Agony and ecstasy

Evan Dando's sugar pop takes on a new bitter twist

by Brett Milano

Five minutes before I'm due to talk to Evan Dando, I get a phone call from his publicist, who has a novel excuse for delaying the interview. "Evan can't talk yet, he's a little ecstatic right now."

You mean he's busy or something?

"No, just ecstatic. Running around the room whooping and hollering. He needs a little time to calm down."

Is this any way to launch a comeback? Evidently so, if you take things as much in stride as Dando seems to. Not that he doesn't have a lot at stake right now. It's been three years since the Lemonheads last released an album, Come On Feel the Lemonheads (Atlantic) -- by general consensus a disappointing and tossed-off follow-up to his commercial breakthrough, It's a Shame About Ray (though both albums were certified gold at about the same time this year).

Most of what's been heard from Dando since then has been gossip, not music. There were reports of excessive rock-star behavior on the road, reports confirmed somewhat by the widely circulated tabloid photo of Dando in bed with a wasted-looking Courtney Love (and a third person the tabs didn't recognize, namely former Bullet LaVolta/Juliana Hatfield drummer Todd Phillips). The last incarnation of the Lemonheads, with bassist Nic Dalton and drummer Dave Ryan, quietly broke up soon after the 1994 tour. Dando did a few club gigs shortly afterward with fellow pop eccentric and former Swell Maps leader Epic Soundtracks, but he's since canceled two scheduled local shows, one at T.T. the Bear's Place and one last Halloween at Avalon. Save for a couple appearances in Gen X films -- a cameo in Reality Bites and a larger role in Heavy -- that was it. Whatever he was doing in his spare time, there was a danger that his once-bright musical career would be consigned to the same folks who buy Duran Duran albums nowadays, whoever that is.

So it's safe to say that few people expected the next Lemonheads album to be a quantum leap. But car button cloth (out this week on Tag/Atlantic) is one, both for cheap-thrill pop appeal (always one of Dando's strong points) and for depth (seldom one of Dando's strong points). That's partly because he lets his guard down in a way he hasn't before. There's a surprisingly dark tone to much of the songwriting, as he admits for the first time that his life isn't all quirky romance and all-night drug parties. A few songs, notably "Break Me" and "Hospital," suggest that he's seen too much of both.

But mostly it sounds as if he'd just plain worked harder on this one. The easygoing, acoustic-based sound of the last two albums has been replaced by a denser electric mix with guitar/keyboard details (in terms of playing ability, the current line-up -- bassist Dina Waxman, guitarist Bill Gibson from the Australian band Eastern Dark, and drummer Patrick Murphy of Dinosaur Jr. fame -- is the best he's had). As a songwriter, he's more inclined to blur the meaning of a lyric. The opening "It's All True," for example, could be Dando the celebrity owning up to the gossip, or it could be a more universal end-of-the-affair song, but it rings true on both counts. There's also more messing with musical genres; they range from a charming country song ("The Outdoor Type") to a Metallica-sounding instrumental ("Secular Rockulidge") to a traditional ballad ("Knoxville Girl") done in a doomy grunge style that's appropriate to the lyric.

When I finally get to talk to Dando, he does indeed sound ecstatic -- in part because he and a few friends, including running partner Todd Phillips, are living it up on Martha's Vineyard.

"You're right, I feel really great," he reports when he hits the line. "How come? Well, I got some really cool roller skates, my friend Meadow just gave them to me. I live in Gay Head, and it's beautiful. I have this weird attachment to Gay Head, it's the best produced beach I've ever seen. So beautiful that it makes you feel like George Bush. I got my cousin here, we're off the hard stuff and we're on the hard alcohol. We decided to renounce all drugs and drink like proper Americans."

Ask what he's been up to lately and he reluctantly gets serious. "What I did was take a really gradual rest, and I decided to possibly quit music forever. And that's exactly when I decided to do an album. Back to writing songs for the sake of writing songs, back to fun, back to the practice space -- back to high school, right? And I went to Australia, had this nervous breakdown."

