Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' It's a Shame About Ray (1992)

I left my apartment building a little before 7:20, as I do every weekday morning, on Valentine's Day, and what was there to greet me when I stepped out on the avenue? Light!

Last year at this time, maybe a few weeks sooner, I noticed the return of the light, at the same time as was I was re-examining the first four Lemonheads albums, and quite abruptly I felt not so bad about myself.

Seeking to recapture that feeling, Valentine's Day I launched myself in an immersion of It's a Shame About Ray (1992). I happened to have it on my iPod knowing that I might want to pick up where I left off last winter.

What I remember about listening to It's a Shame when it was first released late spring of 1992 is, in fact, light. My buddy Mark and I, home from work, were drinking gin. The windows were flung open and June light filled my apartment. Mark was talking about a woman he had just started to date while "Alison's Starting to Happen" blasted out of the stereo speakers.

It was a moment of generational certitude. People forget. Reaganism was bankrupt by June of 1992. Unemployment kept rising (though Mark and I weren't feeling it because we both had steady jobs), and Bush looked cooked. The Dems were licking their chops. They were about to nominate a bright and shiny "New Democrat" known as "Slick Willie."

For those of us in our 20s who voted and read the newspapers, that was all fine. But what was really exciting was that underground, indie record labels like SST, Alternative Tentacles, Homestead, Touch and Go, Sub Pop and TAANG! were on the verge of a major invasion of the majors. All that Punk we listened to and lived by in the 1980s was bleeding into the mainstream in the form of Grunge, exterminating the headbanger hair bands. 

Nineteen-ninety-two was the zenith. The next year would be the asteroid impact with negligible records like Blood Sugar Sex Magik,  Blind Melon, and Pocket Full of Kryptonite in heavy rotation for such long a time (years?) that those of us who knew better and wished to resist finally succumbed and purchased copies of Enter Sandman and Siamese Dream.

It's a Shame About Ray is more Pop Rock than Grunge. Produced by The Robbs at their Cherokee Studios, Ray is no Station to Station (1976). But I am surprised how often now that it is played on the local hipster radio station. "My Drug Buddy" is one of the station's staples.

At the time, the summer of 1992, I was disappointed. I was a Lemonheads true believer, and it seemed to me that Evan Dando had purged the rest of the band members and gone Hollywood. He appeared on the cover of SPIN making out with indie film star Adrienne Shelly.

After reading Everett True's The Lemonheads (1994), "A Melody Maker Book," on Saturday I can say that my assessment was fairly accurate.

The story about Ray is that the band, following a mere 11,000 Lovey copies sold (compared to 30,000 for Lick released by independent TAANG!) headed Down Under for one last tour. There Dando discovered himself.  Thanks to a lot of MDMA, surfing, songwriting help from Smudge frontman Tom Morgan and good old Aussie hospitality, Dando was able to piece together an album's worth (30 minutes) of material. Founding member, and my personal favorite, Jesse Peretz was out. Aussie Nic Dalton was in. Drummer David Ryan remained.

But the real story of It's a Shame About Ray is that it was headed in the direction of Lovey -- meaning, another dud -- until the the band was approached to do a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" (1968) for a new video release of The Graduate (1967), one of the seminal Hollywood films of the '60s cultural revolution. The single took off. Ray was re-released with "Mrs. Robinson" as a bonus track. The album started moving up the charts, eventually reaching #68 on the Billboard 200 for 1993. It did much better in the UK (#33) and Australia (#23).

Though I was disappointed by the bubble-gum quality of a lot of the songs, part of me was foolishly proud of Dando. It wasn't but a few years earlier that I was standing next to him at an empty CBGBs. Now he was making out bare-chested with a beautiful actress on the cover of a national mass-circulation magazine, not to mention partying hard with Hollywood stars at Johnny Depp's Viper Room.

Youth will be served in its boundless hope and dead-end arrogance. When I want to remember what that feeling feels like I think about that June evening in 1992, drinking gin, and my buddy Mark bathed in light talking about carnal delicacies that would soon be his.

Immersed in Ray all last week what became apparent to me is that most of the songs are actually a lot sadder than they seemed when originally ingested back in the early '90s. All the demos that are included in the 2008 Rhino re-issue of the album make this plain. It's stoner music, a sonic account of a young man equipped with the slimmest of defenses confronted with the inevitable assimilation to a brutal world yet hoping nonetheless . . . waiting to be saved. (The demo version of "Rudderless" captures this.)

The genius of It's a Shame About Ray is The Robbs' production -- to take all those downer stoner songs and make them uptempo and sunshiny Pop.

