12/21/2023 0 Comments Guitar chords sunny came home![]() Anyway, his best Lemonheads song had a chorus Dando would have been proud of, with a weary resignation that suggested that, given another album or two, he would have developed into a terrific songwriter. He wasn’t Dando’s equal as a writer, and his voice had a harsh, querulous tone that was harder to take than his bandmate’s, but sometimes he came good. He left after Lick, and the Lemonheads became Dando’s personal fiefdom, but without Deily there wouldn’t have been a Lemonheads for Dando to take over. Deily is the forgotten man of the Lemonheads, despite sharing singing and songwriting duties with Dando across the first few albums. ![]() But rather than pick that, I’ve gone for a Ben Deily song. They cobbled together a third album, Lick, from earlier recordings and a handful of new songs, and it proved to be their breakthrough, thanks largely to a bruised and battered cover of Suzanne Vega’s Luka. The band split in its wake, only reuniting because they were offered a European tour, with Dando – whose relationship with co-founder Ben Deily was barely existent – switching to drums. Two utterly pointless covers, of Charles Manson and Kiss, competed with some underwritten originals ( Clang Bang Clang, the best of them, would be re-recorded for the fourth Lemonheads album as Left for Dead). Hate Your Friends’ successor, Creator, was a bit of a mess. Dando’s gift for the kind of melody that combines euphoria and melancholy was present and correct, with chord changes that are just unexpected enough to raise a smile rather than cause a start. Though it had to be given a plodding drum pattern and fuzzed guitars to fit on the record, this song was obviously the work of someone who had the ability to move beyond the graffiti-covered toilet-circuit dressing room of the album’s back cover. Chief among those was Dando’s ballad Don’t Tell Yourself. But amid the dross were moments where the Lemonheads showed there was something that might lift them beyond the indie ghetto. ![]() But that peak was several years in coming: the Lemonheads had formed in 1986, and their debut album, 1987’s Hate Your Friends, was a brittle, sometimes awkward punk-rock record whose main purpose was to remind you how good Hüsker Dü were – there were pointless punked-up covers ( Amazing Grace) and unconvincing hardcore exercises ( Rat Velvet). Unfortunately, the Lemonheads’ peak coincided with seeming tortured being the principal qualifying factor for alt-rock success, whereas Dando was more interested in the sun, with a sound that joined the dots between Gram Parsons, Belinda Carlisle and Kiss. Maybe it’s because Dando was a) seemingly independently wealthy, b) extremely good looking, and c) apparently not very interested in seeming tortured. But that can’t be enough to explain why the Lemonheads are barely even a footnote these days, when in the early 1990s, they seemed like the group who could credibly bridge the gap between grunge and pop (“bubblegrunge” was one wag’s description of their style). How did the Lemonheads get themselves so thoroughly written out of pop history? Sure, Evan Dando proved himself to be a drug-addled jerk of the first rank, but he’s not alone in that yes, their career tailed off, like so many other bands.
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