Evan Dando Reflects on Drug Use: 'Some People Were Meant to Take Drugs – and I Was One'
Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a line of faint marks running down his forearm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It takes so long to get noticeable track marks,” he says. “You do it for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is especially resilient, but you can barely see it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Only joking!”
Dando, former alternative heartthrob and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in decent shape for a man who has used every drug available from the time of his teens. The musician behind such exalted tracks 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 threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely candid. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has given up owning a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to read all information at the same time.”
He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he married recently, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace family much in my life, but I’m ready to make an effort. I'm managing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, perhaps psychedelics and I’ll smoke marijuana.”
Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for helping him to stop, though he has no regrets about using. “I think some people were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”
A benefit of his comparative clean living is that it has made him productive. “During addiction to heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he says. But now he is about to release his new album, his first album of original band material in nearly 20 years, which contains flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't really heard of this kind of hiatus in a career,” he says. “It's some lengthy sleep situation. I maintain standards about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new before I was ready, and at present I'm prepared.”
The artist is also releasing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the title is a reference to the stories that fitfully spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a wry, intense, occasionally eye-watering account of his adventures as a performer and user. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering his haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a reputable company. And it positions me out there as someone who has written a book, and that is everything I desired to accomplish since childhood. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”
Dando – the last-born of an attorney and a former model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it represents a time prior to life got difficult by substances and fame. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “was the best. It had no rules except no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out three albums. After Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing musicians at his whim.
During the 90s, the band signed to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in preference of a more melodic and mainstream folk-inspired style. This was “since the band's iconic album came out in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, he says. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like an early composition, which was laid down the following we graduated high school – you can detect we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could stand out in softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the act into the popularity. In the early 90s they released the album their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his somber vocal style. The name was derived from a news story in which a priest bemoaned a individual named Ray who had strayed from the path.
The subject wasn’t the sole case. At that stage, Dando was using heroin and had acquired a penchant for crack, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. People magazine declared him one of the 50 sexiest individuals living. He good-naturedly dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become someone else”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.
However, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he delivers a blow-by-blow account of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for his band's allotted slot after acquaintances proposed he come back to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he performed an unplanned acoustic set to a unfriendly audience who jeered and threw bottles. But that proved minor next to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances