The Lemonheads

The band that changed my life, revisited

The Lemohneads in 1987, Evan Dando, Me, Ben Deily

I’m not going to bury the lede, this is a promotional post. I am opening two shows for The Lemonheads next week, in Nashville on August 28, and in Atlanta on August 29. I’ll likely play guitar on some of their songs as well. I hope you come to a show, and I hope you say hello. It will be fun. That’s the promotion. Here’s the ticket link.

Now, then, a little more about how this band changed my life…

I met The Lemonheads before they were famous…WAY before. We were all teenagers in early 1987. I moved to Boston from Indiana in 1985 to attend Berklee College of Music. I first heard The Lemonheads on a college radio station and I bought their debut 7” EP. The band consisted of three Boston or Cambridge high school friends, Evan, Ben, and Jesse, who started playing together in their prep school band room. Our bands met and became instant friends; within a couple months, Evan tricked the other two to bring me into the band as the drummer. It wouldn’t work in the age of mobile phones - he told the drummer practice was cancelled, then when he didn’t show up, he told Ben and Jesse that I could fill in. The other drummer, Doug, was Ben’s friend from the Brandeis dorms. Ben had to tell Doug he’d been replaced. They’d just made their debut album, Hate Your Friends. I heard it as a pre-release cassette, and it quickly became my favorite album. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I played drums in the band for about 18 months. We made their second album together, it’s called Creator. We played dozens of regional shows and toured twice. During that time we hung out every day. Evan was my closest friend at the time, and we were usually together, either at the “condo pad” I shared with my Blake Babies bandmates in Boston’s Back Bay, or at the flat Evan and Ben shared, connected to Ben’s parents’ house in North Cambridge with our rehearsal space in the basement. In March of 1988, Evan and I each turned 21 and spent most nights out at the rock clubs, The Middle East, The Rat, TT The Bears, and about a dozen other dives. The music in the clubs in those days was unbelievable. I’ve never felt more connected to a group of people who weren’t my literal family. Those are happy memories.

Things changed when our bands started to become more popular. My bandmates in Blake Babies, Freda and Juliana, never approved of me playing in The Lemonheads.¹ Freda and I were a couple so things became awkward. Eventually, in late 1988, I had to make a choice because of actual conflicts. I quit The Lemonheads, and briefly Evan quit along with me and joined Blake Babies on bass. Then he had a hit record in Germany with a cover of Luka that I played drums on, and The Lemonheads reformed and he never looked back.

Evan and I didn’t see each other nearly as much after that, but we remained friends. Then everybody went on tour and things got crazy, then Freda and I moved back to Indiana to avoid the high cost of Boston. Blake Babies ran its course in an acrimonious split, and we formed a new band, Antenna, in Indiana. Then things got weird: Evan and Juliana became super famous, seemingly overnight. Like, all over MTV, on the covers of magazines, in Hollywood movies. I wasn’t in touch with either one of them at all. I didn’t know how to feel about it.

In fact, I struggled during those times. Freda and I had a great band, we made music I’m still proud of, we traveled the world playing clubs and enjoyed some modest success. But I had to accept that Evan and Juliana were living the dream we all shared, and I wasn’t part of it. People reminded me all the time about how famous our former bandmates had become. Sometimes people were rude about it. I went through periods of depression, especially when things slowed down.

Then something unexpected happened. Evan called me during that surreal week when Kurt Cobain died, in April 1994. I was in the studio making an album with my band Velo Deluxe for fall release, and I didn’t have much planned that spring or summer. Evan asked me to join the band - the iconic lineup of Evan, Dave Ryan, and Nic Dalton - playing guitar on a tour leg that started in Spain and included Glastonbury and Reading festivals and several months of headlining shows and festivals in the U.S. Why did he decide to invite me along? I’m not really sure. I think he probably just wanted another friend along. Maybe he wanted to beef up the sound. But I will say this: It’s one of the most generous, life-changing things anyone has ever done for me.

I ended up playing hundreds of shows with the band over the next four years. I had so many incredible experiences, and we made a lot of fantastic music together. Nevertheless, the experience demonstrated to me that the thing I’d always thought I wanted - to be a member of a big band traveling the world playing shows every night - wasn’t what I really wanted after all. When the endless tour finally ended, I completely changed direction and went back to school. The experience of being part of the band gave me confidence to move on in a way that would have been difficult if I’d never done these things. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had in my life, but I wanted something different. Someday I’ll share my stories from those tours, there are so many.

Today, Evan is still one of my oldest, closest friends. We’re closer now than we’ve been in years, and it’s a real pleasure to share the stage with him. I’ve had the pleasure of working with many talented artists over the years, mostly on the business side. But to me, Evan is the G.O.A.T. He’s such a talented singer and writer, and despite all the partying he’s done over the years, his voice is as good as ever, just a beautiful, expressive instrument. We’re in our 50s now, and I can count on my fingers how many friends I have from those days who are still in my life. It’s such a pleasure to tap back into the musical conversation, to play those songs that carry so many memories and so much joy from those incredible times I’m so lucky to have lived.

To be continued!

1. When Blake Babies played on the radio for the first time, in 1987, on Emerson College’s station WERS, we covered Second Chance by The Lemonheads. The words in the chorus are “There’s no such thing as a second chance, there’s no such thing as another try.” Juliana changed the words to “There’s no such thing as a Blake Baby, drumming for The Lemonheads.”