Evan Dando’s Rumours of My Demise

I didn’t listen to the Lemonheads much in the 90s. I thought they were lightweight because I first learned of them through their cover of Mrs Robinson. But Evan Dando was always in the background, appearing in magazines and TV, as well as in ‘scandalous’ photos with Courtney Love. Dando comes across as charmingly foolish in his book, just like he seemed to in interviews. But there’s a section where he talks about vandalising a house he rented. It suggested a carelessness, something unpleasant. And, having read Patti Schemel’s Hit So Hard, I suspect that the casual discussions of taking crack obscure some darker stories. There were two moments of Dando’s life I was most curious about. The first was his relationship with Courtney Love. Dando never met Kurt Cobain but would hang out and take drugs with Courtney. Rumours spread after Cobain’s death that Love and Dando were having an affair. A set of photographs that seemed to show Love and Dando making out fuelled these rumours. Dando…