Fine and Dando

It’s late afternoon on the Monday of the recent Bank Holiday weekend. Up onstage at the Village, Evan Dando is leading his band – whose members include sometime Codeine drummer Chris Brokaw and Ben Kweller-collaborator Josh Lattanzi – through a rendition of ‘Louie Louie’, the brilliantly raucous rock ’n’ roll anthem that has served as a primer for many a nascent garage band throughout the American north-west and beyond.

Soundcheck duties duly completed, Dando bounds offstage, greets hotpress with a firm handshake and invites your correspondent backstage to carry out the interview. Of course, had the singer lived up to previous form, his dressing-room would be a wasteland of hedonistic excess, complete with empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, groupies recumbent on the floor and sundry hangers-on injecting smack into their eyeballs.

Instead, what you’re presented with is closer to the homely untidiness of an adolescent boy’s bedroom. CD cases proliferate in huge piles, various discarded items of clothing are strewn across the floor, and a mountain of candy-bars sit atop a tray on the table. Steve Diggle of the Buzzcocks – who played here last Saturday night – has left a message for Dando on the wall: “To Evan, a great big yes! All the best, Steve Diggle.”

Such cheeriness is a long way from the slump Dando found himself in during the mid-’90s, when the dissolution of the Lemonheads, and a subsequent plunge into chronic alcoholism and spiralling drug-abuse, threatened to see him join rock ’n’ roll’s long-list of premature burn-outs.

“It was a dark time,” reflects Dando, whose years of sybaritic indulgence have left him with the perma-glazed expression of a 14-year-old acid freak, belying his lucid conversational tones. “I guess I’ve always been a depressive sort of person, and one way of dealing with it is through narcotics. But, y’know, I also think too much is made of that period. Ultimately, is anyone really interested? For as much as people in groups will drink and do drugs, music fans do not generally say, ‘That guy’s coke intake is so fuckin’ huge, I’m gonna get into that band.’ The music is still what’s important, it’s just that sometimes it’s a lot of the other shit that gets focused on. It’s really fucking bizarre, when you think about it.”

These days a solo artist, Dando first rose to prominence as front man with the Lemonheads, the Boston- based outfit whose rollicking cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs. Robinson’ catapulted them to international stardom in the early ’90s. As contemporaries to the likes of Mudhoney, The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr, the Lemonheads were routinely cited as being a huge influence on the prevailing slacker zeitgeist. However, were the band themselves at all conscious of being part of the broader Generation X movement?

“Absolutely, I knew that a special thing was happening,” Dando reflects. “I remember in 1987 in Boston, there was just so much going on. And we toured with Mudhoney on the west coast in ’89, and things were really kicking off in Seattle around that time. And back at home, we’d find ourselves on the same bill as The Pixies, who were fucking phenomenal, a force of nature. Then Dinosaur Jr would roll into town… I brought my mother along to see Dinosaur play and she actually cried!”

Dando also hung out with the undisputed king and queen of the grunge generation. Although I’d prepared an elaborate question to lure the singer into talking about the couple, as soon as the words “Courtney Love” left my mouth, he took the subject and ran.

“That was a case of really bad time and bad management,” he interjects. “They put Hole on tour with the Lemonheads while Nirvana was on tour in Europe. And Courtney was being a total bitch, making shit up and telling it to Kurt. And then when Kurt died, I thought all kinds of strange shit. I was way too close to it for comfort. A lot of people said his death was inevitable, but I don’t think it was.

“It was a fucked-up moment in time – we were all out of our minds on drugs and strange things happened. I have a lot of great memories from those years and I don’t think I’d change anything, but you really do you look back on times like those and think, ‘I’m glad I don’t have to live that way anymore’.”