Head: The Lemonheads-It’s A Shame About Ray

The Lemonheads: It’s A Shame About Ray
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In the mid-late 1970s, I was in high school (hey—I’m old! I turn 60 today!), became a music obsessive and knew, like, everything about the music that I loved (to the extent possible in the pre-Internet era). From 1979-1982, I was a college DJ and program director, and really dug deeply into the music. Even after college, when I was in law school, I was still a student, and was able to listen to my favorite albums and the radio pretty regularly. 

Then came the late 1980s and 1990s. Between working at a big Wall Street law firm and then smaller, high pressure firms, meeting the woman who would become my wife, having two children, buying and selling a New York apartment, moving to the suburbs and then buying a house, for some reason, I didn’t seem to be able to be quite as focused on new music. That’s not to say that music was not important to my life—it was, and the rack of cassette mixtapes that I painstakingly recorded during this period is proof—but during this period there was a ton of music that I heard on the radio, liked, maybe even owned, but never paid attention to in the way that I was able to do when I was younger. And that’s OK, because I wouldn’t have traded any of the things that happened during that period (except for some of my time at some of the law firms. Ugh.) 

The Lemonheads, and their song, “It’s A Shame About Ray,” falls into that category. I seriously doubt that I ever heard any of their music before the album of the same title, and while I’ve bought a bunch of their music since, it sits in my iTunes library and occasionally plays when I’ve set my music to play on random. By the way, have I mentioned that I turn 60 today, and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that I still buy music and use iTunes (and an iPod, although it is the biggest-ass iPod they make)? So I don’t know about their early, indie work, and can’t wax poetic about their deep tracks or opine about the quality of the band’s various lineups. 

Which is why I’ve chosen to write about “It’s A Shame About Ray,” probably one of their most popular songs, if not the most popular. (Their cover of “Mrs. Robinson" was a hit, too.) It’s a great song, jangly and catchy and poppy and vaguely mysterious. What’s it about? I’ve seen two different explanations, both from singer and writer Evan Dando, who, I understand, liked to mess with the press. Also, he used lots of drugs. 

One thing that is pretty clear, though, is that it was written in Australia, in collaboration with Tom Morgan, who was the lead singer for the Australian band Smudge. One explanation was that they met a guy in Melbourne who called everyone “Ray,” which gave them the idea to write a song by (or for) every man. Another explanation was that they saw a headline about TV talk show host named Ray Martin who had lost his job in the newspaper with that phrase and wrote a song around it. Which sounds more likely to me. (I still read a paper newspaper every day. Have I mentioned…..) 

The video for the song was directed by Jesse Peretz, the original bass player for the band, who had moved on to directing, and has had a pretty successful career in that line of work, and featured Dando’s then-friend Johnny Depp (Dando dated Kate Moss after she and Depp split, leading Dando to remark, “We were really good buds until I slept with his girl.”) Here’s the video: