First of all, I need to give a huge thank you to postcarder Laura Levy for inviting me over to her home and letting me borrow these extremely rare VHS tapes. It was nice meeting you in real life! Laura was friends with the Gin Blossoms in the early days.
I believe that this is the only video on youtube with founding guitarist and main songwriter of all of those early hits (Hey Jealousy, Found Out About You, etc), Doug Hopkins. If you are unaware of Doug’s story, I recommend that you read the “Jesus of Suburbia” article published by the Detroit Metro times- I will link it in FB comments. In short, Doug wrote the hits but had some trouble in the studio (Alcoholism) when it came time to record the major label debut. Instead of the label helping Doug through these issues with their big money, the label pressures the band to kick him out… and they did, which is part of the reason why they have never released anything that even touches the caliber of the early stuff since.
You can read the detail in the metro times article about the circumstances leading up to his tragic death from suicide on December 5th, 1993.
Transfer by: Shayne Stacy
Equipment used: JVC HRS-9900U- Datavideo TBC1000 – Tevion USB Adapter — Virtualdub
Enhanced (degrain) in Adobe Premiere Elements and Neat Video