The Alternative Number Ones: The Lemonheads’ “Into Your Arms”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

I can't think of too many legitimate reasons to feel sorry for lead Lemonhead and notoriously flaky '90s alt-beefcake Evan Dando, a man who had a lot going for him and who mostly seems to be the source of his own problems. But here's something that's always struck me about Dando: He's written more than his share of starry-eyed fuzz-jams, but the songs that he wrote aren't the reason that the Lemonheads got famous. Dando's band earned their major-label deal at least partly on the strength of a sloppy, half-joking cover that they had to be convinced to record, and then they blew up because of a Simon & Garfunkel cover that Dando actively disdained. When the Lemonheads finally became MTV darlings and scored themselves a nice long stay at #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, they did it with "Into Your Arms," a song that the band's brand-new bassist brought over from one of his old projects. To his credit, Dando has never been all that grumpy about owing his popularity to songs that he did not write. He's got other things to worry about.

Evan Dando always took pains to let the world know that he didn't care about being famous. It wasn't a Kurt Cobain situation; he didn't radiate disgust for the idea that he'd have to go sing his songs in hockey arenas full of people who would've hated him in high school. It was more that he just shrugged at all the attention. He wanted to make his loose, sloppy sha-la-la vroom-twinkles, and he didn't care for the extra work that was involved in running a successful enterprise like the Lemonheads. He couldn't keep a band together, and tons of people cycled through tons of different Lemonheads lineups over the years. He was also into heroin and crack, and he wasn't too shy about that, despite his handlers' best efforts. But Dando was the right guy at the right time, and he was a magazine-cover fixture for a few years. His omnipresence turned off as many people as it turned on, and it served to obscure an extremely likable discography.

"Into Your Arms" is not Evan Dando's song. Instead, it's up there with Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" on the list of cover songs that people don't necessarily recognize as cover songs. But "Into Your Arms" still works as a nice little snapshot of what Dando offered the world. It's a joyously dazed trifle, a love song that doesn't really mean anything but that still sounds great with the windows down on a sunny day. Dando's contemporaries on early-'90s alternative radio were destined for canon status, but he was too unambitious and too pretty for the pantheon. Instead, he left behind a bunch of tunes that are always ripe for rediscovery. "Into Your Arms" is one of them, even if you're old enough to remember getting really sick of it in 1993.

Evan Dando was a rich kid. Talking to Rolling Stone, Dando once described his parents as "establishment hippies." His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a model. Dando grew up in Boston, and he started the Lemonheads when he was a student at the Commonwealth School, a tiny private college-prep institution. Dando and his friends Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz were kids who loved punk rock, and they started off covering '80s hardcore bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat. They called themselves the Whelps at first, then took the Lemonheads name from the candy. They used their graduation money to record a demo tape, which they passed to Curtis Casella, head of the local indie Taang! Records.

I am just today learning that the Taang! name is an acronym for "Teen Agers Are No Good!," which is awesome. Taang! later put out classic records from people like Spacemen 3, but it started off as the home of Boston hardcore bands like Gang Green, Negative FX, and Slapshot. Curtis Casella later told SPIN that the Lemonheads' demo "sounded familiar at first -- exactly like the Replacements." In fact, it was the Replacements. They'd taped over one of their own Replacements tapes to make the demo, and Casella was listening to the wrong side. Their own side probably still sounded a lot like the Replacements. The Lemonheads self-released their debut EP Laughing All The Way To The Cleaners in 1986, and their first album Hate Your Friends came out on Taang! a year later.

In the Lemonheads' early days, Evan Dando wasn't exactly the band's frontman. He split those duties with Ben Deily, with the two of them trading off lead vocals and songwriting duties. For a while, Dando tried singing and playing drums at the same time, but that didn't really work out, so they brought in a succession of drummers instead. The sound on the band's early records isn't exactly hardcore, but it's rooted in that world. It's closer to Hüsker Dü than the Replacements -- fast and loud and messy, but with big, muscular, heart-on-sleeve hooks. Those early Lemonheads records were hugely influential in their own way; you can hear echoes of their work in the tunefully gruff music of '90s punk bands like Jawbreaker and Screeching Weasel. It's a lot of fun to go back to those old Lemonheads records, immature and crudely recorded as they may be. Those kids had great songs just bursting out of them.

