We’re Coming Up on the 25th Anniversary of Blind Melon’s Bee Girl
One of the happiest songs ever written about the depths of soul-crushing depression is Blind Melon’s “No Rain” from their 1992 self-titled debut album. (Yes, the single wasn’t released until the following June, but let’s not quibble.)
“No Rain” was one of the biggest MTV hits of the early Alternative Generation era, thanks to the appearance of 10-year-old Heather DeLoach as the “Bee Girl.” (Note that she isn’t the same person that we see on the cover of the album; that’s a 1975 photo of Georgia Graham, the younger sister of drummer Glen Graham, Director Samuel Bayer picked Heather from a casting call because she looked a lot like Georgia.)
The Bee Girl became a powerful MTV meme, resulting her appearing at the MTV Music Video Awards and in the video for “Bedrock Anthem” my Weird Al. And if you go Pearl Jam’s odds’n’sods album, Lost Dogs, you’ll find a song called “Bee Girl.”
After her Bee Girl triumph, Heather tried acting for a while and landed parts in Tracy Takes On…, Phenom and two 2003 episodes of NBC’s ER (“No Deed Goes Unpunished” and “No Strings”) where she played a character named Helen. In 2007, she played herself–well as “Teenage Fan”–in the underground ping-pong comedy Balls of Fury with Christopher Walken.
When agents stopped casting, she started her own event planning company, appropriately called Sweet Bee Candy and Event Planning, which seems to be doing well. Check out her Facebook page. (Thanks for Stephen for the idea for the post.)
