The Lemonheads: Bittersweet Symphony Karl Whitney The Belfast Telegraph, Friday 4th May 2007 - - - - Evan Dando was the enfant terrible of credible pop long before Pete Doherty came on the scene. With a new Lemonheads album out and a live date in Belfast, Karl Whitney profiles the mercurial frontman and his uneasy relationship with rock stardom It takes three days of ringing around various publicists and promoters to get to the crux of the matter: Evan Dando just doesn't seem to want to do interviews. "You can try whatever you want," I am told by one person I talk to, "but the most difficult thing to do is to get him to sit down and talk to a journalist." In the age of instant access to artists via Myspace sites and blogs, in a world where most recording artists are all too willing to play the game, Evan Dando is an anomaly: he preserves a distance from the press that seems perverse, but one that seems to nourish his legend all the same. Dando emerged from the Boston punk scene of the mid-1980s as a member of the Lemonheads, a band whose first record was released when they were still teenagers. As the other original members departed, Dando was the last man standing, and was left with the Lemonheads name. It became the label that he applied to the sweet, country tinged rock he released at the beginning of the nineties. His cover of the Simon and Garfunkel song, Mrs. Robinson, became a worldwide smash, and flung a startled Dando onto the covers of music magazines around the world. The album it came from, 1992's It's A Shame About Ray, went straight to number 3 in the Billboard chart. His fame coincided with that of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, who Dando considered a good friend. Dando, like Cobain, found refuge in drug addiction, but his revelations of crack cocaine use in the NME to promote his 1993 album Come On Feel the Lemonheads didn't provide any kind of catharsis for him. His vocal cords damaged by drug abuse, he sat there silently, scribbling his answers to the journalist's questions on a notepad. At that stage, the pressures of fame, and the necessity of delivering a successful album hard on the heels of 'It's a shame about Ray', became too much for Dando. You could sense the stirrings of his desperation at the relentless demands of the music industry, a desperation similiar to that which was to push Kurt Cobain over the edge. Comparisons were inevitable, and after the suicide of Cobain, Dando and the Lemonheads went missing. For a man in his twenties, who had made comments to journalists saying that dying young might be better than having to make ten more Lemonheads albums, this was worrying stuff. The UK music press went to town on Dando's image as a hippy-dippy slacker, and wilfully reshaped his image from laidback, campfire songwriter into permastoned, LA idiot. He had quickly become shorthand for everything Britain hated about American music, and soon became a favourite target of any Britpop band that was seeking column inches. Of course, none of this was helped by him hanging out with Oasis – a band who openly showed their scorn for Dando – while they toured their first album, Definitely Maybe. A song that Noel Gallagher and Dando co-wrote, titled Purple Parallelogram, never saw the light of day, dismissed by the elder Gallagher, characteristically, as 'shite'. Dando's treatment at the hands of the British press may explain his unwillingness to talk to journalists – and this tendency is not uncommon. At different points, Morrissey and Radiohead's Thom Yorke have refused to talk to the NME because of mistrust generated by previous articles. But there's more than that going on, and it comes down to Dando's almost complete disengagement with the rhythms of everyday life that everyone else lives by: the man drifts. "He doesn't own a car, he doesn't have a house, he can't even find his clothes on any given day," Joe Robb, who produced the Lemonheads albums, once explained, "he just wanders around". Once, on a street in Dublin, I met Evan Dando by chance. I was standing outside a shop when he sidled up to me, guitar case in hand, trying to find the venue where he was due to go onstage in less than an hour. "Hey, do you guys know where the Olympia is at?" It's hard not to come back to this chance encounter when you're trying to get in touch with Dando on a professional level. He seems to have cut out the elements of rock stardom that have made him so unhappy in the past: the relentless promotion, the pressure for chart hit after chart hit. With these things now banished to the sidelines, he's free to follow his interest wherever that should take him. Dando has credited his marriage in 2000 to model Elizabeth Moses as stabilising his life. More recently, he co-wrote one of the Dandy Warhols best songs 'The last high', recorded a maudlin solo album, 'Baby I'm Bored', and in the last year got together with Bill Stevenson and Karl Alvarez of legendary 80s hardcore act The Descendents to record a new album under the Lemonheads name. The album is a return to form for the Boston native. One of the highlights of last year, it zips along, clocking up 12 fuzzily melodic tracks in 30 minutes. The lyrics betray a wistful but reinvigorated songwriter, who has got things together in his own unique way, and is happy to pursue his career free from the pressures of a rock-stardom that pushed his contemporaries over the edge. The Lemonheads play the Mandela Hall on Sunday 6th May © 2007 The Belfast Telegraph To read this piece on the Belfast Telegraph site click here -------- Journalism | Home | About