When the Boston college-rock scene came together in the late '80s, the Lemonheads were right there in the mix, playing shows with bands like the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. For a little while, Evan Dando got sick of the Lemonheads and went off to join Juliana Hatfield in her band the Blake Babies, while Blake Baby John Strohm was one of the Lemonheads' early drummers. Dando went to Skidmore College for one semester, and he flunked out of pretty much every class. The other two Lemonheads both went to Harvard, and they didn't flunk out of anything.

Dando's relationship with his bandmate Ben Deily grew increasingly strained, but the Lemonheads kept cranking out records. They made three Taang! albums in three years, and all of them are worth your time. From the very beginning, the Lemonheads played around with goofily punked-up cover songs; Hate Your Friends has a very silly version of "Amazing Grace." Their 1988 follow-up Creator has covers of Charles Manson's "Your Home Is Where You're Happy" and KISS' "Plaster Caster." 1989's Lick had Evan Dando singing "Luka," the child-abuse hit from Suzanne Vega, an artist who's been in this column. The Lemonheads covered that song as a joke at a live show, and Taang!'s Curtis Casella was adamant that they should put it on the album. They didn't want to, but they went along with it, making a video and everything.

The "Luka" video got some MTV burn and earned college-radio buzz for the Lemonheads, but the original core of the band was done. Dando's former best friend Ben Deily quit the Lemonheads to focus on college in 1990, and the two of them stopped talking. Later on, Deily became an advertising exec, and he and his brother kept making music part-time in the power-pop band Varsity Drag. Deily has reunited with Dando onstage a few times over the years. The former Bullet LaVolta guitarist Corey "Loog" Brennan replaced Deily in the Lemonheads, and the band signed with Atlantic. Lovey, the band's 1990 major-label debut, didn't do any business, and most of the reviews that I've seen are dismal. The album quickly went out of print, though it got a 30th-anniversary reissue in 2020. Between that LP and Favourite Spanish Dishes, an EP that came out around the same time, the Lemonheads kept covering other people's songs: Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, the Misfits, New Kids On The Block. The band still sounds ramshackle and unfocused on Lovey, but their occasional forays into pretty, folky acoustic music become more and more frequent.

In 1991, bassist Jesse Peretz left the Lemonheads amicably, leaving Evan Dando as the sole original Lemonhead remaining. The former Blake Babies leader Juliana Hatfield, who was only just in this column a few weeks ago, joined up on bass and backing vocals. Her presence added a ton to the band's 1992 album It's A Shame About Ray. That record was the Lemonheads' big breakout, and it was also one of the emblematic albums of the early-'90s alt-rock era. The LP's producers, the Robb Brothers, were a '60s-pop family band who became country-rockers in the '70s. Evan Dando loves '60s pop and country, and those sides really came out. Dando co-wrote much of the album with Tom Morgan, of the Australian indie-pop band Smudge, and he became Dando's most important collaborator without ever officially becoming a Lemonhead.

It's A Shame About Ray is way more polished than all the previous Lemonheads albums, even though it still has a beautifully dazed feeling. The straightforward sweetness of songs like the genuinely soulful "My Drug Buddy" is undeniable. Dando and his bandmates figured out how to clean up their sound without losing their idiosyncratic qualities, and people started to notice that Dando was almost cartoonishly handsome. The album's title track became the Lemonheads' first Modern Rock hit, especially after Dando's buddy Johnny Depp showed up in the video. The former Lemonheads bassist Jesse Peretz directed that video; it was one of the first music videos that he made. Peretz went on to direct bigger and bigger videos, and then to direct episodes of TV shows like Girls and movies like Our Idiot Brother and Juliet, Naked. ("It's A Shame About Ray" peaked at #5. It's an 8.)

Around the same time that the Lemonheads released It's A Shame About Ray, something funny happened. They were asked to cover Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" as a way to promote a 25th-anniversary VHS release of The Graduate. Talking to SPIN, Dando explained the situation like this: "Some people, probably wearing Italian shoes, said, 'Hmm, we need to get The Graduate out to more of a flannel-wearin' kind of audience.’" Dando said that he didn't even like "Mrs. Robinson," but he still played nice and did what was asked. He also filmed the cutie-pie video with Jesse Peretz. Supposedly, Dando was really annoyed when Atlantic released "Mrs. Robinson" as a single and tacked it onto later pressings of It's A Shame About Ray. But the Lemonheads' slacked-out take on "Mrs. Robinson" became a big hit, so it worked out for him. The song only reached #8 on the Modern Rock chart, but I remember the song being obnoxiously omnipresent. (I'm mellower on "Mrs. Robinson" now, but I still can't give it better than a 5.)

