The Lemonheads’ lead singer thought he’d be dead by now. One person changed all that
Not long ago, Evan Dando’s appetite for drugs had taken over his life. Now he’s married, living in Brazil and on a creative streak. So what went right?
By Barry Divola
Newspapers were preparing Evan Dando’s obituary decades ago. Now he lives in the hills above Brazil’s Sao Paulo and sleeps well every night.Credit: Antonia Teixeira
Evan Dando looks like he’s in paradise. He’s walking around the yard of the sprawling house where he lives, as fluffy clouds hang in a bright blue sky, palm trees sway gently in the breeze, colourful parrots fly overhead and his four cats – one of whom is called Marc Jacobs (“named after a friend of mine”) – frolic with each other.
This is in the town of Maripora, in the lush Serra Da Cantareira hills above São Paulo in Brazil, a place he has called home for the past couple of years. The singer-songwriter of the Lemonheads is now 58, which is a miracle in itself. Newspapers were preparing his obituary decades ago. His appetite for drugs was certainly no secret, but then it took over his life, derailing his creativity and reliability. His live performances over the years have suffered as a result, numerous reviews have been written about him squandering his talent, and there has not been an album of original songs from him in almost two decades.
“I was just going for the ‘Ultimate Slacker’ award’,” he says, laughing and shrugging it off. “I did a covers record, then I took another 10 years to put out another covers record. I couldn’t put out an originals record. Well, I could, but it would have been a bad one.”
Things are about to change. Love Chant, the first Lemonheads album of originals since 2006, is set for an October release. A month later, his memoir, the appropriately titled Rumours of My Demise, is due to follow.
To say Dando has fallen on his feet is an understatement. This cat had well and truly used up his nine lives, and he knows it. “I always joke that I died in the fentanyl epidemic and went to heaven,” he says, waving around a large joint that he will smoke over the next hour. “I guess I was a nice person when I was on Earth.”
In the 1990s he became a pin-up boy for alternative rock, a blond, beautiful guy from Massachusetts singing songs that tapped into Gen X ennui, loneliness and a desire for connection. He was a Zelig-like figure in that decade, seemingly always in close proximity to an array of famous folks: getting chummy with Angelina Jolie, Chloë Sevigny and Johnny Depp in various Lemonheads videos; swapping spit with actor Adrienne Shelly on the cover of Spin; falling about onstage and off with everyone from Courtney Love to Oasis.
Today, Dando is more reminiscent of Jeff Bridges’ The Dude in The Big Lebowski in look, bearing and speech. He’s craggier and heftier, his beard is frosted with grey and his voice is lower in register and more husky in tone. I have interviewed him many times over the years going back to 1990. The conversations are rarely linear. There are lots of digressions, flights of fancy, word association games and unrelated anecdotes.
At one point in this interview, in the space of a single answer, he quotes James Joyce and later offers the opinion that people who didn’t grow up watching Gilligan’s Island don’t seem to get it if they watch it now. He’s well-
read, a pop-culture sponge and a musical savant.
He’s also an inveterate but entertaining name-dropper. In the course of an hour he will tell me stories involving Nick Cave, Amber Valletta, Michael Hutchence, Thurston Moore and Keith Richards’ son Marlon.
Dando’s connections with Australia are strong. He first toured here in 1991 and fell in love with Sydney’s inner-city music scene. “I was only 24, but I already felt really old. I thought it was all over. Australia brought me out of that with all the experiences I had and the people I met.”
He gravitated towards Half A Cow, a seminal record, comic and book store in Glebe, owned by musician Nic Dalton, who would go on to play bass in the Lemonheads for a few years in the ’90s. He also became fast friends with Tom Morgan, the singer and songwriter with indie-rock trio Smudge, and the two would go on to co-write many of the Lemonheads’ best-known songs.
