I'll Be Out Here If You Need To Find Me

Evan Dando's musical career- sole ever- present member of Lemonheads and a solo album too- has been a very stop- start affair. In the early 90s he crashed into the popular culture with It's A Shame About Ray and Come On Feel The Lemonheads after some under the radar albums as a three piece- their third, Lick in 1989, got some music press attention in the UK partly due to their cover of Suzanne Vega's Luka but they were just another American indie band, a little bit punk, a little bit country, ragged guitars, ripped jeans and Converse. After grunge exploded and their cover of Mrs Robinson gave them a hit they started selling records and Evan hit a rich vein of form. 

Exhibit A) My Drug Buddy from 1992's It's A Shame About Ray

My Drug Buddy

Exhibit B) Into Your Arms from 1993's Come On Feel The Lemonheads (a cover of a 1989 song by Australian band Love Positions)

Into Your Arms

Evan also developed some serious problems with crack cocaine and Lemonheads went on hiatus after 1996's Car Button Cloth. In 2003 he put out a solo album, Baby I'm Bored and a Lemonheads re- union followed in 2005 with a couple of albums and some appearances and disappearances. I've very much dipped in and out but am often curious to hear what he'd been up to. Evan's a talented writer and singer. 

Now living in Brazil Evan has got things back together and an album Love Chant is due in October. In Maya new song, Deep End, came out, three minutes thirty seven seconds of riffing and growly vocals, a song that recalls former glories but also sounds like a new Evan Dando. Julianna Hatfield is back and J Mascis turns up for the guitar solos.

And then two weeks ago another one, In The Margin, short and sweet and on fire, more riffs, more guitars, more choruses and Evan sounding great. 

I Know All This And More

There's some thing about the sound and feel of thirty year old, American alt- rock which is doing it for me at the moment. Apropos of nothing I was struck by the desire to hear Belly's 1993 hit Feed The Tree recently and it became an earworm for days...

Feed The Tree

Belly were Tanya Donelly's band, a breakaway from both Throwing Muses and The Breeders for Tanya (the former with step- sister Kristen Hersh, the latter with Pixie Kim Deal, Kim's twin sister Kelley and Josephine Wiggs). She formed Belly with Chris and Thomas Gorman and Fred Abong in 1991 and released Star in 1993. Feed The Tree is a beaut, with churning indie rock/ folk rock guitars and Tanya's honeyed but slightly weary vocals, chiming into the chorus, 'Take your hat off boy when you're talking to me/ And be there when I feed the tree'. 

The album Star also featured this song,  Gepetto, which was also released as a single. Geppetto, despite the sweetly sung/ chiming guitars sound, is a bit darker, a song about control and losing your soul. 

Gepetto

From Belly it's a short hop back to 1992 and The Lemonheads, a single from the It's A Shame About Ray album and a sparkling showcase for the songwriting talents of Evan Dando. 

Confetti (Remix)

Drums And Bumpers

While everything has been going on for us for the last three weeks the real world has been continuing to spin on its axis. The death of Michael Nesmith was a sad loss. If you grew up in the 1970s you couldn't escape The Monkees TV show (and why would you want to?). Mike was a talented songwriter and before he even appeared in The Monkees had written his classic song Different Drum, although he wouldn't record it as a solo artist until 1972. Linda Ronstadt and The Stone Poneys had a big hit with it in 1967 but I think the first version I heard was a cover by The Lemonheads in 1990. Evan Dando drawling 'You and I/ Travel to the beat of a different drum' over some crunchy early 90s indie- rock makes a good claim to be the definitive version of the song. 

Different Drum

The Monkees 1968 film and soundtrack Head are legendary, a trippy, satirical attempt to throw off their pop image. As We Go Along is one of the soundtrack's highlights and although it's sung by Micky Dolenz rather than Mike Nesmith I thought it was worth posting here today regardless. There's a bit of an all star cast playing on this one- Neil Young, Carole King and Ry Cooder. 

As We Go Along

Also gone is Robbie Shakespeare, a man whose basslines run through my record collection like the writing through a stick of rock. As half of the Sly and Robbie rhythm section he's appeared on more great records than most. Take Grace Jones in 1980 as as good an example as any. 

Pull Up To The Bumper

It's A Little Secret

We watched The Graduate last weekend, the first time I've seen it for many years- it's still a brilliant film I think but it made for discomforting viewing in ways it didn't when I first watched it in the late 80s. Seen through 2021 eyes (and a fifty one year old eyes as well) the seducing of Ben by Mrs Robinson at a party to celebrate him graduating is less seduction and more grooming. Ben's post- college malaise, aimlessness and fear of adulthood was very familiar to me when I first saw the film but his behaviour becomes increasingly extreme as the film goes on and his treatment of Elaine, the Robinson's daughter seems much crueler now. His later and sudden obsession with her also seems much odder now than it did then- Ben's descent coming across more and more like a breakdown, mental health issues surfacing rather than the whims of a young man. At the centre of the film is the empty lie at the heart of the suburban American dream, the existential crisis of people who have it all but have nothing. Mrs Robinson is bored, listless, trapped by manners and society in a marriage she never wanted but ended up in because of a teenage pregnancy. Ben is adrift, literally for much of film, floating round his parents' pool on a lilo. The only place he seems content is at the bottom of the pool in the scuba diving gear, well away from his parents, their friends and an endless round of congratulatory parties. Mr Robinson plays golf and drinks. Ben and Mrs Robinson's relationship (if that's what it is, regular sex in a hotel filling the hole in both their lives) is destroyed when Ben says he wants to talk before they have sex. The conversation throws it wide open and leads to Ben telling Elaine and everything unravelling. When the action shifts to Berkeley and Ben pursues Elaine the film becomes increasingly dark. It's difficult to have much sympathy for Ben at this point- in 1989 I'm sure it was Ben I was supposed to identify with but it's not easy to sympathise or empathise with him very much now. Dustin Hoffman makes him become pretty unlikeable in ways I hadn't really noticed before. Mrs Robinson, crushed by the affair becoming common knowledge, becomes less sympathetic too. Elaine is the most sympathetic character, about to married to a college boyfriend solely to keep her away from Ben. The closing shot of them on the bus chased by Elaine's family is superb, the sinking realisation on both their faces that what they've just done might not be the answer to either of their problems. 

The Graduate was released in 1967, the central year of the 60s, and is at least partly about a generation gap- Ben's behaviour and attitudes and those of his parents in stark contrast. Ben and Elaine question their parent's values -get married, get a good job, settle down, get a car and a house. Mrs Robinson is questioning those values too. Conformity and acquisition lead to deadening boredom. The youth feel confused and lost. These aren't specific to the 60s, they're universal (at least in the modern world). Ben's generation are now in their seventies, the Boomers, many of them comfortable and well off in their retirement. It's a clever and witty film, sly in places and seems to be about a rite of passage, but some of it's central themes came through quite differently watched in 2021. 

It was well worth watching again. The cinematography is brilliant, suburban California captured in mid- 60s technicolour, the enormous houses and swimming pools, the blues really blue and the greens really green. The soundtrack is, it goes without saying, superb. It's a record that has been part of my life since childhood. My mum had a copy and its cover, Ben in the hotel room and Mrs Robinson's stockinged foot sticking out provocatively, was always near the front of her records. Simon and Garfunkel's songs are not just playing with the film, they are woven into it, as central to it as any of the cast. The Sound Of Silence is as bleak as any folk music made during the 60s, the harmonies and reverb unable to distract from the 1960s- the problems caused by lack of communication, the apathy generated by consumer society, neon gods and darkness. Strawberry Fair/ Canticle is another song that's always been there, not least because in the late 80s The Stone Roses turned into a song about getting rid of the Queen. And then there's Mrs Robinson...

Mrs Robinson

Mrs Robinson was re- written for the film after Simon presented it to director Mike Nichols but began life as Mrs Roosevelt, a former First Lady who worked tirelessly for others and rarely did anything for herself. The famous Joe DiMaggio line appeared out of nowhere according to Paul Simon, a moment of inspiration. 

The Lemonheads cover version from 1992 is an oddity, a minor hit that sounds like the band tossed it off in an afternoon, a punk- ish cover that the record company hoped would recoup some money/ smash the charts. Evan Dando reportedly hates it- so apparently does Paul Simon.