"Mrs. Robinson" was the moment that the Lemonheads jumped to the next level. Evan Dando, who doesn't even look like a real human being, became the kind of guy who could show up on People’s Most Beautiful list when that actually meant something. The first issue of SPIN that I ever bought was the one where Dando was on the cover, shirtless and making out with the late indie-film star Adrienne Shelly. My dad found my copy and got really mad; I think he thought it was porn. In the UK, where the "Mrs. Robinson" cover was a top-20 pop hit, the weekly music magazines, which were already fond of the Lemonheads, went apeshit for Dando. He was a gossip fixture who gave guileless interview quotes and who was happy to talk about all the drugs that he was doing. He was doing a lot of drugs. At the time, his big things were smoking heroin and crack. Lots and lots of alt-rockers were doing the same things at the time, but most of them weren't talking about it quite so openly.

The drugs didn't scare off the media. The Lemonheads' catchy-shimmery fuzz-pop fit in with the grunge zeitgeist while offering a sunnier take on the sound. Dando did the same drugs as his grunge contemporaries, but he was hunkier and sillier, and that gave him a different sort of charm. As Dando got more and more famous, he took to spending a lot of time in Australia, hanging out with his songwriting partner Tom Morgan and Morgan's buddies on the Sydney indie-pop scene. When Juliana Hatfield left the Lemonheads to go solo, Nic Dalton, a member of a bunch of those Sydney bands, joined up instead. Dalton had been half of a duo called Love Positions, and his bandmate Robyn St. Clare wrote "Into Your Arms," an ultra-twee song that the duo released in 1989. I guess Evan Dando liked that song.

There must've been a lot of expectations on the Lemonheads' follow-up to It's A Shame About Ray, but Dando didn't exactly shoot for mainstream pop stardom with 1993's Come On Feel The Lemonheads. (Funny title.) The band once again recorded with the Robb Brothers on production, and the result still has the same lackadaisical shine. It's the kind of album that ends with a near-unlistenable hidden-track 15-minute stretch of fuck-around studio outtakes. Juliana Hatfield sings a bunch of backup vocals on the record, and Dando continues to benefit from her presence. There are some extremely random guests on there, too. Belinda Carlisle sings backup on one song, and Rick James pops up on "Rick James Style." (It's an alternate version of "Style," another track from the LP.) If you were hanging out with Rick James in 1993, then you were probably into some real self-destructive shit.

For the most part, Come On Feel The Lemonheads sounds a whole lot like It's A Shame About Ray but just isn't quite as strong. That's pretty normal for a rushed follow-up to a breakthrough album, and the blueprint was strong enough that I'm happy to have another record of near-peak Lemonheads all these years later. But "Into Your Arms" still stands out from the rest of the LP. It also stands out from Love Positions' original version of the song. In its own mellow, low-stakes way, the Lemonheads' "Into Your Arms" is one of those tracks where everything lines up just right.

"Into Your Arms" might as well be '70s bubblegum, which is exactly why it's as good as it is. Love Positions' original version was a scratchy lark that may or may not have been ironic, but Evan Dando and his collaborators treat it like classic pop song. It's not exactly a substantive work -- all chorus, no verse, with an infinite-repeat lyric about how your arms are the only place where Evan Dando can go when he's low. The Lemonheads make that lightness feel profound. The song plays into the idea of Dando as a helpless kid who just needs love. He's wounded and scared and maybe kind of stupid, and he just needs the reassurance that you'll stick with him. And if he should fall, he knows he won't be alone anymore. Who wouldn't eat that up?

In its construction, the Lemonheads' version of "Into Your Arms" feels slapped-together. Dando sings in a handsome-guy croon that doesn't really need to be all that tuneful, and the short, fuzzy track comes to an almost-indecisive trail-off ending. But there's lots of quiet craft in the recording -- the soft propulsion of Nic Dalton's bassline, the stacked harmonies on the chorus, the combination of acoustic strums and J Mascis-esque ragged guitar action. It's all sweetness, no teeth, and alt-rock radio programmers found it irresistible. The song had some of the same shaggy juice as the grunge that dominated the zeitgeist, but it was brighter and friendlier. It sounded a bit like a jingle, and I don't even mean that in a bad way.

