Though it had to be given a plodding drum pattern and fuzzed guitars to fit on the record, this song was obviously the work of someone who had the ability to move beyond the graffiti-covered toilet-circuit dressing room of the album’s back cover. Chief among those was Dando’s ballad Don’t Tell Yourself.
But amid the dross were moments where the Lemonheads showed there was something that might lift them beyond the indie ghetto.
But that peak was several years in coming: the Lemonheads had formed in 1986, and their debut album, 1987’s Hate Your Friends, was a brittle, sometimes awkward punk-rock record whose main purpose was to remind you how good Hüsker Dü were – there were pointless punked-up covers ( Amazing Grace) and unconvincing hardcore exercises ( Rat Velvet). Unfortunately, the Lemonheads’ peak coincided with seeming tortured being the principal qualifying factor for alt-rock success, whereas Dando was more interested in the sun, with a sound that joined the dots between Gram Parsons, Belinda Carlisle and Kiss. Maybe it’s because Dando was a) seemingly independently wealthy, b) extremely good looking, and c) apparently not very interested in seeming tortured.
But that can’t be enough to explain why the Lemonheads are barely even a footnote these days, when in the early 1990s, they seemed like the group who could credibly bridge the gap between grunge and pop (“bubblegrunge” was one wag’s description of their style).
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