Evan Dando’s chaotic, narcotic life

The night before, he was tripping on Adderall and acid, which he only realised while being thrown out of a Smashing Pumpkins show. He’s in Manhattan because he’s house-sitting an apartment where actresses, supermodels and club kids meet to smoke golf ball-sized rocks of crack cocaine, and rodents regularly emerge to nibble the plush Persian carpets. “I kept listening because you never know,” he says now at 58, twice the age he was then. “Maybe this is how the afterlife works. You go to a restaurant and instead of getting a menu and some breadsticks you find out you’re dead.”

With his memoirs arriving soon after his latest, chaotic UK tour (with his last gig, at the time of writing, cancelled due to illness), it’s a reminder that Dando was once, all too briefly, a big beautiful deal. He first appeared in the UK’s top 20 in late 1992, when his band the Lemonheads’ cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson, commissioned for a 25th anniversary VHS release of The Graduate, took off.

Shiny-haired, big-grey-eyed and gorgeous, Dando arrived on the scene after the white heat of Nirvana but before the bubblegum brightness of Britpop, and also had chops behind the good looks. His teenage roots were in the mid-80s Boston punk scene, which begat the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr, and he was a gifted singer, writer and interpreter of songs. (Try his exquisite ballads Big Gay Heart, Ride With Me and Favourite T if you’re new to his work, or his excellent covers of Whitney Houston’s How Will I Know and Frank Mills from the musical Hair.)

He could have been a proper crossover star, and if he’d died young, monthly music magazine specials would probably still be mourning what could have been. The irony is that what prevented Dando from becoming bigger was the very thing that nearly killed him. Rumours of My Demise includes 79 mentions of drugs, 48 of heroin, 21 of coke or cocaine, 14 of weed and acid and 12 of LSD, but this intake somehow hasn’t affected Dando’s levels of recall. Put together with the music journalist Jim Ruland, this book is detail-packed and riveting. From the opening pages, it’s also laced with melancholy, like Dando’s best songs.

A sufferer of night terrors, he never would have become a musician if his dad hadn’t left his family, he tells us, or met the original members of the Lemonheads if he hadn’t had to repeat his high school freshman year. His adolescence is spent listening to and making music in the homes of wealthy bohemian friends whose parents are “never around” (brilliantly, his knowledge of expletive-filled rap, rock and punk comes from records the former second lady Tipper Gore sent to the magazine editor Marty Peretz, dad of his friend and fellow original Lemonhead Jesse, now a TV and film director).

The Lemonheads’ reputation rises through three albums released on Boston indie label Taang!, but another cover version, of Suzanne Vega’s Luka, helps them get signed to a major label, Atlantic, in 1990. Dando has the face for this world but not the stomach (“awards are scams,” he rails at one point, “not for the artist, [but] for record companies, the organisations that give them out, and the journalists who write about them”).

Epic anecdotes flood this book: Dando hanging out, playing music and “popping Xanax” with Johnny Depp; the evening Keith Richards puts a sword to his throat; Courtney Love making Kurt Cobain cry by telling him that she and Dando are having an affair (Dando insists that they weren’t). Dando also gives the best excuse for not playing his 1995 Glastonbury set: he was having a heroin-fuelled orgy with two models, which meant he “didn’t quite make it in time”.

Briefly settled with his first wife in the early 2000s, he watches the second plane plough into the World Trade Center on 9/11, while living only two blocks away. “The terrible thing I’d been running from all my life – the night terrors, the sleepwalking, the screaming in my sleep – had finally come.” Thereafter, he keeps giving up drugs and starting them again, and towards the end, writes “all alcohol does is get between me and the things I want to do”. Last month, the Verdant Brewery in Cornwall launched a Lemonheads-themed 6.5% IPA, with a video featuring Dando in the brewhouse.

In the last chapter, Dando discusses an early ambition. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an oceanographer… the idea of being alone at the bottom of the sea was appealing to me.” The epilogue brings a short, sharp shock. “This is not a redemption story. Addicts don’t get better.” Dando’s entertaining, painful memoir is about talent and fame in all its raw, messy reality.

Rumours of My Demise: A Memoir by Evan Dando is published by Faber & Faber (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17. Delivery charges may apply

Editor’s note: our recommendations are chosen independently by our journalists. The Observer may earn a small commission if a reader clicks a link and purchases a recommended product. This revenue helps support Observer journalism

Photograph of Dando in 1996 by Luciano Viti/Getty Images