I heard "Into Your Arms" so many times in 1993. It was the kind of song that's beyond love or hate, the kind that just is. I haven't seen Dando talk that much about why he decided to cover this song or what he thought when it blew up the way that it did. It's softer and less ambitious than a lot of the other songs that were on alt-rock radio at the same time, and that probably led to more people thinking of Dando as a foxy airhead. But when I hear "Into Your Arms" today, the charm shines through so brightly. It's like a relentlessly affectionate golden-retriever puppy -- still cute even when it's chewing up your stuff and shitting on your floor.

When "Into Your Arms" was huge, my local alt-rock station sometimes played a parody version called "Hickory Farms," and it would be down in this column's Bonus Beats section if I could find it anywhere online. Here's a story that I'm embarrassed to tell: When I was in eighth grade, I used to sing that parody sometimes and pretend that I'd made it up. Why did I do that? I don't think I even knew what Hickory Farms was. It was like that scene in The Squid And The Whale where Jesse Eisenberg tries to pass "Wish You Were Here" off as a song that he wrote. One girl called me out for lying about this parody song, and I was like, "Scoff scoff scoff, what are you talking about?" Why? What was wrong with me? Anyway, that's how big "Into Your Arms" was in that moment.

"Into Your Arms" turned out to be the one hit from Come On Feel The Lemonheads. For the first and only time, the band landed on the Hot 100 when "Into Your Arms" peaked at #67. In the UK, the song was considerably bigger, peaking at #14 on the pop chart. Dando was famous enough that he started getting movie roles -- a supporting part in James Mangold's directorial debut Heavy, a very funny cameo at the end of Reality Bites. He was seen out with a parade of supermodels and it-girl types, and the National Enquirer published a photo of Courtney Love kissing Dando in bed while Kurt Cobain was still alive. Noise Addict, a band of literal children from Australia, first found international buzz when baby frontman Ben Lee wrote the Dando ode "I Wish I Was Him." On the other extreme, someone published a zine called Die, Evan Dando, Die. Those two artifacts come to opposite conclusions about Dando, but they both basically regard him as the luckiest and coolest guy on earth. The man provoked big reactions.

Despite all the noise around Dando, Come On Feel The Lemonheads was not a huge album. It stalled out as gold, and only one of the singles after "Into Your Arms" even reached the Modern Rock chart. ("The Great Big No" peaked at #15. Good song!) At the same time, Dando was getting more erratic. For a while in 1994, he put his own band on ice so he that he could follow the young British group Oasis around on tour before their debut album was even out. (Oasis will eventually appear in this column.) In 1995, Dando missed the Lemonheads' scheduled set at Glastonbury because he was having a heroin-fueled threesome, and you almost can't begrudge him that. He tried to run onstage hours later to play an acoustic set, but he had to be pulled off because the fans waiting for Portishead were about to riot, which is hard to picture. Eventually, the Lemonheads had to go on hiatus so that Dando could go to rehab.

The Lemonheads came back with the 1996 album Car Button Cloth, and that one didn't have much of an effect on the world. Dando co-wrote the lead single "If I Could Talk I'd Tell You No" with the Vaselines' Eugene Kelly, and that was the last Lemonheads song to reach the Modern Rock chart, where it peaked at #15. (Another good song!) Dando could've probably had another alt-rock hit, but Oasis' Noel Gallagher blocked the release of "Purple Parallelogram," the song that the two of them wrote together. Dando put together a new Lemonheads touring lineup, with the Blake Babies' John Strohm, who'd been one of the Lemonheads' early drummers, on bass, as well as once-and-future Dinosaur Jr. drummer Murph.

I actually saw the Lemonheads at the Reading Festival in 1997. I was on vacation in London with my best friend from high school -- the one time in my life that I've ever taken an overseas trip just for fun. We went to one day of Reading, which happened to have the Lemonheads on the main-stage mid-afternoon bill. We didn't really care about the Lemonheads, and I think we only stuck around for a couple of songs before wandering off to a DJ tent or something. If I'd known that it would be the last Lemonheads set for nearly a decade, I might've paid a bit more attention.

