Evan Dando

Evan Griffith Dando (born March 4, 1967) is an American musician and frontman of the Lemonheads. He has also embarked on a solo career and collaborated on songs with various artists. In December 2015 Dando was inducted into the Boston Music Awards Hall of Fame.

Evan Dando

Birth name Evan Griffith Dando Born March 4, 1967 (age 53) Essex, Massachusetts, United States

Genres Alternative rock, punk rock, country rock Occupation Singer, songwriter, guitarist Instruments Vocals, guitar, piano Years active 1986–present

Associated acts The Lemonheads, Blake Babies, Juliana Hatfield, Sneeze, MC5

Biography Early life and education Dando was born in Essex, Massachusetts, on Boston's North Shore, to Susan, a former fashion model, and Jeffrey, who worked as a real estate attorney. At the age of nine, his family moved from Essex to Boston; his parents divorced two years later. In his teens Dando attended Commonwealth School in Boston. In the fall of 1986 he enrolled at Skidmore College but dropped out after getting "four Fs and a D."

The Lemonheads While at Commonwealth, Dando met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz, and in 1986 they formed the Whelps before changing their name to Lemonheads, like that of the candy manufactured by Ferrara Pan. The Lemonheads debuted at the Meltdown House in Cambridge on July 18, 1986, followed by a show at The Rat on August 19. The band recorded an EP, Laughing All the Way to the Cleaners, which got the attention of Taang! Records, a local label. The Lemonheads' first three albums, Hate Your Friends, Creator, and Lick, were all released on Taang!

Following the third album, Dando left the group briefly after some tension with Deily, and joined Juliana Hatfield's band Blake Babies. However, he returned as a drummer when The Lemonheads' cover of Suzanne Vega's song "Luka" became successful, and the group had an opportunity to tour Europe. Deily, however, quit the band shortly before the tour, which placed Dando as the guitarist and lead vocalist. Dando brought in David Ryan on drums, and the group signed with major label Atlantic/Warner, where it released the album Lovey in 1990. The album straddled punk, rock, country, and metal, and sold about 9,000-11,000 copies.

Dando spent some time in Australia to write songs with friends Nic Dalton and Tom Morgan, who later started the band Sneeze. Some of his songs formed the basis for The Lemonheads' fifth album, It's a Shame About Ray. In 1992, The Lemonheads recorded a punk-inflected cover of Simon and Garfunkel's hit "Mrs. Robinson" to help promote the VHS release of The Graduate film for its 25th anniversary. The song reached number 19 on the UK Singles Chart in December 1992, and was included in the album's re-release as a bonus track. Dando's face appeared on several magazine covers, and People listed him among the "50 Most Beautiful People". In an interview with Q magazine, he admitted he smoked crack cocaine and regretted it. In late 1993, the group released the album Come on Feel the Lemonheads, which featured singles "Style", "The Jello Fund", and "Into Your Arms". During the group's touring in 1994, Dando befriended Oasis and appeared at some of their live shows. He also made a cameo appearance at the end of the 1994 film Reality Bites with Karen Duffy.

Dando re-formed The Lemonheads with former member John Strohm on guitar, Bill Gibson, former bassist of Australian band The Eastern Dark, and Patrick Murphy, a former member of Dinosaur Jr., on drums. The group released the album Car Button Cloth in 1996. The album featured "jangly guitar songs" such as "If I Could Talk I'd Tell You," and some writing that showed off Dando's darker side in "Break Me" and "Losing Your Mind". In 1997 the band went on tour and played its final gig at the Reading Festival, after which the band went on hiatus.

In 2005, Dando put together a new lineup for The Lemonheads which included Karl Alvarez and Bill Stevenson, formerly of the pop-punk pioneering band, the Descendents. In April 2006, they signed with Vagrant Records, and released a self-titled album in September. Dando also had a lineup which included bassist Vess Ruhtenberg and drummer Devon Ashley of the Pieces where they toured the UK, Europe and the United States. In late 2007, Alvarez and Stevenson toured with Dando for the first time live on the US tour. In 2008, he toured with Ruhtenberg and Ashley to promote the re-release of a deluxe version of It's a Shame About Ray, and then toured with Ruhtenberg and drummer P. David Hazel of Beta Male for a European Tour. On April 23, 2008 at the inaugural NME US Awards ceremony held at the El Rey in Los Angeles, Dando received a Classic Album award for It's A Shame About Ray, although Entertainment Weekly reported that he threw the award in the garbage offstage, and then returned to perform "Ray" and "My Drug Buddy".

In 2009 the Lemonheads released Varshons, a collection of 11 covers, including tracks originally recorded by Gram Parsons, Wire, GG Allin, Christina Aguilera; the album featured vocal performances by actress Liv Tyler and model Kate Moss. For many of the tours since 2010, The Lemonheads have included the entire It's a Shame About Ray album on the setlist.

Solo career and collaborations Dando worked with Australian musicians Nic Dalton and Tom Morgan, both of whom have been involved with The Lemonheads. In Sydney, he joined Dalton, Morgan, and a number of Half A Cow artists on a self-titled album by the band Sneeze and the album Coastal by Godstar. Dando participated in the Australian band the Givegoods, which featured Paul Dempsey of Something for Kate.

