In case you need to refresh your memory, The Lemonheads are an alt rock relic, receiving international accolades for their seminal 1992 album, It’s a Shame About Ray. Listening to Ray nearly twenty years after its release is like opening a time capsule and experiencing a short’n’sweet blast (the album clocks in just shy of 30 minutes) of early 90’s ethos – sometimes sunny, sometimes stormy, lazy and bittersweet. When the Lemonheads announced that on their rigorous Fall ‘11/Winter ’12 tour they would be playing all Ray, every, die hards exploded with glee, while others scratched their heads and tried to jog their memories.
It seems as though that’s the case with the Lemonheads. Ray’s success gave them their 15 minutes of being media darlings (they performed on every talk show you can shake a stick at – Letterman, Regis and Kathy, etc.), but then they sort of vanished. The few who love them passionately will never forget them, but for most people, the Lemonheads are a name on the tip on their tongues – a name they can just barely remember. And who can blame them. The Lemonheads have changed personnel like day-of-the-week panties, causing their sound and song quality to be somewhat inconsistent from album to album.
Let’s get one thing straight – The Lemonheads have always been whoever singer-songwriter Evan Dando happens to be playing with. Right now, he’s got Fred Mascherino on bass and Chuck Treece on drums. Show opener Meredith Sheldon took the stage and belted out a jaw-droppingly gorgeous rendition of Big Star’s “Kangaroo,” before being joined by her band for a slough of solid originals. Then Dando took the stage all by his lonesome.
After reading mixed views of the Ray revival tour, I gotta say…I was worried the show might be a dud, not to mention the fact that I was still a little bitter about Dando having stood me up on three different scheduled phone interviews. But, alas -there he was – Evan Dando. Without warning, and in his floaty, dreamlike way, he went straight into “Being Around” from Come on Feel the Lemonheads, their 1993 follow-up album to Ray, a song with such cutesy lyrics as, “If I was your body, would you still wear clothes? / If I were a booger, would you blow your nose? / Where would you keep it? / Would you eat it? / I’m just trying to give myself a reason for being around,” at which point Dando (who, by the way, has never been beaten with the ugly stick) won my Valentine’s Day heart.
Dando played several more acoustic songs in seamless succession, and without speaking in between, including “All My Life” and “Hard Drive” from his arrestingly beautiful, tearjerker of a solo album, Baby I’m Bored, released in 2003 after a seven-year recording hiatus: “God knows what I thought I’d do / I bit my own sweetheart in two,” and “This is the child I’m bearing now / This is the love that I’ve always had / This is the face I make when I’m sad / This is the town I’m living in / This is the hard drive / This is the ocean / Have you ever felt yourself in motion?” Beautifully melancholic and sentimental, Baby I’m Bored is an album that really must be heard to be believed.
After the unexpected pleasure of hearing some of Dando’s solo work, Mascherino and Treece took the stage. Dando, speaking for the first time, coolly said, “Okay, now we’re gonna play It’s a Shame About Ray,” which they did, in full, and to a T, complete with Mascherino singing Juliana Hatfield’s charming backup vocals from the original recording. Both adoring fans and newbies danced their bottom dollars off and partied like it was 1992. Short, sweet, and simple, Ray’s themes of lazy love and loss, doing drugs and staying bored, wandering around with nowhere to go and feelin’ damn fine about it filled the venue. The album’s title track, plus “Rudderless” and “Drug Buddy” were particular highlight’s of the evening: “I’ve never been too good with names / The cellar door was open I could never stay away,” “Waiting for something to break / Left my heart out to bake / Nothing there in my glass / Wasn’t air meant to last,” and “She’s coming over / We’ll go out walking…There comes a smile on her face / There’s still some of the same stuff we got yesterday…I’m too much with myself / I wanna be someone else…I love my drug buddy.” Evan Dando and the Lemonheads on Valentine’s Day ‘12 at the Spanish Moon is not a show I’ll forget anytime in the near future. It sure beat the shit out of any heart-shaped box of candy.
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Be sure to check out the Lemonheads most recent 2009 release, Varshons, from The End records.