A 1992 publicity photo for the Lemonheads with David Ryan, Dando and Nic Dalton, who owned Glebe’s Half a Cow store.Credit: Courtesy of Evan Dando
Dando is currently touring Australia with the latest of the many incarnations of his band, and they are playing his two most popular albums, 1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray and 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads. The former in
particular is littered with songs inspired by people he met in Sydney back then – Alison’s Starting to Happen is about Alison Galloway, drummer with Smudge; My Drug Buddy is about Morgan’s girlfriend at the time and set in a phone booth on King Street, Newtown; Rockin Stroll is about the infant son of Robyn St. Clare, bass player with The Hummingbirds (Dando would go on to cover her song Into Your Arms).
“The motivating force in both those records is Australia,” he says. “Those people were like my family for a while there. A big gang. It was a special period. You go through phases like that where you have a great bunch of people around you.” He pauses, then adds: “Usually when you’re not doing heroin.”
With ’90s Sydney band Smudge’s drummer Alison Galloway, who inspired his song Alison’s Starting to Happen.Credit: Courtesy of Alison Galloway
Dando is a remarkably open book, willingly bringing up his problems with drugs without being prompted and never saying that anything is off the record. He relates his experiences with a mix of humour, horror, self-deprecation and a genuine sense of wonder that he got through it.
He reached his nadir a few years ago, when he was living in a trailer in Martha’s Vineyard. “People were trying to outdo each other with their badass drug behaviour around me to impress me or something. One guy was storing kilos of coke in my trailer, and he’d wake me up at 4am with all these people needing to buy. One guy hid his gun in my refrigerator. Four or five of those people from that time are dead now.”
The reason he’s alive is video-maker Antonia Teixeira, daughter of well-known Brazilian singer-songwriter Renato Teixeira. The two met in 1994, when the Lemonheads were on tour in Brazil. In 1997 they dated briefly, but it was only about four years ago that they reconnected. “I remember the first time she came over to see me,” he says of their reunion. “Some of my friends were sitting around my trailer, with drugs all over the floor. She wasn’t even judgmental. She just knew I could do better than I was doing. She was persistent, too. I wasn’t very nice to her sometimes. I knew I wasn’t ready for a relationship, so I felt like I was helping her out by being a jerk. I was thinking, ‘You don’t want to get involved with me right now.’ She waited, though.”
‘I don’t really believe in regrets. I don’t see the point. I did the things I did.’
Evan Dando
They got married on December 30 last year in the yard of their house. Dando was previously married to English model Elizabeth Moses from 2000 to 2010. Teixeira has three grown-up children. Dando says they are considering having a baby. “I think I’d be a great dad. I’m naturally really good with kids.”
Where does he think he would be now if Teixeira hadn’t come along? “Dead or in jail,” he says, without hesitation. “I remember watching a video of a show I played where I’d get halfway through a song and just stop and tell some story. It was really sad. That’s what did it. That’s when I went to rehab. It sucked. But it stuck.”
Dando and wife Antonia Teixeira, who married last year.Credit: Courtesy of Evan Dando
He clarifies that he’s clean from what he refers to as “hard drugs”. He stills smokes pot and adds that he has also taken acid a few times, “but only because it was very good Polish acid, so I knew what was in it”.
When I ask how long he used heroin, he holds up the underside of his arm, which bears a constellation of white scars. “See that? That’s 20 years or so. The years fly by, you know?”
As for regrets, much like Edith Piaf, he has none. “I don’t really believe in regrets. I don’t see the point. I did the things I did. Regretting it’s a waste of time. In the end I dealt with it. I regret slamming my fingers in the shutters yesterday. They were heavy and that was ill-advised, and now my fingers are turning black. Those shutters are nice, I really like them, but don’t get on the wrong side of them.”
Now he can feel his creativity rushing back. He had his first exhibition of paintings and drawings in October last year at London’s Farsight Gallery. There’s the memoir, the new album and another album that is already written and largely recorded. “I want to do as much as I can now,” he says. “At this age I feel better than I did in my 40s. Every show, I go out there and I give it everything. There’s something more exciting about things now. My heart has opened up more. And I sleep well every night. That’s all it takes to not lose your voice, by the way. Sleep eight hours.”
Then there’s another one of those Dando-esque pauses. “And don’t stay up doing coke four nights in a row.”
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