Dando has worked regularly with Juliana Hatfield where he appeared on several Blake Babies songs and she in turn played with The Lemonheads. In Blake Babies, Dando wrote on tracks and provided supporting music and vocals on the Slow Learner album, released in 1989. He also collaborated on Hatfield's album Hey Babe, released in 1994. In 1999, he recorded a duet with Hatfield for the 1999 album, Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons. The two sang Gram Parsons' "$1000 Wedding". Their long-time relationship inspired a line in the Barenaked Ladies' song "Jane": "No promises as vague as heaven. No Juliana next to my Evan". In late 2000, Dando sang with the Blake Babies and played some acoustic shows with them. In 2011, Dando and Hatfield paired up again for a series of live performances.

In 1995, he had a small role in James Mangold's indie film Heavy, and contributed two songs to the soundtrack.

During an acoustic world tour in early 2001, Dando garnered renewed interest in his back catalog. With touring musicians Ben Lee and Ben Kweller, he performed a mix of Lemonheads songs and solo songs. His performance at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge on October 18, 2000, was recorded and officially released in the fall of 2001 as Live at the Brattle Theatre; the album was packaged with an additional disc, an EP titled Griffith Sunset that featured covers of country songs.

In February 2003 Dando released his first solo album, Baby I'm Bored, which reached the top 40 of the UK Albums chart.

In 2004, Dando performed as the lead vocalist for the band MC5 on a 41-show tour. He has collaborated with The Dandy Warhols and soundtrack composer Craig Armstrong. At the All Tomorrow's Parties' Don't Look Back festival, Dando played several live dates, including a full performance of the It's A Shame About Ray album.

In 2015, Dando played solo shows in the United States and Europe.

Personal life While taking a break from making music with/as the Lemonheads, Dando met English model and musician Elizabeth Moses in 1998; they married two years later. Moses contributed photography to Dando's albums Live at the Brattle Theatre and Baby I'm Bored as well as the Lemonheads' 2006 eponymous album and its 2009 follow-up, Varshons, on which her backing vocals can be heard on the song "Fragile." Moses and Dando separated in 2010. On February 13, 2019, Dando appeared on an episode of The Goldbergs called "My Valentine Boy”. In the episode, he was played by Luke Eisner. In the episode he played guitar with The Dropouts, a band starring Adam Goldberg’s fictional older sister.

Evan Dando’s songs feel saturated with a kind of directionless longing.Photograph by David Tonge / Getty
In June, 1992, the Lemonheads released “It’s a Shame About Ray,” the band’s fifth record, and its first to garner international renown. The album featured the singer and guitarist Evan Dando, the bassist Juliana Hatfield, and the drummer David Ryan. Five months earlier, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” had landed at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and so-called “alternative rock,” as it was then known, was reaching a commercial zenith. I first learned about the Lemonheads through that most potent nineties triad: the group had been featured in Sassy magazine’s “Cute Band Alert,” it had a video in heavy rotation on “120 Minutes,” MTV’s late-night dumping ground for stuff too weird or grating for prime time, and Dando had scored a cameo in the film “Reality Bites,” in which he coolly ended a conversation by saying, “I’m Audi 5000.”

The Lemonheads were getting big. Dando, the band’s chief songwriter, had even appeared on “Regis and Kathie Lee” to promote the album. “This is a young, giant star,” Regis Philbin announced. Dando ambled onstage, wearing a tan secondhand jacket. “This is in,” Regis said, fingering the threadbare lining and nodding. “See, I’m out, I’m just totally out.” At one point, Dando described his mother, who was sitting in the audience, as “cool bananas,” which intrigued Regis. “It just means cool bananas,” Dando explained. (Was anyone ever so young?)

This month, “It’s a Shame About Ray” is being reissued with bonus material, including B-sides, demos, and radio sessions, and in April the Lemonheads will be performing these songs at a handful of tour dates. In the thirty years since its release, I have come to think of “It’s a Shame About Ray” as a perfect album. Certainly, there are records more sophisticated, more dangerous, or more expert, yet there are few so exquisitely self-contained. Dando’s songs are saturated with a kind of directionless longing—a troubling, inescapable sense that there’s more out there for him. Often, his protagonists are walking around waiting for something interesting to happen. For most writers, it’s extraordinarily difficult to catch and hold feelings of pathos, idleness, hunger, a kind of hazy but manageable melancholy. Dando’s songs are short (many are under or around two minutes), with choruses and hooks so easygoing, so suffused with nonchalance, that it feels as though they must have arrived fully formed and without struggle.

