Evan Dando Reflects on Drug Use: 'Some People Were Destined to Take Drugs – and One of Them'

The musician rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a line of faint marks running down his forearm, subtle traces from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to get decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can hardly notice it today. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and lets out a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

The singer, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 1990s alternative group his band, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has taken numerous substances available from the time of his teens. The musician behind such acclaimed songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. We meet at midday at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if we should move the conversation to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to consume. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My thoughts is too scattered. I just want to absorb 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 reside and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this new family. I avoided domestic life often in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take LSD sometimes, maybe psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not bear this kind of conduct.’” He acknowledges his wife for helping him to stop, though he has no regrets about using. “I think certain individuals were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to smack, 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 original Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which contains flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't truly known about this sort of hiatus in a career,” he says. “It's some lengthy sleep situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new until the time was right, and at present I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a reference to the rumors that fitfully spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a ironic, intense, occasionally shocking narrative of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his hands full given his disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I was psyched to secure a good company. And it positions me in public as someone who has written a book, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish since I was a kid. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an attorney and a former model – speaks warmly about his education, maybe because it represents a period prior to existence got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He went to the city's prestigious private academy, a liberal institution that, he says now, “was the best. It had no rules aside from no skating in the corridors. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in religious studies, that he met Ben Deily and Ben Deily and started a group in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and Ramones; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once band members left, the Lemonheads largely turned into a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in favour of a more melodic and mainstream country-rock style. This change occurred “since the band's iconic album was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like Mad, which was laid down the day after we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my voice could stand out in softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously labeled by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they released the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless demonstration for his songcraft and his somber croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman lamented a individual named Ray who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, the singer was using hard drugs and had developed a liking for cocaine, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a music clip with actresses and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him among the 50 sexiest individuals alive. He cheerfully dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he delivers a blow-by-blow description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally did appear, he delivered an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile audience who booed and hurled bottles. But this was small beer compared to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances