Evan Dando Shares on Drug Use: 'Some People Were Destined to Take Drugs – and I Was One'
Evan Dando rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a line of small dents along his arm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to get noticeable track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is especially tough, but you can hardly see it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy laugh. “Only joking!”
Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group his band, looks in decent shape for a man who has taken numerous substances going from the time of 14. The songwriter behind such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is likely to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has given up owning a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is too all over the place. I desire to read everything at the same time.”
Together with his spouse his partner, whom he wed recently, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace family much in my life, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing quite well up to now.” At 58 years old, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, maybe psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”
Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely 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 cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think certain individuals were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”
A benefit of his comparative sobriety is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But now he is about to release his new album, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really heard of this sort of hiatus between albums,” he says. “It's some lengthy sleep situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new before I was ready, and at present I am.”
The artist is also publishing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, heady, fitfully shocking narrative of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he collaborated with co-writer his collaborator, whom one can assume had his work cut out given his disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a reputable company. And it gets me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is all I wanted to accomplish since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”
He – the youngest child of an attorney and a former fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it represents a time prior to life got difficult by substances and celebrity. He attended the city's elite private academy, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “was the best. There were few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. Once band members departed, the group largely turned into a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.
In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and reduced the squall in preference of a more melodic and mainstream folk-inspired style. This was “since the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “If you listen to our early records – a song like Mad, which was laid down the day after we finished school – you can hear we were trying to do what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly described by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would take the act into the popularity. In 1992 they released the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic vocal style. The name was taken from a news story in which a clergyman lamented a individual named Ray who had strayed from the path.
The subject was not the sole case. By this point, Dando was consuming heroin and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, shooting a video with actresses and dating Kate Moss and film personalities. A publication anointed him one of the fifty most attractive people living. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the notion that his song, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having too much fun.
However, the substance abuse became excessive. His memoir, he provides a detailed account of the fateful Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women suggested he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually showing up, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a unfriendly audience who booed and hurled objects. But that proved minor next to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances
