The Lemonheads' frontman Shares on Drug Use: 'Some People Were Meant to Use Substances – and I Was One'
Evan Dando rolls up a sleeve and points to a series of small dents running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to get decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You do it for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is especially resilient, but you can barely see it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Just kidding!”
Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has taken every drug available from the age of his teens. The songwriter responsible for such exalted tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who apparently achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. We meet at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. It's understandable he has given up using a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I desire to absorb all information at the same time.”
He and his wife his partner, whom he wed last year, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I avoided family often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing quite well so far.” At 58 years old, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use acid sometimes, perhaps psychedelics and I’ll smoke marijuana.”
Sober to him means not doing opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost a few years. He decided it was time to quit after a disastrous performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I think certain individuals were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”
One advantage of his comparative sobriety is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and that,’” he says. But now he is preparing to launch his new album, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which contains glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really known about this kind of hiatus between albums,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep shit. I do have integrity about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before the time was right, and now I am.”
The artist is also publishing his initial autobiography, named stories about his death; the name is a reference to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It is a wry, intense, fitfully eye-watering account of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I wrote the first four chapters. It's my story,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full considering Dando’s disorganized conversational style. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I was psyched to get a reputable company. And it positions me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is all I wanted to do since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”
Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a former model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it represents a time prior to life got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He attended the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal establishment that, he recalls, “was the best. It had few restrictions except no skating in the hallways. Essentially, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in bible class, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and Ramones; they agreed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released three albums. After band members departed, the group effectively became a solo project, he recruiting and dismissing musicians at his whim.
During the 90s, the group contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in favour of a more languid and mainstream country-rock style. This change occurred “because Nirvana’s iconic album was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, he says. “Upon hearing to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can hear we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could stand out in softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly described by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the band into the mainstream. In the early 90s they released the album their breakthrough record, an flawless showcase for Dando’s writing and his somber vocal style. The name was derived from a news story in which a clergyman bemoaned a young man named Ray who had gone off the rails.
The subject wasn’t the sole case. At that stage, Dando was consuming heroin and had acquired a liking for crack, as well. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him among the 50 sexiest individuals living. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of fun.
However, the substance abuse got out of control. In the book, he delivers a blow-by-blow account of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an unplanned acoustic set to a unfriendly crowd who booed and hurled objects. But that proved minor compared to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances
