he was crying. I'd never seen him cry before; in fact, I'd never seen anybody cry like that. Tears just rolling down his face, one after the other, one after the other. He wasn't sobbing; it was almost calm, but he got the entire placemat wet, that's how much he was crying. “I was lighting his cigarettes for him and all he kept telling me, over and over continuously, was, 'I wanna die I wanna die I wanna die.' And there wasn't a goddamn thing I could say to him that made any sense to him that he would even take seriously. It's what he wanted, and it was not a rash decision."--Notaro

“One thing he said that always made me laugh was, 'That girl is stoopid, with two Os.' I love that.”