Review of The Best of The Lemonheads - The Atlantic Years
by David Benedict
From Melody Maker 1998
Fame, fame, fatal fame plays hideous tricks on the brain and rock history is littered with the pretty corpses of those who've fallen by the wayside. It's a cruel culture that grabs hungrily for the next big thing one minute and spits it out the next. But is it the case for Lemonheads' Evan Dando?
Taken from the four albums the one-time college rock pin up recorded for Atlantic over a period of six years (he'd made three for Boston indie label Taang!), the songs on this "farewell to Atlantic" collection might easily have all come from the same record. It's the kind of music made for driving or crying into your beer to; in other words, great pop music. Look a little harder though and see the fragility that left Evan a casualty of extended rock'n'roll binges.
In some senses his druggy gooning echoes the prat falls of pre-"Angels" Robbie Williams - professional ligging and arsing about with Oasis (his much-hyped collaboration with Noel, Purple Parallelogram, never made it onto vinyl, it was rumoured at Mr Gallagher's request). Even at the height of his critical and commercial success (1992's wonderful It's A Shame About Ray, which contained the muscular yet perfunctory romp through Simon & Garfunkel classic Mrs Robinson, their only sizeable hit in the UK), he was already fading out. My Drug Buddy echoes the darker moments of Rem's Out Of Time and finds our dog-eared hero "too much with myself, I wanna be someone else", while elsewhere he's "like a ship without a rudder" (Rudderless).
Come On Feel The Lemonheads in
1993 was a robust if less subtle follow up, yielding Into Your Arms and the
goofily well-intentioned liberalism of Big Gay Heart. Pulled down by partying
too hard, Evan wasn't to surface again for three years. His final Atlantic
album, Car Button Cloth wasn't quite the career turnabout that Robbie pulled
off but that it appeared at all was a surprise to everyone: "I've been
falling down since I learned to walk" sang Evan defiantly on the self-explanatory
It's All True. Neatly, he'd already written his band's own epitaph "It's
a shame about Ray/in the stone under the dust/his name is still engraved".
Remember him for that, rather than the druggy gooning or the luminous good
looks. Cheek bones are never enough, the songs are. Let's hope he makes it
back.