🔗 Share this article

Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and points to a series of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to get decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you think: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my skin is especially tough, but you can hardly see it today. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”

The singer, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has taken every drug going from the age of his teens. The musician behind such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and squandered it. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is likely to veer into wild tangents. It's understandable he has given up using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My thoughts is extremely scattered. I just want to absorb all information at once.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this new family. I avoided family much in my life, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing quite well so far.” At 58 years old, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I’ll smoke pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost a few years. He decided it was time to quit after a disastrous performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not tolerate this kind of conduct.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I believe some people were meant to use substances and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his relative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he says. But now he is preparing to release his new album, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in nearly two decades, which includes flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't really heard of this kind of dormancy period between albums,” he comments. “It's a Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have integrity about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before I was ready, and now I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the name is a reference to the rumors that fitfully spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a wry, heady, occasionally shocking account of his experiences as a performer and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out given his haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “challenging, but I was psyched to secure a reputable publisher. And it positions me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an attorney and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it represents a period before existence got complicated by drugs and celebrity. He went to the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. There were few restrictions except no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, don’t be an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in 1986. His band began life as a rock group, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. Once Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads largely became a solo project, Dando recruiting and dismissing musicians at his discretion.

During the 90s, the band signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in favour of a more languid and mainstream folk-inspired sound. This change occurred “because Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like Mad, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can detect we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” The shift, humorously labeled by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, 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 young man called Ray who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the only one. At that stage, the singer was consuming hard drugs and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a music clip with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and film personalities. People magazine declared him among the 50 sexiest people alive. He good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that his song, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying a great deal of fun.

However, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed account of the significant festival no-show in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu live performance to a hostile crowd who booed and threw bottles. But this was small beer next to the events in the country soon after. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances