Evan Dando started using heroin to be like his idols William Burroughs and Keith Richards. This is one of the things he says in an interview given toIndependent. The Lemonheads rocker has been clean for two years. The journalist describes him as a 57-year-old with a rumpled appearance and sometimes indecipherable speech, signs left by addiction.
Dando started using drugs before even starting the band. “There was a pretty effective coke dealer in high school,” he says. He started using heroin to imitate Burroughs and Richards, but also because of the suffering caused by his parents' divorce when he was 10 years old. “I never saw my father in my teenage years and this thing fucked me up.”
Heroin and crack weren't the only addiction. «When you become a pop star, sex becomes attractive. I did this until I dropped every night. Maybe I was in Japan and thought: well, groupies aren't extinct here, cool! 15 of them come forward and you choose them: “You and you”. It's a wild experience. And it's a lot of fun.” Giving specific “I didn't want them to do anything against their will, I let it happen if it had to happen”.
Dando says he hit rock bottom not with heroin, but with oxycodone, the drug belonging to the class of opioids that has caused a massacre in the United States, marketed and promoted under the name of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma. He kicked the addiction just a couple of years ago. When he started offering performances online in exchange for money three years ago, he had cleansed himself from heroin, but not from cocaine. Today, he says, he plays «for myself and my self-esteem. Besides, I don't do much else. I paint, but it doesn't improve my self-esteem because I'm not good at it yet. I like fishing, but the thing that keeps me going is touring because it gives me something to do every day.”
In the interview Dando says he appreciated the Polish LSD he tried in Brazil (“Acids are good once in a while”), he admits to having deceived doctors in order to be prescribed drugs for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, tells of the Lemonheads' tour as a supporter of Jawbreaker which should have brought in 170 thousand dollars. «They were losers. I went to the singer and said: “Are you the singer of that shitty band Jawbreaker?”. This was enough to get me kicked off the tour” (Dando gave a different version at the time).
In May Dando will publish his autobiography Rumors of My Demisea title that ironically plays with the rumors about his death that occasionally circulate. He also finished recording a new Lemonheads album titled Love Chant. «It's very psychedelic and heavy, but also quiet, and they're all original songs».
