Review of It's A Shame About Ray
by Matt Ashare
From Boston Phoenix 5th June 1992
It's taken five records and six long years of growing up in public for Evan Dando to come into his own as a songwriter. But with his band Lemonheads' new release, It's a Shame About Ray (Atlantic), he's settled into a comfortable style and come across with his most consistent and accessible album. Instead of trying to cover the wide range of musical styles - from hard-metal-edged grunge to folky acoustic rock - that made the last two Lemonheads releases uneven at best, Dando focused on developing the simple-yet-gutsy melodic guitar rock that's been his strength since 1988's Creator.
The songs on It's a Shame About Ray range from the straightforward power-pop hooks of the title track and first single to the revved-up quirkiness of "Ceiling Fan in My Spoon" without straying too far from the basic formula of strummed acoustic guitar mixed with some Gibson SG grit over a solid rhythm section. Dando does stray into a bit of countrified rock for "Hannah & Gabi," and he sings "Frank Mills" (a song from the Broadway production of Hair) against a simple acoustic-guitar background. But there are none of the half-hearted excursions into heavy-metal antics that marred Lick (1989) and, to a lesser extent, Lovey (1990).
Darlings of the Boston scene, Lemonheads
have evolved into whatever group Dando has assembled to record and/or tour.
Before this album, the band went through yet another line-up change: original
bassist Jesse Peretz departed, leaving Dando as the only original member,
though drummer Dave Ryan has now been on board for three and a half years.
Juliana Hatfield, a longtime friend of Dando's who recently left the Blake
Babies to pursue her own solo career, filled in on bass for Ray and added
some pleasant background vocals on a few tunes, most notably "My Drug
Buddy" and "Bit Part," which opens
with Hatfield screaming "I
just want a bit part in your life." (When Lemonheads start touring this
fall, Peretz will be replaced by Nic Dalton, a bassist from Australia who
wrote "Kitchen" for Ray.)
Locale as well as personnel seems to have affected the new album. Dando did much of the writing in Australia and the recording in LA, which seems to have freed him from the obligation to live up to the band's Boston-based punk-rock roots.
"I'd be lost without Australia," he concedes. "The people I met there got me excited about music again, and I wrote the whole record on my acoustic guitar while I was hanging out down there." Dando also hooked up with a songwriting partner Down Under, Tom Morgan (from a Sydney band called Smudge), who helped pen two of the songs for Ray and is already working with Dando on songs for the next sessions.
You can also hear the difference in the production, which was all done at LA's Cherokee Studios by the Robb Brothers, a threesome of siblings who had a band called the Robbs in the '60s. Instead of playing down the acoustic poppy side of Dando's music, or burying it in studio gloss, the Robb Brothers let Dando's songs speak for themselves.
LA allowed Lemonheads a chance to fill out their sound instrumentally with such non-punk devices as keyboards and pedal steel guitar. As Dando puts it, "It's that LA thing. I wanted Sneaky Pete from the Flying Burrito Brothers to play pedal steel, but they couldn't find him, so they got Skunk Baxter from the Doobie Brothers, and they also got Barry Goldberg, the guy that played with Dylan a lot, to come down and play some organ."
But by far the strangest meeting of minds that took place at the studio sessions came when Dando ran into Gunnar Nelson (of Nelson) and persuaded him to lay down some background vocal tracks on "Alison's Starting To Happen." "He was hanging out in the studio all the time and I had my guitar, so we played songs and hung out. He's a really nice guy, so I asked him to do some singing and he did the oooh-weees on `Alison's Starting To Happen' and this big Boston and Sweet vocal flourish at the end. That's what's cool about recording in LA: all these music people are there all the time. Urge Overkill were also hanging out at the studio, so I had Nate [Kato] sing the backgrounds on `Ceiling Fan in My Spoon.'"
If all this talk of LA has you thinking that Lemonheads have sold out their punk roots, then you might miss some of the old guitar grunge. But if, like me, you always found the poppy, melodic side of the band more convincing, It's a Shame About Ray will be a welcome surprise. Dando's take on it is plain. "I could never see this record as a sellout because it's real simple songs. It's just what I want to do. I can't worry about any of that stuff anyway."