![you tube third eye blind you tube third eye blind](https://media.timeout.com/images/105250091/750/422/image.jpg)
“Semi-Charmed Life” sounds like feeling the sun on your skin after a long winter. But before they disbanded, Chunn wrote the guitar riff that would grow into Third Eye Blind’s inescapable hit “Semi-Charmed Life.” In a move that foreshadowed his own beliefs about song ownership and creative control, Jenkins bought his use of the tune from Chunn for $10,000. Jenkins sought creative control above all else, even the possibility of a record deal, and the duo broke up over production disagreements with the label. They managed to get one perfectly raunchy song, “ Just Wanna Be Your Friend,” onto the Beverly Hills, 90210 soundtrack and attracted interest from Capitol.
He grew up on the Sugarhill Gang and early hip-hop, and by 1992, he formed the rap duo Puck and Natty with Detroit rapper Herman Anthony Chunn. Jenkins, the son of a political science professor, graduated with top honors from UC Berkeley in 1988. Though the music press painted Third Eye Blind as an overnight success, their path to a debut album began several years prior, in the Bay Area scene of the early ’90s. “It’s this self-imposed angst and you’re playing this raw way, but you’re not trying to play well.” Jenkins, with a passionate if pitchy falsetto, was a perfect foil to grunge, which he declared too “safe” for his taste: “Nobody really makes a statement,” he lamented. In response, a slow but steady reemergence of earnest pop-rock-and a broader return of the brighter sounds and styles of the ’70s-was already well underway when Third Eye Blind made their debut: The Wallflowers, Goo Goo Dolls, and Counting Crows paved the way for a melodic revival with the softest of edges. Acts like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots had taken the sound of the downtrodden and down-tuned and plastered it over magazine covers and Billboard charts, while Naomi Campbell modeled beanies and flannel for Vogue. Their hooks and clean vocals stood in contrast to the prevailing sound of grunge, which had reached peak cultural saturation by the middle of the decade. The outsized label interest also signaled growing demand for Third Eye Blind’s specific sound. “I really felt like they gave us their trust,” he later explained. The band accepted after the label agreed to let Jenkins produce the debut. After months of courtship, the band finally signed with Elektra for $1.2 million, a deal reported at the time as the biggest ever for an unsigned act. The level of attention Third Eye Blind received from labels without even an EP to their name reflected the bullish state of the music industry in the pre-Napster peak of the 1990s: CD sales continued to rise, growing by a billion dollars or more year over year. That a barely known, unsigned quartet got an encore as openers spoke to their natural fit alongside the great melodicism and even greater egos of the Gallagher brothers.
![you tube third eye blind you tube third eye blind](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-rd6U69blqU/hqdefault.jpg)
The cricket legend fit a band with a built-in God complex, a band who would walk into an opening slot for Oasis a few days after the piñata incident simply because they told another label, Epic, that they deserved it. Third Eye Blind built their reputation on these imperfect metaphors.