An indie-pop darling details his rise to fame and subsequent public humiliations with appealing frankness
Evan Dando’s autobiography opens in early 2021. The singer is& living in a mouldering trailer on Martha’s Vineyard. He has a& $200-a-day drug habit and is subsisting off a diet of cigarettes and cheeseburgers that he can’t chew because the heroin, cocaine and amphetamine he’s injecting have caused his teeth to fall out.
It’s all a very long way from Dando’s brief burst of fame as frontman and solitary longstanding member of the Lemonheads: two big albums in 1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray, and 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads, a huge hit cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs& Robinson, an era with Dando’s face taking its place alongside the Betty Blue and magic eye posters on halls of residence walls, the Docs-shod female student’s pin-up of choice. But it’s also& not totally unexpected, at least if you have even a glancing knowledge of& the singer’s subsequent travails. Mainstream success was short-lived: Dando succeeds in sabotaging his own career in a blaze of hard drugs and wildly unpredictable behaviour. For& the last 35 years, drugs and unpredictability – rather than music – is what Dando has become known for. The book’s blurb mentions “heroin chic”, but in truth, Dando’s dissipation is almost impossible to put any kind of& romantic gloss on. To his credit, he doesn’t bother, instead recounting one public humiliation after another with a what-can-you-do? shrug.
A cocktail of heroin and cocaine puts paid to a show designed to impress investors who’ve just bought a share of Dando’s song publishing for $300,000, but it’s just one of many gigs that collapse into chaos: he falls offstage, or the police are called and he’s led away from the venue in handcuffs. The Lemonheads miss their slot at Glastonbury because Dando is holed up in a hotel, doing heroin: when he does eventually turn up, he performs an unscheduled solo set, but the crowd throw bottles and boo him offstage. He hangs around Oasis in their pomp, even writing a song with Noel Gallagher: it has to be removed from a Lemonheads album at the last minute, because Gallagher deems it an “embarrassment”.
Comments