Graham Reid | | 2 min read
I Don't Want to Go Home
Until he became a bit of an embarrassment to himself – I have a story about him trying to score on tour here, a week or so after he'd assured me he was clean – you had to admire Evan Dando of the Lemonheads.
He shaped the sound of melodic indie.rock in the Nineties alongside Buffalo Tom, REM, Grant Lee Buffalo and others, and he was kinda fun.
When I interviewed him in the early 2000s – I'd interviewed him a decade before when he was at a peak on the back of the critically acclaimed albums It's a Shame About Ray ('92) and Come on Feel the Lemonheads ('93) – we inevitably talked about the drugs which has slightly derailed him.
He was refreshingly unapologetic.
"It was part-and-parcel of the whole thing. I wanted to do it properly, be in a rock band, get successful and do tons of drugs - and I wouldn't have done it any other way had I had to do it again.”
I suppose the pity is he did keep doing it and the drugs became less benign.
Car Button Cloth of '96 which followed those previous two was the last Lemonheads album for almost a decade and he's only done one solo album (Baby I'm Bored of 2003, reissued and expanded in 2017) since then.
He seems to have survived on a reissue programme and a couple of covers albums (Varshons and Varshons II).
As a measure of how much time has passed since his heyday we arrive at the almost 30thanniversary reissue of Car Button Cloth, the album now appearing as a double vinyl with the extra album being made up of acoustic versions, covers, remixes and so on. But not Purple Parallelogram co-written with Noel Gallagher who seemed to go off it when he heard it on the first pressing of the album.
On original release CBC didn't receive quite the same acclaim as its predecessors and its downer vibe (Losing Your Mind) and lyrics which suggested he was royally screwed up. If I Could Talk I'd Tell You sounds like a cheery Byrds/Petty jangle-guitar song but it's about being unable to communicate in an interview while on crack.
(Fully understand, I had an encounter with Petty who was exactly like that, so out of it he almost fell of his chair.)
There are filler songs (One More Time) alongside more delightful tracks (the ballad C'mon Daddy) and their treatment of the Louvin Brothers' Knoxville Girl.
A patchy Lemonheads/Dando album which he obviously didn't feel in a hurry to follow-up.
Is the reissue improved by the extra 13 songs?
Well the remix of the enjoyable Outdoor Type (“I never set foot inside a tent, couldn't build a fire to save my life, I lied about being the outdoor type”) polishes up as funny country confessional; there's a slightly dialed-down power chord treatment of Galveston (Dando had the ability to make something out of covers like Mrs Robinson and Leonard Cohen) and an acoustic version of Metallica's Fade to Black; the previously unreleased Arise brings his baritone forward on a lovely string-enhanced ballad and there's a one minute take of Doug Sahm's wonderful I Don't Want to Go Home.
Some of these – and Oasis' Live Forever acoustically with whistling – will be down to taste and only a few add a little lustre to the Car Button Cloth package.
Evan Dando is closer to 60 than 50 these days and we can perhaps conclude that, barring some miracle resurrection, we have seen the best of him.
Some of it was on Car Button Cloth but most on the albums before it.
.
You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here
post a comment