Evan Dando Reflects on Drug Use: 'Some People Were Meant to Take Drugs – and One of Them'
Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and points to a series of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so long to develop noticeable track marks,” he says. “You do it for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly notice it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Only joking!”
Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, appears in decent shape for a person who has taken every drug available from the age of his teens. The songwriter behind such acclaimed songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently had it all and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to the pub. In the end, he orders for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has stopped using a mobile device: “I struggle with online content, man. My thoughts is extremely scattered. I desire to read all information at once.”
He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this recent household. I avoided family often in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”
Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost three years. He concluded it was time to quit after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for assisting him to stop, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe certain individuals were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”
A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he says. But currently he is preparing to launch his new album, his debut record of new band material in almost two decades, which contains flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really heard of this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “It's some Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”
Dando is also publishing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the rumors that intermittently spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a wry, heady, occasionally shocking narrative of his experiences as a performer and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full given his disorganized conversational style. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I was psyched to secure a good company. And it positions me in public as a person who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to accomplish from I was a kid. In education I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”
He – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it represents a period prior to existence got difficult by drugs and fame. He attended the city's elite Commonwealth school, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had no rules aside from no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in bible class, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. After band members departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.
During the 90s, the group contracted to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the noise in favour of a increasingly languid and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando says. “If you listen to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the following we finished school – you can detect we were trying to do what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously labeled by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the act into the mainstream. In 1992 they released the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable demonstration for his writing and his melancholic croon. The name was derived from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman lamented a individual named the subject who had gone off the rails.
Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was using hard drugs and had developed a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. A publication anointed him one of the 50 sexiest individuals alive. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.
However, the drug use got out of control. His memoir, he delivers a blow-by-blow description of the significant festival no-show in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for his band's scheduled performance after two women suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally showing up, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile audience who jeered and hurled objects. But this was minor compared to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances
