Happy 30th Anniversary to The Lemonheads’ fifth studio album It’s A Shame About Ray, originally released June 2, 1992.
The first time I heard the Lemonheads, my friend Kara had just finished puking over the side of a boat. It was the Fourth of July 1992, and Kara’s friends’ dad, whose boat we were on, had given us a bunch of Jell-O shots. Y’all want some? It’s like candy, he said with a heavy drawl and a Benson & Hedges laugh-cough. It was hot and muggy even out on the water, and it was probably a combination of the sticky heat and the sickly constant swaying of the boat, rather than the gelatinous neon alcohol, that made Kara hurl the contents of her stomach into the sea.
Not that either of us could really hold our liquor. I was 15, she was 14, and the only other drinking we had done was daring each other to order the occasional beer at the local ice-skating rink. You could do that in Germany, where the drinking age was 16 (and wasn’t strictly enforced) and where we had, up until very recently, both been American army brats.
But now it was the summer before high school, Kara had just moved to Virginia Beach, I was visiting her, and we were out on a boat that smelled of coconut suntan lotion and where everyone had nut-brown skin and sun-bleached hair. Kara was a pale freckly redhead, though, and, oddly, so were her new friends, identical twins named Carrie and Jessica, two giggly American mall girls with big bangs and thick southern accents.
The radio was on and a version of “Mrs. Robinson” I had never heard came on, sped-up and dizzying, like riding on a tilt-a-whirl. One of the twins started singing along. “What is this?” Kara asked weakly. “It’s The Lemonheads! Haven’t you heard this yet?” the twin said, except she said it like The Liiimonhayds. I didn’t particularly love the cover, but it struck me as something very different from the metal-pop of Guns N’ Roses, the straight-up pop of Paula Abdul, and the R&B-infused pop of the New Jack Swing that had been ruling the airwaves, which is probably why I still remember this all so vividly. It was even different from Nirvana, which had just broken through to the mainstream that year in 1992.
"In the old days,” Evan Dando told The Guardian in 2006, “the Lemonheads appealed to 16-year-olds and their mothers.” Maybe because I lived in Germany, I didn’t really experience the Lemonheads as a teenybopper band, aside from my encounter on that boat with the mall twins. Yet there is plenty of evidence that it indeed was the case. Exhibit A: A few scenes in My So-Called Life where Angela Chase and her friends dance spastically to Lemonheads songs; B: countless magazine spreads dubbing Dando an “alternahunk”; and C: Dando’s cameo in Reality Bites whereby he says something like, “Whatever babe, I’m Audi 5000” as parting words.
Jay McInerney, in his 1994 New Yorker profile of “it” girl Chloe Sevigny, seemed to capture the conundrum of the band the best: “The Lemonheads are considered either very cool or really bogus – lead singer Evan Dando has managed to inspire an anti-fanzine called Die Evan Dando, Die, presumably because he is too cute and his songs are too catchy. But Chloe simply likes the Lemonheads.” I simply liked them, too.
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Aside from the schmaltziness of “Mrs. Robinson” (which was removed from the album’s 1993 reissue), It’s A Shame About Ray is a melancholy, happy-lackadaisical album that captures the way young people hung out pre-Internet. It’s the languid stretch of a day spent bumming around, stopping at a pay phone to call a friend, and running into someone else you didn’t expect to see. It vividly encapsulates the ’90s slacker zeitgeist, by way of ’60s hippie tradition—and it did so even back then as it was happening, with or without the touchpoint of The Graduate.
Ray’s subtle genius lies in a relatable caricature of the ennui and happy accidents of the era, and yet there’s also a distinct sense that it’s offering a glimpse into a deeply personal experience, a particular narrator and a specific set of friends with their own intricacies—and the intimacies between them.
The record is approximately a half-hour long, many of the songs clock in around two minutes, and nothing about it seems to try very hard—the hooks and melodies are effortless, concise yet cascading. Which is why Dando was sometimes dismissed. He was seen as someone to whom things came too easily—his good looks, definitely—but also his art. Yet there’s restraint to the album and to each of the songs—a discipline even, a purposeful sparseness.
The album opens with “Rockin’ Stroll,” a jangly, rollicking grunge-infused track that imagines everything through the perspective of a baby in a stroller, lounging back, staring at people’s knees (“She takes me on a rockin’ stroll / If you won’t wave, guess I won’t know / As I roll by, I hope you’ll throw a smile at me”). It’s fun and easy, and doesn’t make a big deal out of its kitsch, just invites you to come along for the ride.
The languid jangle then continues on the next song, “Confetti,” which, emotionally, acts as the album’s centerpiece in that it’s where we seem to get to the root of Ray’s forthcoming melancholy. “Confetti” is autobiographical, a song about Dando’s parents’ divorce during his childhood, which had a deeply wounding effect on his life. The hurt is masked by the song’s otherwise celebratory title, but at the same time it’s not hard to imagine “confetti” representing the million little fragments of something, or someone, that used to be whole.
I was going through my own parents’ divorce at the time and reading about the meaning of “Confetti” in SPIN or Rolling Stone was likely what hooked me into an earnest, unironic Lemonheads fandom. The emotional honesty of the song lies in the repetition of what appears to be a simple, straightforward story (“He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could’ve / The story’s getting closer to the end”). With each retelling vis-à-vis the chorus, we’re in the middle of a speeding-up cycle—more complex than our initial impression—until Dando concludes the song with the slow, drawn out “He’d rather be alone than pretend” and a single, sad, reverberating note. It’s exactly how a divorce plays out.
In addition to Dando’s guitar and lead vocals, It’s A Shame About Ray features Juliana Hatfield’s bass and gorgeous backing vocals, and David Ryan on drums. Because Dando and Hatfield were both from Boston and there was a widely publicized soap opera around whether or not they were dating, as well as a backstory of how they had both played in the Blake Babies, I always assumed that Ray was about meandering the streets of Boston in a marijuana haze. That’s how I still think of it in terms of my own life—wandering the cobblestone streets of downtown Heidelberg with my then-boyfriend and friends, lying in the grass along the Neckar River in summertime, smoking Turkish hashish. “Ship without a rudder’s like a ship without a rudder’s like a ship without a rudder,” Dando sings on “Rudderless,” the song on Ray where he dives headfirst into directionlessness.
The album was, however, written during a 1991 narcotics-fueled trip to Australia, where Dando would bum around, surf, and meet future Lemonheads bassist Nic Dalton. (The Lemonheads have gone through so many different iterations that Dando, the only constant, has referred to the band as more of “a collective.”) Some of the Ray songs were written with co-writer Tom Morgan, frontman of the Aussie band Smudge. In fact, the song “Alison’s Starting To Happen,” is about Smudge drummer (and Nic Dalton girlfriend) Alison Galloway’s ecstasy trip (“She’s the pebble in my mouth / and underneath my feet”), but they toned it down to make the track more of a love song. When I eventually saw the Lemonheads live in around ’93 or ’94 after the release of Come On Feel The Lemonheads, they were touring with Superchunk, and Smudge as their opening act. I had no clue about the ecstasy factoid, but I remember thinking it was very cool that the band had a girl drummer.
Other characters from that Australia trip also make an appearance on It’s A Shame About Ray. Take “My Drug Buddy,” for instance, a song about scoring drugs with a friend in Sydney’s Newtown. “That's a really good story of a night back in the day when we used to do speed,” Dando said in an interview with Songfacts. “It was me and my friend Nicole – she was actually my friend Tom's girlfriend. I was trying to tell the story as forthright and normal as possible , without many rhymes or anything. There’s something like a chorus at the end – it’s not really a classic song structure.” Hatfield’s almost childlike harmonies on the finished song imbue it with innocence, making it, once again, more of a lazy, dreamy love song than sordid drug tale.
For the album’s title song, Dando and Morgan had stayed up several days in a row when they came across a newspaper headline—“It’s A Shame About Ray”—that was either about Australian TV presenter Ray Martin losing his job, or about a man in Melbourne—presumably a vagrant—that everyone just knew simply as “Ray,” depending on the telling. It’s a hauntingly melancholy track, and throughout the album, Ray seems to serve at varying times as Dando’s alter ego, or as cautionary tale. “It’s spooky,” Dando said of the song. “It’s about a disappearing person. It’s a very open-ended, grey sort of song.”
At varying points, the album picks up with “The Turnpike Down,” a wind-blowing-your-hair driving kind of song; “Kitchen,” a high-energy pop track with handclaps that reminds me of a custard fight I had in a kitchen in Brooklyn with someone who would later become my boyfriend; and “Bit Part,” where Dando appeals sweetly to a crush for just a little more time (“I want a bit part in your life / A walk-on would be fine / I just want a bit part in your life / Rehearsing all the time.”) “Ceiling Fan In My Spoon,” near the album’s finale, could be taken like the opening track “Rockin’ Stroll” (about the baby) as fun, nonsensical kitsch, or, with its frustrated scream towards the end, it could be construed as drugged-out hallucination (“Started out today jello in the sand / Went out of my way not to understand / Walked into a tree don’t you look at me”).
By the time I saw the Lemonheads perform, I was past the drinking age of 16 and had been enjoying Heidelberg’s vibrant, somewhat wild nightlife thanks, in part, to my friend Shana’s parents who let us all spend the night whenever and didn’t care how late we came home. Still, it was my newly divorced mother who drove us—me, Shana, and Nikki—across the grey German countryside in a downpour to see the Lemonheads play in a dingy nightclub a couple hours away. I have no idea if my mom liked the Lemonheads, but if she did, it was probably because of “Mrs. Robinson” or the Ray track “Frank Mills” from the ’60s Broadway hit Hair. All I remember from the show was that the bands were tight, and that Evan Dando took me down when he stage-dove into the crowd. (I was fine.)
Today, Evan Dando is ok—he’s not totally clean and sober, but he’s also not dead—and the last performance I saw of his was in a Walgreen’s during the pandemic as a thank you to the pharmacy for finding his lost wallet. The song he chose to perform was “Confetti.” What I thought immediately—besides, damn, Dando still looks pretty good—was of his parents’ divorce, and whether he was still thinking about it, too.
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