Big Gay Heart for Evan Dando

I've recently had a rediscovery of The Lemonheads. It was a day like any other. I was at the library, sifting through the CD's when I happened upon The Lemonheads' It's a Shame About Ray. (BTW-The COMO library has a great collection of music.) This was one of those albums I traded in at Used Kids and have regretted it ever since.

As I played the first few tracks while in the car, driving to the grocery store, I remembered listening to this album over and over again in high school, then in college. I was obsessed with celebrity (still am, I guess), and Evan Dando was a huge obsession.

It was the cover he did for Spin that started this fixation. Dando was swapping spit with this skinny, long-haired girl. The image was really hot! It was hard to figure out where Dando's limbs and hair began and where the model's limbs and hair ended.

What I found inside was the typical Behind the Music story of drug abuse and multiple sexual partners that had me reading the pages continuously for weeks...until J Mascis graced the next Spin cover. I was naive enough to believe that Dando's story was unique. I think I still believed that Kurt Cobain's drug problems weren't that bad at that time. Sure, I had read the Led Zeppelin book, but that seemed so unreal, almost made-up (A shark? Please!) compared to Evan Dando's story.

I continued following Dando and the Lemonheads through his next album, Come on Feel the Lemonheads. It was a diverse album (at least to someone who mostly listened to grunge) that jumped from genre with almost every track. I loved the song "Big Gay Heart" for Dando's courage to sound so...well, gay. Here was this rock star who depended on girls lusting over him, and he was comfortable enough with his own sexuality to sing about his big gay heart. Other tracks like "Into Your Arms", "Style", and "Dawn Can't Decide" also captured my imagination.

I waited through the credits of Reality Bites to see Dando's cameo in which he played the fictionalized Troy Dyer.

I don't know if the music is great, but I know that my emotional and intellectual attachment and its role in shaping my identity will always make the Lemonheads important to me.