Evan Dando — Lemonheads frontman, one-time alternative rock “it” boy, and notorious hedonist whose career was the very definition of sex, drugs, and rock & roll — is set to tell his life story in an upcoming memoir.
Titled Rumors of My Demise — a tongue-in-cheek nod to the seeming inevitableness of Dando’s premature death in the Nineties — the tome tracks the singer’s wild, excessive life.
“My life is a muddy river. I thought I should add more dirt,” Dando said in a statement of his memoir, which he co-wrote with music writer Jim Ruland.
“From starting out in Boston’s hardcore punk scene in the Eighties to becoming a Nineties icon as the Lemonheads lead singer, Dando is the embodiment of the golden age of alternative rock & roll-bacchanalian tours with the Lemonheads, two gold records, and all several lifetime’s worth of drugs, sex, and parties,” Gallery Books, the memoir’s publisher, said of Rumors of My Demise. “Dando’s memoir will set the record straight on everything the media got wrong and include never-before-told stories from the tumultuous band history to what it was like to be famous in the Nineties before the internet turned everything toxic.”
The memoir’s editor Alison Callahan added, “I’ve long been a fan of Evan’s music. His shockingly honest memoir is a look inside the funhouse of his mind and a much welcome capsule of Nineties nostalgia.”
Now semi-clean and living in Martha’s Vineyard, Dando spoke to the New York Times in 2019, resulting in a profile that just scratches the surface of the singer/sex symbol’s boisterous Nineties: Parties with Keith Richards and Johnny Depp (a good friend of Dando’s “until I slept with his girl”), a stint serving as a roadie for Enya until he was fired for insulting the New Age singer, a disastrous Glastonbury performance due to a supermodel and heroin, and more.
In between the tabloid fodder, the Lemonheads released a string of beloved Nineties LPs — It’s a Shame About Ray, Come on Feel the Lemonheads, Car Button Cloth — before Dando withdrew from the spotlight; the new incarnation of Lemonheads have only released a pair of covers albums, dubbed Varshons, over the past 11 years.
From Rolling Stone US