My favorite track though is the mid-tempo "Rudderless." "Hope in my past." The honest statement of a confused young man waiting for recognition buttressed by a solid Grunge guitar and topped off by a fragmenting deep space Sonic Youth guitar effect at the end:

Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Lovey (1990)

In all of Robert Christgau's vast trove of criticism on his excellent web site, www.robertchristgau.com, I could find only one review of a Lemonheads record:

Come On Feel [Atlantic, 1993]
Evan Dando is a good-looking guy with more luck than talent and more talent than brains who conceals his narcissism beneath an unassuming suburban drawl. Twenty years ago he would have affected an acoustic guitar and acted sincere; now he affects a slacker-pop band and acts vulnerable. His songs don't bite, they sidle over and nibble your ear when you're not looking, and if you throw him a withering glance, no problem--he'll just move on to someone else. Exception: the one about drugs. C+

Brutally dismissive as it is, and applied to an album that most of us who were Lemonheads fans at the time would freely admit as proof that the band had lost its purpose (the dividing line for Taang!-era Lemonheads devotees like myself was Dando's cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" on the album that preceded Come on Feel the Lemonheads, 1992's It's a Shame About Ray), it is pretty much how I felt about Lovey (1990), The Lemonheads major-label debut on Atlantic Records, when I started listening to it again this week.

But after only a couple of days, I changed my opinion. There is no indication that Christgau had anything more than a superficial familiarity with Taang! bands such as The Lemonheads, Bullet LaVolta and Moving Targets, bands that were powering the Grunge revolution before it turned into a Grand Barbecue the summer of 1990 when Sonic Youth released Goo on Geffen Records.

What is not readily recalled is that Lovey was released in July shortly after Goo. Considering that it would be another year before major-label honchos would bring Nirvana to market, not to mention Hardcore founding fathers fIREHOSE and Meat Puppets, we have to ask ourselves the question, What did the corporate recording industry power brokers see in The Lemonheads to put them in the same bracket as Sonic Youth?

And here is what I concluded: The Lemonheads were not signed by Atlantic to be the equivalent of a Grunge Bobby Sherman act; if that were the case, the label would not have allowed Dando to make "Ballarat," an homage to Charles Manson's Helter Skelter eschatology, the first cut on Lovey. And while "Ballarat" might not be the equal of Sonic Youth's "Tunic (Song for Karen)," I would argue that it is of a piece (and that is not pretty boy Grunge).

The next clue is that of all the Taang! back catalog songs selected to appear on Lovey it was "Left for Dead," a re-titled "Clang Bang Clang" from Creator (1988), that made the cut; it is a truly great song that points clearly to what Atlantic had planned for The Lemonheads -- a chick-friendly Hüsker Dü.

The fact is that Lovey is loaded with grand gesture Grunge statements like "Li'l Seed" and "(The) Door," both of which are powered by the superb "guitar hero" playing of Corey Loog Brennan, filled out with an uptempo number like "Stove" and a Grunger, "Year of the Cat." As Brennan says in an interview that appears on the English fan web site devoted to Dando and The Lemonheads, "I thought that Lovey was going to sell a million copies. Then I was devastated when it semi-flopped."

But what Lovey did do is turn Dando into a Grunge heartthrob (see the video for "Half the Time" at the top of the post). I can bear witness. In last week's post I described seeing The Lemonheads at CBGBs the summer of 1989 and the only women there were the dates of the record industry guys at the back by the bar. I saw the band again at CBGBs the winter of 1991, seven or eight months after Lovey's release, and rather than being deserted, as it was the time before, the place was packed. So packed that it was difficult to move about. And most of the people at the front near the stage when Dando appeared in a 1960s-era red nylon windbreaker with racing stripes, his beautiful long blonde tresses catching the spotlights, were young middle-class women. The only explanation, given Brennan's assessment that the album semi-flopped, is that video for "Half the Time" found a passionate audience on MTV.

Hence, The Lemonheads coming pop flame-out, casually derided by Christgau as narcissistic, is set in motion by Lovey. Which is too bad because Lovey is an excellent album, one that was important to me and that I played a lot. Hearing it again repeatedly this week -- that and the fact that light is already starting to return at the end of January -- I started to feel not so bad about myself. I realized that at 26 years of age I was a solid householder, but one who nonetheless was hounded by the troika that has felled many a man -- work, women and alcohol. Maybe to become who we are we need to go back and figure out who we were.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Lick (1989)

One thing is clear to me as this rainy week winds down: Lick (1989) is certainly the best Lemonheads record. It has it all. Ballads -- "A Circle of One" (The YouTube above) -- powerful Grunge rockers like the two opening tracks, "Mallo Cup" and "Glad I Don't Know," not to mention an amazing Punk love song, "Ever" (see You Tube below) and an adroit reworking of Suzanne Vega's contemporaneously popular hit "Luka."

