How a tour with Oasis resulted in one of Evan Dando’s favourite Lemonheads songs
Evan Dando has lived a crazy life. The frontman of an iconic 1980s and ’90s grunge band, The Lemonheads found their fame in the same new grunge scene that gave the world Nirvana. But it was actually a Britpop group that inspired one of Dando’s favourite tracks.
Despite being a vital part of the grunge scene, with Dando being the heartthrob of the genre, in 1994, he found himself on the Oasis tour bus. It was totally unplanned, with the grunge singer essentially going AWOL and running away from his own career by tagging along with the Gallagher brothers.
“I was finishing my tour when they were starting theirs. I jumped in the van and hung out for a few days,” he told an interviewer back in 1996. “It was really fun. I really like those guys,” he added.
All at the height of their drug dependencies, with Noel Gallagher ending up hospitalised and getting clean in 1998, it was precisely the kind of cocaine-fuelled chaos you’d expect from the most hedonist period of the decade.
Since the experience, Gallagher and Dando have publicly fallen out. The story goes that Dando wanted to release an unofficial collaboration between the two, but Gallagher stopped him. “And it was a bit [like]‘, Hang on a minute – you can’t do that’. I heard it, and I didn’t like it, and it was like, ‘No’. It was a bit awkward,” Gallagher said on a podcast.
To the Oasis singer, their friendship and experience on the road together was nothing but another drug-fuelled waste of time. Upon getting clean from cocaine, he said, “It is a shit drug. It’s not creative, it’s not very sociable. You end up locked in a bathroom with some fucking idiot who you don’t like,” possibly counting Dando as one of those idiots.
But for The Lemonheads, the experience proved fruitful. During his time in Oasis’ tour van, Dando wrote a song that would go on to be his favourite on their 1996 record, Car Button Cloth.
When Rolling Stone asked him what his favourite track on the record was, the answer came back, “‘Losing Your Mind’”. After being asked if Dando was, in fact, losing his mind when he wrote the song, he said, “Definitely! I went on tour with Oasis, and I was hanging out in London with my friends, doing heroin.”
“You develop this semi-habit after two weeks. Then I flew down to Sydney [Australia], and I banged up a bunch of fucking speed the first night,” he added about the bender. “You know, clean needle, of course. And the next day I did two hits of ecstasy, didn’t go to sleep, and the next day I did a hit of really strong acid, and then the withdrawal symptoms started kicking in. And that was it, man.”
A slower track in the band’s discography, ‘Losing Your Mind’ sounds like a comedown. And it sounds like the one that inspired it was rough.
