LEMON APPEAL

Eight or nine teenage girls wearing trend-of-the-month-club t-shirts are hanging around outside Dublin's National Stadium for a chance to sneak a preview peak at Lemonhead Evan Dando. I fidget inside, smug in the knowledge that the band's lead singer and resident sex god is going to have to talk to me whether he wants to or not.
The band arrive and Evan is last to come inside, having mingled with the loitering fans a bit longer. He bounds up the stairs leading to the arena, stops abruptly and moans, "Oh, nooooo, it's one of those seated places!"
I laugh and he looks at me, surprised, as if was unaware that he'd been expressing his thoughts out loud. "We never play these kind of places," he explains.
I tell him that I'm from Hot Press, and here to do an interview. He shakes my hand and says "Hi, I'm Evan."
As if I didn't already know.
For all of his height and good looks, there's something floppy about Evan Dando, and when interview and gig are said and done, I can't help but think that were "The Muppet Movie" ever remade with live actors, Evan could do any number of characters justice.
The way his hair hangs in his face when he bounces around on stage, head cocked to his left, leaning down into the microphone mildly contorted-not to mention his use of words like "neato" and "awesome"-tames his knock-me-down-with-a-condom sex appeal somewhat.
Still, Evan comes to town and women - girls, really - swoon. They're the girls who daydream about him in maths class because guys their own age are about as appealing as homework. Girls who subscribe to the Jackie's and Sassy's of the world and read about dating with such enthusiasm that you'd think they were actually doing it.
"That's the audience I always wanted," Evan admits. "It's the audience that, say, the Beatles had and I think it's the cool pop audience. I think it's a good sign."
Catering to such an audience, however, means that Evan's face gets plastered everywhere, while the rest of the band remain fairly anonymous. "We all get a bit annoyed about that," Evan says, "but they all have other things going on in their lives. Like Dave does a lot of writing. He writes screenplays and stuff, and Nik has a record label and another band in Australia. So what happens is I do all the interviews."
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. It's just that the long-haired, baseball cap-sporting American sitting next to me seems so much more likely to have stepped out of a frame of "Slacker" than any glossy centrefold, that anyone who wasn't otherwise informed might guess that he's working a McJob - maybe pumping gas upstate New York or manning the Slurpie machine at the local 7 Eleven.
Listen to "It's A Shame About Ray," the splendid album that pushed Lemonheads over the top and into the stratosphere, with its abundance of laid-back, spliff-smoking pop and it's even harder to believe that someone from this band was voted one of People magazine's "Fifty Most Beautiful People."
"Those kind of things just help the whole thing move along," says Evan in practical mode. "I think it's good to stay a bit visible. I don't take it seriously, but it's funny and you have to do it. The People thing was really weird, but I guess they've got to pick somebody. It's pretty random."
Yes, girls, he's humble too! And on top of that, disturbingly unexcitable when talking about his band and fame. Strange, then that he should change gears so drastically when an envelope containing a button that reads "Zenta" makes its way backstage. He completely flips out and, as in the best Tom Hanks-era movies, comes on like a hyperactive eleven-year-old stuck in the body of a grown-up at the dreaded board meeting.
"Oh my God the Zenta Badge!," he shouts, "That's incredible! Cory is going to go crazy! When he lost his Zenta Badge...that's the religion of the MC5 - that's Zenta. I'm going to mail it to Cory. That's the best. When did he steal it off Cory? I love stuff like that."
"Like this hat," he turns to me, more animated now than at any other stage during the interview, "I keep losing it. Someone steals it off stage and then it comes back a year later."
"I threw the hat in the crowd once when we were tripping, remember?", one of the other band members interrupts, "and I was like 'Oh my God!' and remember?-you got it back that night."
(Wow, man, great story.)
"Zenta - that's amazing," Evan continues before taking measures to secure the badge's safe return to its owner.
Someone else barges in, insisting that Nik and Evan get their picture taken together because they're both wearing Meanies t-shirts. (The Meanies are a punk band from Melbourne, you see, and this guy Wally would be really psyched to see that Evan and Nik, who by the way is Australian, were both wearing their shirts at the same time.)
Evan and Nik stand side-by-side, flexing their muscles and making gorilla noises and I get a fleeting sense of what it would feel like to be trapped in an episode of "The Simpsons" (the one where Homer gets lost in the campsite and is mistaken for a mutant apeman).
The photo shoot ends with the pair of them doing their best Suede impersonations, and at last Evan's glamour boy foundations are revealed. He's a complete ham in front of the camera, posing and pouting. And in this case, the request "Okay, now do Brett" really strikes a chord.
"We had a party the other night with Suede in LA.," Evan had told me earlier. "We've both had a lot of funny hype about us recently in England - they had more, but we had a real camaraderie there, a real affinity.
"And then when we met each other and realised that we were just normal people that really loved music, it was great. We just decided to get really out of it and party and have a good time - so we did. They were such nice guys, really funny. Mat's hilarious. I spent a couple of nights hanging out with him. He's so funny, his shoes are all fucked up. Did you see his shoes?!"
Even a night out on the town walking around on top of shrubbery with Suede, however, can't sell Evan on L.A. "It's a scary place," he says very sombrely. "It's fun for a while, but then you really get sick of it.