Say what?

"Well, yeah. It got really ugly, and Nick Cave figures into that. Because I went on tour with the Birthday Party and Nick Cave was backstage, and I heard him saying to our bass player, `The Lemonheads aren't dark enough.' Then we had this burst of creativity, and now it's dark enough."

There is a downside to Dando's misadventures, and it got a lot downer during the Come On Feel the Lemonheads tour. When we last talked, following the release of that album, Dando claimed he'd cleaned up and was working out. Turned out he was fibbing.

"I remember, I talked to you from some hotel in Germany, saying I'd cleaned up and I hadn't. But check this out. It was great for a long time. A lot of those drugs were not incorrect for me; they were what I should have been doing. It's just that you reach a point where your metabolic rate can't handle it, when you're gonna die or get permanently fucked up on hard drugs. And like Flavor Flav says, `I'm not going out that way.' I love life too much."

How bad did it get?

"Well, I don't want to name names, but it was me and a bunch of musicians getting in the Nissan Crack Finder and driving around LA. Dude, this says it all: I opened the Viper Club [the Sunset Strip scene of River Phoenix's demise]. It was me and Shane MacGowan and that chick named Maria McKee. That about says it all."

The upside is that Dando happens to write really good drug songs. The best track on It's a Shame About Ray, "My Drug Buddy" (or "Buddy," as it was called after Atlantic Records censored the title), wasn't a pro- or anti-drug song, just an honest look at a kind of intimacy that happens in certain situations. Ditto for "Style" on Come On Feel the Lemonheads.

The best moments on car button cloth also concern the dreaded substances. One of them is a song you probably won't get to hear. "Purple Parallelogram" is based on a riff that Dando picked up from Noel Gallagher when the Lemonheads toured Australia with Oasis; the song made it to the test pressings but was yanked after Gallagher complained. It's a power-pop dance number that compares the rush of romance to that of the latest designer drug ("Purple parallelogram I got in Amsterdam, made me dream a dream I didn't understand . . . Do you wanna dance with me?"). In its original slot (as track #8) "Purple Parallelogram" provided a light spot where one was needed; it was a mistake to release the album with one less song instead of coming up with a replacement.

That leaves the middle of car button cloth with a string of a half-dozen comedown songs broken only by the joky "Outdoor Type." And "Losing Your Mind" gets the same kind of junkie ambiance Neil Young achieved on Tonight's the Night, with a muttered wasted vocal and a Crazy Horse-ish guitar jam.

"To tell you God's honest truth, I wrote a lot of those songs when I was still using," Dando admits. " `Hospital' I wrote when I was in rehab. My parents threw me in; it was like an intervention. And I'm thinking, `Holy shit -- suppose there's some communicable disease going around, and I get it because I'm in fuckin' rehab?' But I benefitted from those horrible things that happened to me."

The one question he won't answer directly concerns that tabloid photo. Instead he hands the phone to Phillips, who says, "What were we doing? We were hanging out the way we hung out, being the sad and depressed people that we were. The maid came and took the disposable camera."

This marks the second time that Dando has kept the Lemonheads name for an all-new line-up, a move that has earned him some criticism in the past. "Of course it's not the real Lemonheads; it's the Eastern Dinosaur Dark Jr. Lemonheads; it's been this way since 1988 when the original band broke up. When the last band broke up, it was no hard feelings, just a beautiful explosion of goodbye and hello. Dave Ryan said he didn't want to tour anymore, but then he joined Fuzzy and went everywhere with them." (He's since left Fuzzy.)

With a lot of living behind him, Dando has gone back to songwriting (and whatever he was drinking on the Vineyard) as the most reliable source of a buzz. "I'm not happy unless I'm working, and not doing it was driving me up the freaking wall. I wanted to make a lasting contribution, I really did, and I didn't feel like I had yet. I don't mean trying harder, that's for squares. But getting in there and having a decent go at it."