“It sounds really happy, but it represents something dark.” The name of the band says it all,” Wilson says. Like those groups, the Gin Blossoms excelled at marrying world-weary lyrics with ebullient melodies. Produced by the late John Hampton, who engineered albums by Alex Chilton and the Replacements, New Miserable Experience took its cues from Chilton’s Big Star and Paul Westerberg’s alt-rock progenitors, who also recorded at Ardent. “It was an intense experience on every level.” We knew this was our last chance,” says singer Robin Wilson of the album that was just re-released in a commemorative vinyl edition.
We were all just treading water trying to make the record. The group teetered on the edge of being dropped, and, most alarmingly, their founder and chief songwriter, guitarist Doug Hopkins, was in the throes of mental illness and alcoholism. A first attempt at cutting the record in 1991 in Los Angeles was a $100,000 disaster. When the band left Tempe, Arizona, in 1992, headed for Memphis’ famed Ardent Studios to record their first album for A&M Records, the mood was far from optimistic. It’s a miracle that the Gin Blossoms‘ breakthrough album, New Miserable Experience, exists at all.