Dando, who is now in his mid-fifties, is hunky in a dopey-yet-strapping, I-rolled-off-the-couch-like-this way; in the nineties, he became an alt-rock pinup, appearing on the April, 1993, cover of Spin shirtless and golden-skinned, and with his tongue in the model Adrienne Shelly’s mouth. In a 1994 profile of Chloë Sevigny for this magazine, Jay McInerney described the Lemonheads as “considered either very cool or really bogus” and referred to the creation of an anti-Dando fanzine called Die Evan Dando, Die, thus named “presumably because he is too cute and his songs are too catchy.” (Sevigny, who is featured in the video for “Big Gay Heart,” a track from the album “Come On Feel the Lemonheads,” is one of several celebrities to appear in the band’s videos: a forlorn Johnny Depp stuffs his belongings into a grocery bag and takes off in the video for “It’s a Shame About Ray”; Angelina Jolie makes out with Dando as his defeated girlfriend looks on in “It’s About Time.”)

Dando was brought up in Back Bay, a historic and moneyed neighborhood in Boston. His mother was a model, and his father worked as a real-estate attorney. As a teen-ager, Dando attended the private Commonwealth School, where, in 1985, he started a band called the Whelps, which later evolved into the Lemonheads. The inaugural lineup included the bassist Jesse Peretz (who went on to direct films and television shows) and the singer and guitarist Ben Deily. The trio’s first record, “Hate Your Friends,” was released on the Boston-based independent label Taang! Records (an acronym for “Teen agers are no good”), which specialized in local punk and hardcore. “Hate Your Friends” may sound jarring and cacophonous to anyone chiefly familiar with the band’s sweeter, late-career output, but nonetheless it’s tuneful and energetic. The Lemonheads signed with Atlantic Records and released “Lovey” in 1990. Since then, the band has had more than forty members. Dando once described it as “kind of like a collective.”

“It’s a Shame About Ray” eventually went gold, yet for a while it seemed as though Dando himself might not survive the decade. In 1995, the band was scheduled to play at the Glastonbury Festival, in England; Dando arrived two hours late and was booed off the stage. (He later told the Guardian that he had been in bed with two women and a bag of heroin.) He admitted that he had smoked crack and damaged his vocal cords during the sessions for “Come On Feel the Lemonheads,” telling Q magazine, “I went to the throat doctor and I told him I’d been smoking crack and he said, ‘Don’t do that, man. That’s dangerous.’ ” After that, rumors that he was dead would periodically circulate, but Dando ended up outlasting many of his contemporaries.

The Lemonheads have not released new material since “The Lemonheads,” in 2006. (That lineup included the bassist Karl Alvarez and the drummer Bill Stevenson, both members of the punk-rock band the Descendents, with contributions from Garth Hudson, the organist for the Band, and the singer and guitarist J. Mascis, of Dinosaur Jr.) In 2009, the Lemonheads released a covers record called “Varshons.” On it, Dando takes on Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around to Die.” Unlike Van Zandt, who sounds heartsick, frayed, and desperate, Dando gives a performance that is practically jaunty. That album was followed, nearly a decade later, by “Varshons II.” In the years since, Dando has been promising to release new songs, but they have yet to materialize.

“It’s a Shame About Ray” was recorded at Cherokee Studios, in Los Angeles, and produced, at Atlantic’s suggestion, by the Robb Brothers. In the nineteen-sixties, the Robbs (Dee, Bruce, Joe, and Craig) had briefly served as the backing band on “Where the Action Is,” a variety show hosted by Dick Clark, but by the early seventies Bruce, Dee, and Joe had become more focussed on production. They opened Cherokee in 1972, and during the following decade worked on a series of remarkable records, including Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic,” David Bowie’s “Station to Station,” and Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall.”

The Robbs recruited some unexpected players for the “Ray” sessions, including Jeff (Skunk) Baxter, a guitarist turned defense consultant who had been a founding member of Steely Dan and a guitarist with the Doobie Brothers. It is almost impossible to imagine a band less germane to the dishevelled alt-rock vibe than Steely Dan, yet Baxter’s pedal-steel parts on “Hannah and Gabi”—a pretty, fragile song about being a terrible partner (“I’m out wandering around / You’re but one thing I’ve found”)—are warm and rubbery, giving the song a lilt that recalls Gram Parsons. The acoustic demo included on the reissued record, which features only Dando on vocals and acoustic guitar, is listless by comparison.

“It’s a Shame About Ray” is the only album by the Lemonheads to feature Hatfield, who is a dynamic and beguiling artist on her own; her soft, almost childlike vocals on “My Drug Buddy,” a loping, breezy ode to the person you call when you want to get high but don’t want to be alone, give a potentially devastating track an unexpected airiness. In fact, much of “It’s a Shame About Ray” should be devastating—these are songs about being young and lost, “like a ship without a rudder’s like a ship without a rudder’s like a ship without a rudder,” as Dando puts it—but isn’t. Since that record’s release, Dando has remained spacey and carefree despite the nihilism that plagued his Generation X cohort. He never wanted to be a pop star. At times, it has seemed as though he barely wanted to be a professional musician. The reissue of “It’s a Shame About Ray” closes with an echoing, acoustic demo of “Confetti,” a song that addresses being the less interested party in a romantic entanglement. It’s a minute and fifteen seconds long. Dando doesn’t need much time to say his piece: “He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could’ve / He’d rather be alone than pretend.” ♦