Lick is the last Lemonheads album with Ben Deily and the last on independent label Taang! Records. Without Deily the band loses a lot of its Punk juevos and it basically becomes a vehicle for Dando's pretty boy Grunge (which achieves breakout commercial success a few years later with It's a Shame About Ray).

On the strength of Lick the Lemonheads were signed by Atlantic. I was at the performance where the deal was either broached or consummated, a show at CBGBs on a rainy summer Saturday night in 1989. There was hardly anyone there except for a bunch of older affluent record industry types with their dates sitting at tables back near the bar, 

Downtown Manhattan's population, at least when I lived in the city, tended to drop in density in the summer months; that, combined with the torrential downpour, made for deserted streets and a mostly empty CBGBs. Dando was out front in a white t-shirt chatting with someone when my buddy Gary and I got there. We had taken the 'A' down from Washington Heights and walked over from the West Village.

The Lemonheads -- Dando, Jesse Peretz and some guy on drums that I recognized from a photo on one of the albums -- were incredible that night. I shared the pit with two skinheads. (My friend Gary was not a fighter; he enjoyed the whole show positioned directly beneath one of the PA speakers. I would look over at him occasionally and he looked as if were teleporting Star Trek style, like he was atomizing before my eyes. That is how good the Lemonheads sounded that night.) The Punks and I beat the shit out of each other all night. They battered away at me, and we plowed through tables at the edge of the pit, yanking one another up off the floor when someone lost his footing so we could get right back to pummeling each other. I think we were as much a part of the show to the execs in the back of the hall as the band up on stage. I had an edge over the Punks because I was a believer in the music. I had picked up a copy of Lick as soon as it was released that spring. My wife and I played it non-stop. So by the end of the night, when the Punks had tossed in the sponge and sat down, I was dancing blissfully -- sort of a James Brown shoulder roll -- by myself on an empty floor.

As the old year was drawing to a close last month and I was walking to the library after work a New Pornographers song shuffled on my iPod, "Execution Day." It made me feel incredibly good. And since I was starting to think about The Lemonheads because I was watching Nurse Jackie episodes directed by Jesse Peretz, I thought about that night at an empty CBGBs dancing along to the band. And I realized I have never had a better night than that one.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Creator (1988)

The plan is that for the remaining Fridays in January Hippies vs. Punks will be devoted to what I believe to be the seminal recordings of The Lemonheads -- Creator (1988), Lick (1989) and the major-label debut on Atlantic Lovey (1990), leaving us deposited in February at the doorstep of It's a Shame About Ray (1992), the breakthrough album for Evan Dando during the zenith of Grunge.

It is unclear at this point if I'll have the stomach to plow forward to Car Button Cloth (1996), the last album before the band was mothballed; there is some merit in doing so because the seven albums The Lemonheads produced from 1987 to 1996 correspond to the rise and fall of Grunge, a decade when it seemed possible that there might be some sort of durable counterculture forming.

The release of Creator in August 1988 coincided with my relocation to New York City. I bought the album at Bleecker Bob's in the West Village, probably after work or on my lunch break at my first job in the Big Apple, a research assistant for a lady manager at Scholastic Magazines.

I listened to the album a lot because it reaffirmed a sense of pure youth endangered as I became devoured by the brutal post-collegiate workaday world. Looking back now I realize that the hat tips to Charles Manson on Creator -- "Your Home Is Where You're Happy" and "Die Right Now" -- were an upside down flag, a signal of not only distress but refusal to assimilate.

This refusal to assimilate would mark my years from 1988 all the way to the millennium. By the time the millennium rolled around the confidence of a youth-based counterculture had been narrowed to a select urban milieu, which I suppose is a return to the origins of Punk.

But in 1988 the Grunge rocketship is fueling on its launch pad, and in 1989 it would blast off.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Hate Your Friends (1987)

The best thing about life lately is sleep. This January has been colder than last year's. The radiator doesn't heat up until well after five in the morning. So the result is I have been staying in bed much later than I usually do.

Recently I was gifted a flat screen television. I had basically stopped watching TV, except for football on Sunday when I would scrunch up in front of my 13-inch old-fashioned analog with its digital-converter antenna. To this bonanza of a large flat screen, I added my cheap DVD player which I fished out of the closet. Subsequently, I have been on a binge of library videos.

One treat was season six of Nurse Jackie. The guy who directs most of the episodes is Jesse Peretz, son of longtime owner of The New Republic and prominent neocon Marty Peretz.

Jesse Peretz was a founding member of The Lemonheads, a band that was important to me in my twenties. I chatted with him casually one of the times I saw The Lemonheads perform at CBGBs. He struck me as an exceedingly nice guy.

