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

The Lemonheads: It’s A Shame About Ray
[purchase] 

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:

Show Tunes: Frank Mills

The Lemonheads: Frank Mills

[purchase]

There have been many covers of the various groovy pop hits from Hair, the sixties celebrational musical which first hit Broadway in 1968 - from the Cowsills' 1969 chart hit title track to Three Dog Night's Easy To Be Hard, from Quincy Jones' version of Walking In Space to Canadian folkpop singer-songwriter Serena Ryder's wonderfully bombastic 2006 take on Good Morning Starshine, which I posted way back in May of last year when I took on the topic of showtunes coverage at Cover Lay Down.

But my favorite has to be this 1992 cover from The Lemonheads - likely just Evan Dando, performing under the name of the band he led and founded, plus either a drum machine or some random bandmember patting gently away on a guitar case. Frank Mills appeared as a coda of sorts on their alt-pop album It's A Shame About Ray, and surprisingly, though it had already been recorded by the likes of Liza Minelli and Barbra Streisand before them, their performance manages to come off without a hint of irony. Instead, it's delicate acoustic grunge, tender and raw, much like Dando himself, who was quite literally a crackhead throughout much of the early nineties, but has since cleaned up a bit.

If: If I Could Talk I'd Tell You

The Lemonheads: If I Could Talk I'd Tell You

[purchase]

With its jangly guitars, summery organs, a frickin' whistling solo, and lyrics which I refuse to believe have any meaning, If I Could Talk I'd Tell You is the second happiest song is the world. It has that kind of unashamed euphoria that inspires you to jump around like a moron and kiss everyone unfortunate enough to be within kissing range. Yet it never feels corny, it's just two minutes and fifty seconds of pure joy.

In case you're wondering: The happiest song in the world is of course Petula Clark's My Love.

1989: Luka / Just Like Heaven

The Lemonheads: Luka

[purchase]

Dinosaur Jr.: Just Like Heaven

[purchase]

The perfect set: two covers from a single emergent genre that arguably saved my social life.

I've gone on about Evan Dando here and there, but this 1989 Suzanne Vega cover was the true turning point for me. The familiarity of Vega's folk original gave me entry into the song, but I had just switched schools, and the cool kids at my new hipster school liked loud. From here, I would turn my back on folk music, adopt a new set of long-haired friends, and turn on to the fuzz and feedback of a whole new musical movement, formed in the halls of the very high school where I was getting my second chance.

Released on Lick, the Lemonhead's last indie record before signing to Atlantic, and a studio disaster -- the original band members were at each others' throats, and would break up after this one despite the new contract; the tracks were cobbled together from B-sides and previous sessions -- this is the raw, early lemonheads, not the mellow-by-comparison heroin dream that would follow, and Luka still claims my heart. You can hear the boiling waters of the post-punk grunge movement emanating from every lick. The original colored vinyl 7" only made it that much sweeter.

The 12" release of Dinosaur Jr.'s cover of The Cure classic Just Like Heaven provided a similar entry into the world of alternative grunge, while the coverage simultaneously allowed me a comprehensive opportunity to purge myself of my earlier, top-40 post-punk geekself through song transformation. To be fair, though, this wasn't a cover so much as it was a total destruction of song, from the stop-and-start style to the parody of anthemic guitar to the full-stop ending mid-chorus, as if the song and everything it stood for had burned out too quickly.

The song is now available as a bonus track on the re-release of 1987 album You're Living All Over Me, but the original 45 RPM release was pricelessly weird, its vinyl deeply etched with unplayable body organs and, oddly, a box of Rice Crisps on the B-side, the better to match the A-side thrash of long-haired screams and moans, the epitome of teen angst and rage against a culture we saw as wiped out and musically exhausted. The album cover was terrifying, too, featuring clashing colors and some sort of brain being consumed by a jagged adolescent-drawn maw; it spoke of violence and drug-addled rejection, like the music inside, and I was all for it.