Evan Dando rolls up a sleeve and points to a line of small dents running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to get decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for years and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is particularly tough, but you can barely see it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”
Dando, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a man who has taken every drug going from the age of 14. The songwriter behind such exalted tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray and My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, central London, where he wonders if we should move our chat to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has given up owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too all over the place. I just want to read everything at once.”
He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he married last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this new family. I didn’t embrace [family] much in my life, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”
Clean to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He decided it was time to give up after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not bear this type of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for helping him to stop, though he has no regrets about using. “I think some people were supposed to take drugs and one of them was me.”
One advantage of his (relative) sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,” he says. But now he is about to release Love Chant, his first album of original Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which contains flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never really heard of this sort of dormancy period [between albums],” he says. “This is some Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until I was ready, and [now] I am.”
Dando is also publishing his first memoir, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a wry, heady, fitfully eye-watering account of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he collaborated with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his work cut out given Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a good [publisher]. And it gets me out there as someone who has written a book, and that’s all I wanted to do since I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce, Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”
Dando – the youngest child of an attorney and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it represents a time before life got complicated by drugs and fame. He went to Boston’s prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “was the best. There were no rules except no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to the Minutemen, Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a one-man show, Dando hiring and firing musicians at his discretion.
In the early 1990s, the band signed to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a more languid and accessible country-rock sound. This was “because [Nirvana’s] Nevermind came out in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “If you listen to our early records – a song like Mad, which was recorded the day after we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to do [what Nirvana did] but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my voice could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they released the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic croon. The title was taken from a newspaper headline in which a priest bemoaned a young man named Ray who had gone off the rails.
Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was using heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, too. With money in his pocket, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with Angelina Jolie and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. People magazine anointed him one of the 50 sexiest people alive. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was having too much fun.
Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he delivers a blow-by-blow account of the fateful Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who booed and threw bottles. But this was small beer next to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was intended as a break from drugs and touring but, arriving in Sydney, Dando immediately binged on speed, ecstasy and Valium. A breakdown followed, which saw him feeding dollar bills into grates in the gutter convinced it would help him “teleport” back home. He went to the airport planning to get the first plane back to the US but skipped out on his cab fare, leading to his arrest.
The problem, as Dando tells it now, was he hadn’t clocked he was a full-fledged addict, and was going into withdrawal. By the time he got to the airport, “I probably looked like a fucking crazy person. And I didn’t pay for my cab, so I ended up wrestling with five cops. But you know what? They were OK because their girlfriends were all fans.”
Rumours of My Demise may find Dando in the literal gutter but there’s no trace of self-pity. Despite the many lows, he says he always had fortune on his side. “I’ve never overdosed, not on anything. Who can say that?” he says, proudly. Most people, I reply, as gently as I can. He has a better example: the time Martin Scorsese picked the Lemonheads’ cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson for the soundtrack to 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Dando never liked it, but Atlantic had pressured them into recording it in 1992 and it was a hit. When Scorsese alighted on it, Dando was broke. “Like, how did that happen? I think we got 80 grand. That saved the day. I’m just incredibly lucky sometimes, even when I fuck up.”
When I ask about the physical toll after years of drug use, he replies: “The toll is on my teeth,” and flashes newly capped pearly whites plus a trio of gold crowns. “My lungs aren’t great – I have a bit of emphysema. But otherwise, I’m healthy. My heart isn’t enlarged, and I don’t know how I don’t have Aids or hepatitis C.” He illustrates how surprising this is through a particularly grisly story. “I once did this thing, getting all the blood out of all the syringes [used by] me and my girlfriend, and pooling them to see if I could get a hit out of it. Like, eww, that’s disgusting. But nothing happened. I have a very good constitution.”
Dando maintains that, bar the Australia meltdown, everything that he has done he has done on purpose, though I’m not sure I believe him. He is, he says, “an entertainer. In my way, I feel like I was always in service to entertain people.” He pauses and grins. “And I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed my life incredibly.”
Rumours of My Demise is published by Faber on 23 October. Love Chant is released on Fire Records on 24 October.