So I started thinking about The Lemonheads again. I've mentioned them here and there on this page before. And when I get to thinking about The Lemonheads, I think about the time I "heard" about the band for the first time; it was when I saw a write-up of Hate Your Friends (1987) in an issue of Maximum Rock'n'Roll that was bathed in moonlight on the floor of my college lover's bathroom. I was puking my guts out, and I think she was watching me from the doorway; and all I could think about was the brilliance of that title, Hate Your Friends.

The Lemonheads -- Evan Dando, Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz -- formed while attending the elite private Commonwealth School in Boston. They took their name from a candy that is sour on the outside and sweet on the inside. (I think the most representative Lemonheads song is "Mallo Cup," another candy.) Their first album, the aforementioned Hate Your Friends, owes a lot to California Hardcore. If I had to cite another band, I would say Descendents. Short, sweet, abrasive, pining, pop Punk -- really an amazing pastiche that tapped into something we were feeling in 1987, a longing for the purity of early Hardcore.

Ben Deily and Evan Dando split the songwriting and lead vocals on the album. It is an excellent combination. Deily has a classic "ant-man" Hardcore vocal style, while Dando sings more like a crooner (on "Nothing True," he sounds like Morrissey).

The first Lemondheads album I really bonded with is the followup to Hate Your Friends, Creator (1988), which I purchased on its initial release. I think I picked up a colored-vinyl version of Hate Your Friends at a record store on St. Mark's Place in 1989.

In any event, listening to Hate Your Friends repeatedly this week has been a pleasure. The young have their egos and their aspirations, and, walking up the hill yesterday after work something that leaped into my mind -- the ability to drink alcohol and have sex all day long. If that isn't purity I don't know what is.

Suffering through Keith Jarrett's "Mirrors." Saved by The Lemonheads' "Nothing True." World War IV.

I can't say that I am Keith Jarrett expert. I do like his music. But this morning I went out, iPod earbuds attached, for an hour-plus run, half of which was accompanied by "Mirrors" off Keith Jarrett's Arbour Zena (1975), and I suffered acutely. It felt like I was being tortured. The strings of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra cloyed like diethyl ether; Jan Garbarek's sax waddled and dribbled; and Jarrett's keys tinkled like a fat crazy housewife alone with her ironing board on a weekday afternoon.

To top it off, I was exhausted and gasping for breath. I'm working my way back from a significant injury. And if I am not at absolute zero, I'd say I'm definitely below five on a scale of ten, with ten being god-like conditioning and 5.5 being the ability to run at an eight-minute-mile pace over a distance of 5,000 meters.

"Mirrors" lasts for almost 28 minutes. I became transfixed with its interminable length. When was it going to end? Would it ever end? The morning was overcast. A drizzly rain fell. Hardly anyone was out. My run slowed to a jog. The jog slowed to a septuagenarian shuffle. The shuffle towards the end became a mummy's plod.

Finally, relief came in the form of "Nothing True" off The Lemonheads' first LP, Hate Your Friends (1987). What a difference. The harmonizing of a young Evan Dando is unparalleled. 

 

In case you missed it, Alissa Rubin filed a story yesterday, "5 Bombs Explode in Baghdad as Dispute Continues With Jordan," which brought home to me how above board World War IV is. Jordan, which does nothing without the explicit clearance from USG, hosted in Amman this past Wednesday Sunni groups allied with Islamic State in its war with Iraq:

The Jordanian government was not involved in the meeting, but after the groups put out a strident statement asking other nations not to side with the Iraqi government in its conflict with Sunni militants, the Iraqis were angry that Jordan had allowed the meeting to take place.

Iraq recalled its ambassador and the Jordanians apologized on Friday, but Iraqi Parliament members are accusing Jordan of knowing the groups were there and not arresting them.

The groups, which included tribes, former Baath Party members and the Islamic Army, a radical group that has carried out multiple attacks against the government, have been willing to tolerate the presence in Iraq of the militants known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as a means to get rid of the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Aliya Nusaif, an Iraqi Parliament member from Mr. Maliki’s State of Law Party, criticized the Jordanians for permitting the meeting, saying, “The government of Jordan should be familiar with such activities.” 

That they did not prevent it or even arrest the people participating suggested “that they knew about it,” she said.

Bear this in mind as the United States continues to press its case in public that Russia is to blame for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Rather than working for a ceasefire, the Obama administration seems intent on framing Moscow. For an interesting counterpoint to the Russophobic media onslaught, check out this article, "The crash of the Boeing 777 is a failed global staged act," by Col. Igor Maatev, which I gleaned from Niqnaq's blog.