Rock’s wildest child
Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando’s drug exploits were legendary. Now, at 50, he’s taking a more sober path, writes
TGrant Smithies.
he man GQ magazine recently proclaimed ‘‘The Grunge God of Style’’ sits beside the water, stick in hand, gazing out to sea. Is he elegantly attired in sharply cut angler’s tweeds? Is he wearing waders of the latest style? I couldn’t say.
All I can tell you is that Evan Dando, painfully handsome leader of 90s indie band The Lemonheads, is fishing when I call to discuss his upcoming New Zealand tour.
He’s in a tiny hamlet called Menemsha in Martha’s Vineyard, in his home state of Massachusetts. The population, if you don’t include passing fish, numbers around 900.
‘‘It’s real nice out here today,’’ he tells me over a scattering of what sounds like polite applause, but is really little waves slapping on rocks.
‘‘It’s a beautiful old fishing village with a couple jetties poking out into the inlet. There’s all these lovely old houses all around. What can I tell you? I’m a happy man.’’
And he really does sound happy, which is nice, because the narrative that usually adheres to Evan Dando is one of missed opportunity, squandered talent, emotional damage and addiction.
Both solo and with The Lemonheads, he has made a handful of great records, but Dando is widely perceived as a master of self-sabotage, frequently derailing his own career with drink, drugs, duff albums or footin-mouth interviews just as it starts to get some serious traction.
Is he sick of reading about his own troubled life?
‘‘Oh, yeah! But I brought it on myself, I guess. Some of the things I’ve done haven’t helped me much careerwise. I did all these interviews where I was a little too honest about the fact that drugs can be fun sometimes.’’
And there it is: a mighty understatement, hovering in the air above Martha’s Vineyard like an incoming storm cloud.
Honesty has not always been the best policy for this particular fisherman.
There was a time in the early 90s when Dando was big news. The Lemonheads’ fifth album It’s A Shame About Ray was a huge underground hit, and Dando was in high demand, touring relentlessly, seemingly on the brink of major mainstream success.
The band’s mix of dirty noise-rock guitar fuzz, jangling folk and singalong pop, coupled with Dando and bandmate/girlfriend Juliana Hatfield’s good looks, made The Lemonheads the kind of band record company marketing departments dream about.
The youngest child of a wealthy Boston property lawyer and a former fashion model, Dando was declared the ‘‘doe-eyed pin-up’’ and ‘‘slacker sex-kitten’’ of 90s underground rock, and for a while there, his damaged pretty-boy schtick seemed certain to make him a huge star.
But Dando was a little too personally and artistically unreliable to follow through, and he failed to realise that journalists were not his friends, sharing his tales of epic meth, acid, ecstacy and magic mushroom benders in Australia and the UK; of booze and Mandrax binges that got him thrown off planes; of being so smacked out at dinner that he face-planted into his bowl of steaming tagliatelle.
In one interview at LA’s infamous Chateau Marmont Hotel, Dando admitted he’d descended to a very dark place after playing at a party thrown by his mate Johnny Depp, spending several days alone in his hotel room smoking crack, with intermittent heroin chasers to take the edge off. The crack pipe gave his throat such a hammering that Dando lost his voice, and had to complete his interview using paper and a pen.
He admitted he’d had a ‘‘once a week’’ heroin habit since way back in his 20s, but his intake ramped up sharply after he divorced English model Elizabeth Moses in 2010. Dando claims he finally kicked heroin in 2013, but ‘‘still likes weed and coke’’.
Somewhere along the way, the loose-lipped junkie persona started to overshadow his music, and worse, he told so many tales about his own wasted exploits that he committed the cardinal sin of any pop star: he became a bore.
‘‘Those interviews turned into all these stories about me going off the rails, you’re right, but that sort of honesty deepens your understanding sometimes. I remember Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine once talked about how certain drugs made your music change in very valuable ways, and I respected him for being so honest.
‘‘But being truthful gets you in a whole lot of trouble sometimes. People begin to treat your life as some sort of cautionary tale. It gives certain moralistic individuals the opportunity to push for prohibition, you know? And it also gives them an opportunity to say ‘I told you so’ if you do f... your life up a little bit. Even so, I’d rather be honest. I don’t want those sort of people winning.’’
Dando rejects the much-touted notion that The Lemonheads could have been ‘‘bigger than Nirvana’’ if he’d been a little less hedonistic. And besides, his ambitions have always been modest: to pay his rent, enjoy life and write good songs.
‘‘I just wanna make records I can be proud of, and that’s far more important to me than commercial success. When people sell too many records, it often f...s up either their music or their life. I don’t want to have some big resounding reckoning with the universe because something I do is suddenly huge. I wanna have a lot more failure to give some contrast to my success.’’
And he laughs, a big gravelly croak erupting down the line. It’s endearing – goofy and unguarded, like the man himself. He may be 50, but Dando still comes across as a pretty loose and immature dude, an eternal teenager.
This current world tour revolves