The Lemonheads’ ‘It’s a Shame About Ray’ turns 30 with a pair of shows at the Paradise
Back in March, upon the release of a 30th-anniversary edition of the Lemonheads’ “It’s a Shame About Ray,” the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich wrote something quite nice about the record. She called it “perfect.”
There have been countless “perfect” pop songs, but to make an entire album’s worth of songs that hang together flawlessly – well, that’s a trick as rare as, say, explaining the ’90s without mentioning grunge.
Evan Dando’s songs are “so easygoing, so suffused with nonchalance,” Petrusich wrote, “that it feels as though they must have arrived fully formed and without struggle.”
They only feel that way. Born and bred in Boston, straight outta the halls of the alternative Commonwealth School, the Lemonheads were originally a trio of hyperactive hardcore enthusiasts with an unusual knack for melody. Over the years Dando has led a vagabond’s lifestyle, backpacking between Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, and the beaches of Australia while leaving behind a messy trail of flare-ups, disappearances, and other detritus.
Three and a half decades in, after more than a score of membership changes — Dando is the only remaining member — the band wraps up its current tour supporting the album’s reissue with two shows this weekend at the Paradise. The record is well worth celebrating. So is Dando’s longevity.
“It’s a Shame About Ray” was “clearly an evolution of the songwriting ideas Evan had been playing around with,” says Ben Deily, who formed the band with Dando and Jesse Peretz in 1986. Deily left the band in 1989 to attend Harvard; he is a Clio Award-winning creative director.
Dando was writing great songs from an early age, Deily says, but he was mostly getting noticed for his singing on the band’s cover songs. The Lemonheads grabbed some early attention by squalling through Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” and Dando’s melancholy version of Gram Parsons’s “Brass Buttons” was a highlight of “Lovey” (1989), the band’s fourth album, its first on a major label after leaving Taang! Records.
By then Deily was gone, but that album included some of his favorite Lemonheads songs to date — “Stove,” “Ride With Me.”
“When he’s in fighting form,” Deily says of his old friend, “his voice is unbelievable.” (Dando initially agreed to be interviewed for this story, but backed out earlier this week to rest his voice.)
Disappointed with the commercial showing of “Lovey” (which got its own anniversary reissue two years ago), Atlantic Records booked the band into Cherokee Studios in Hollywood for its next album session. Cherokee was owned and operated by the Robb Brothers, three siblings who had minor success in the ’60s as a pop group called the Robbs.
By the time Dando showed up with his latest lineup, drummer David Ryan and his good friend Juliana Hatfield on bass, Cherokee had hosted a long string of bookings that resulted in classic albums — Tom Petty’s “Damn the Torpedoes,” Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall.”
Bruce Robb took an instant liking to the languid Dando. “They sent a demo on cassette that was kind of thrash,” he says. “It was good thrash, but I wasn’t that into it.”
Then the band sent a second demo of some of the songs that would appear on “It’s a Shame About Ray.”
“And I just went, ‘Oh, [crap], we’ll take it,’” Robb recalls. “Breaking new groups is the most exciting thing you can do.”
After the departure of Peretz, who would become a noted film and television director, Dando had been on the verge of breaking up the Lemonheads. Then he met the Aussies.
Nic Dalton and Tom Morgan joined Dando’s inner circle after Dalton played in an opening act during the Lemonheads’ 1991 Australian tour. They were part of a fertile indie-pop scene in Sydney. Dalton and Morgan would help write several songs for “It’s a Shame About Ray.” (Dalton’s onetime girlfriend, Robyn St. Clare, wrote “Into Your Arms,” which would become the big alt-rock hit on “Come On Feel the Lemonheads,” the follow-up to “It’s a Shame About Ray.”)
“Evan meeting me and my friends really inspired him to be more poppy,” says Dalton. “Pop with guitars — pop-punk, I suppose. And then the Robb Brothers, they could see those songs might be better having the acoustic guitars underneath.
“Evan really embraced it. He realized he could still rock out onstage but have songs that were more melodic,” says Dalton. He would join the band in time to record Dando’s cheeky version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” an afterthought for the album that would become the Lemonheads’ breakthrough hit.
Dando and Morgan wrote the album’s title track after spotting a newspaper story about a delinquent boy named Ray. A young Johnny Depp appeared in the video, shot by old friend Peretz.
While Hatfield sang memorably on “My Drug Buddy,” Dando has said that song was actually about Morgan’s girlfriend at the time. The Australia faction’s drug of choice was speed, Dalton explains.
He remembers Dando writing “Ceiling Fan in My Spoon” while he was sitting in a cafe near Dalton’s home in Sydney, “waiting for his toasted cheese sandwich.” Lemonheads fans have sometimes assumed the song to be about heroin, but Dalton’s response to that is a flat no.
“That drug wasn’t even on the radar back then,” he says.
After the release of “It’s a Shame About Ray,” though, things did get a little nuts for Dando. Lanky, long-haired, and fine-featured, he briefly became an improbable pinup idol. Dalton recalls trying in vain to get his forthright friend to stop talking about drugs in interviews.
“It’s cooler to do it and not tell anyone,” Dalton would say.
Thirty years on, Dando has never come close to matching the near-perfection of “It’s a Shame About Ray.” His band has been on-again, off-again. The
current touring group features Vineyard native Farley Glavin on bass and Lee Falco on drums. Earlier this year the Lemonheads were kicked off a tour opening for Jawbreaker after Dando broke a COVID-related rule. He posted some choice words online about the dismissal.
“There are people in your life who are family if not by blood. You can’t quit them,” says Deily, who has slipped back into the Lemonheads fold more than once. “A lot of us both absolutely love him and have been driven mad by him from time to time.”
A few years ago Dando stopped in to see the Robbs. A
quick visit turned into a threeday hang; Bruce played Hammond B-3 organ while Dando played guitar.
But when Robb suggested they make another album together, Dando begged off. “I haven’t been doing much writing,” he said.
“After that, I had a problem getting him on the phone,” Robb says.
He still thinks fondly about the tall kid who first stumbled in all those years ago.
“You can misplace your talent for a while,” he says, “but it’s not something you can lose. It’s a gift.”