"It should be better when we get back," he continues, the thought of going visibly depressing him. "I think I'm going to stay with a friend of mine. He has a neato house so that'll be good."
The band are bound to L.A. at the moment since they're in the middle of recording their next album there.
"It was hard at first," says Evan, "'cause we have a lot of pressure on us right now 'cause the record company's kind of looking at us to do a good record and sell some records. At first it was sort of daunting. We're getting into it now and it seems like it's going to go really well."
But home is where the heart is, as they say, and Evan's just isn't in America anymore. "It just seems like it has been deteriorating so much since I was born," he says. "It's just kind of a harsh toke - all the violence that's happening there all the time and all the chains of stores that are taking over.
"I just see a lot of things that I don't like about it," he continues. "And I don't really think the culture is that great. It has a great history to it and a lot of great things have come out of it, but at the moment... " He trails off shaking his head.
"I like to think that my home is in Sydney now," Evan adds, having toured Australia with the band in '91 and spent a lot of time there ever since. I didn't think I'd like it and I wouldn't have gone there unless I'd been brought there to tour. But when I got there I just totally fell in love with it. It's just an incredibly tranquil, awesome place. We have a lot of friends there. It's like a family, just a group of friends that I really really love to hang out with. It makes me really sad to leave there so I always rush back whenever I can."
One of those friends is Tom Morgan who's in a band called Smudge and co-wrote the title track from "It's A Shame About Ray." He has also co-written most of the new album and Evan affectionately refers to him as "the fourth Lemonhead."
Even though America, let alone Boston, is no longer considered home, that's where Lemonheads started out. They were kind of a Harvard band for a while, consisting of three Harvard students and Evan. That alone made them special since Ivy Leaguers end up in the White House more often than they do The Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame, and Harvard students in general are more interested in Kant and Homer than in any music scene.
With the fledgling Lemonheads playing occasional gigs and an enterprising student name Jon Schecter publishing a leaflet from his dorm room that would eventually grow into America's premiere hip hop magazine The Source, the late mid-'80s might have been an interesting time at Harvard, music biz wise - had anybody noticed.
But Evan eventually picked the fruit from the vine. "It just kind of happened, 'cause you know the people that go to Harvard usually end up doing other things with their lives.
"Harvard's full of assholes," he concludes later on, ignoring the fact that it was a song from a movie about a graduate of that university that put his band on the international stage.
"That song is particularly strange," Evan reflects, "because I never had any passion about it. But that was always one of my favourite movies, and so we were asked if we wanted to be involved in the movie in some way-like releasing that song in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the movie. I wanted to do it just to be a part of that movie."
The version of "Mrs. Robinson" that Lemonheads released was actually done on the first take - and indeed the first time the band played the song all the way through. They have, Evan says, purposely avoided doing it live because, among other things, they liked the idea that they had only played it in its entirety once .
"Sure there are people who want to hear it but there are also people who don't want to hear it," Evan offers. "There are a lot of people out there who do like our songs and when they come to our show they want to hear our songs anyway. A lot of people like that we don't play it.
"We're leaving covers behind now," he adds, "for better or for worse. We're not going to do any on the next record. The whole Mrs. Robinson thing seemed to pass pretty quickly though it's still with us, but it seemed to serve its purpose. It's what it is, you know. Funny things happen. Rock'n'roll is about accidents, you know. It just happened."
You may have noticed that Evan Dando has a strange habit of contradicting himself and still making sense. Almost. "I don't take it seriously, but it's funny," "The whole Mrs. Robinson thing seemed to pass pretty quickly though it's still with us" - these kind of things pop up often enough that you have to wonder whether anything being said here can be taken very seriously or whether he has actually thought about what he's talking about.
At one point, he seemed to stop a sentence dead in its tracks, pick it up, turn it around, place it back down facing the opposite direction, and send it on its merry way. "Dwight Yoakam is okay," he said, "but Garth...and Garth Brooks is okay too."
Yes, something strange is going on here. Having gone into some detail about his reasons for never doing "Mrs. Robinson" live, the band went on to play it later that evening, and despite songs about being "tired of getting high," hash is without a doubt high on the agenda right now.
My own conclusion is that Lemonheads would have done a better job than Pearl Jam playing the waster band in "Singles", Cameron Crowe's cinematic ode to Seattle's disillusioned twenty-somethings. They just don't seem to take anything seriously, and when Evan states that the band is "kind of serious now," it's in the same tone of voice he might use if telling you that his goldfish had died.
Still, reality has forced certain changes in attitude. "As far as live performances go, I always try to do my best now," Evan admits. "Before, if I was in a bad mood I just wouldn't sing or something."
That might be why a Rolling Stone critic said that the Lemonheads live were about as exciting as Necco Wafers, Boston's answer to Hobnobs.
"I love Necco Wafers!," Evan enthuses, "That was a total compliment! That guy hates us and he's the only guy who keeps writing about us. He was married to my friend and she left him and I'm sure that has something to do with it."
"It's good to get bad press," Evan concludes, "because you just realise it doesn't matter what they write about you at all. You just can't take it seriously."
Maybe the best backhanded professional advice I've ever been given.