After that Reading show, the Lemonheads went on hiatus. Evan Dando got married and then divorced a decade later. He released the Jon Brion-produced 2003 solo album Baby I'm Bored. In 2006, Dando put together a new version of the Lemonheads with the rhythm section from the Descendents, and they put out a self-titled album on the emo-centric Vagrant label. That was the last original Lemonheads albums, though there have been two covers collections, 2009's Varshons and 2019's Varshons 2, since then. Lots of old Lemonheads albums have been reissued, and Dando will sometimes tour, though he doesn't always seem like he's doing that well. At some point, he developed a bad Oxycontin habit and lost all his teeth. He still looks implausibly great, though.

Evan Dando has certainly had his struggles, but the last two editions of this column were about guys who didn't live to see 30, and Dando's not one of them. These days, he'll occasionally pop up in the news for some random reason. In 2019, for instance, Dando made a cameo on the sitcom The Goldbergs. Later on, Dando told Stereogum that Goldbergs creator Adam F. Goldberg was an old family friend who "idolized" the Dandos when he was a kid. In 2021, Dando lost his wallet on Martha's Vineyard, and someone at a Walgreen's found it and returned it to him. To thank the store, Dando played an acoustic set at that Walgreen's, and a video of that performance made the rounds.

Over the years, people have generally described Dando as a lovable flake but not an asshole, at least up until the Jawbreaker incident. In 2022, the Lemonheads were booked as an opening act for Jawbreaker, the '90s punk cult heroes who are finally back together after decades of saying they'd never reunite. The bill made sense. Jawbreaker took obvious inspiration from the early Lemonheads records, and maybe they named themselves after a candy as a Lemonheads homage. But it didn't work out. Very quickly, the Lemonheads were kicked off the tour, and Dando went on Twitter to say that Jawbreaker were "pussies" who were "scared of me." It later came out that Dando was just upset at having to open for a band that was nowhere near as popular as the Lemonheads in their heyday, and he apologized.

These days, Evan Dando is married again, and he's living in Brazil. He says he's clean from all drugs except LSD. That's a new one on me, but hey, whatever works. Dando says that he's got another Lemonheads album on the way, which is cool. He's also planning to publish a memoir, which is even cooler. That guy must have some serious stories. He didn't rule the alt-rock airwaves for very long, but his run was fun while it lasted, and he made it out the other side. Considering all the ways that Dando's story could've turned out, that might be a best-case scenario.

GRADE: 8/10

BONUS BEATS: There are lots of things that I could put down in this section, like Foals interpolating "Into Your Arms" in 2010, or the late Scott Weiland covering it in 2011. But I'd rather go back to Evan Dando's fellow attention-magnet walking disaster Courtney Love. Love and Dando both insisted that their tabloid kiss was a staged joke, not evidence of a torrid affair. While they both got blowback in the moment, they have continued to say nice things about each other ever since. Hole covered "Into Your Arms" live in 1999. In 2022, the Lemonheads played in London, where Courtney Love lives now. Love came out onstage with them, and she got choked up talking about how Dando is a great guy and how she used to console herself by listening to "Into Your Arms" after shows. She also sang the song with them. It was a really nice moment, as you can see right here:

(Courtney Love's band Hole will eventually appear in this column.)

THE 10S: "Into Your Arms" was a #1 Modern Rock hit for a nine-week stretch at a time when alternative radio was arguably at its peak, so a lot of great songs stalled out on the top 10 while it was on top. This is one of those situations where I'll have to link out to all the extra Bonus Beats so this column doesn't have too many YouTube embeds. First up: James' headlong-into-horniness falsetto-yipping acoustic singalong "Laid" peaked at #3 behind "Into Your Arms." My therapist said not to play it no more. She said it's like a dis-ease, without any cure. I said sorry, it's a 10.

(Bonus Beat: I guess I imagined the American Pie scene set to "Laid," or at least I can't find it online. Maybe it was just the trailer? Instead, let's go with the 2017 Pains Of Being Pure At Heart cover.)

Another one: The Cranberries' soul-shattered extended-sigh mega-ballad "Linger" peaked at #4 behind "Into Your Arms." You know, I'm such a fool for this song. It's got me wrapped around its fingerrrr-ah-hwaaa-ha. It's a 10.

(Bonus Beat: Abed turning "Linger" into a wedding song on Community.)

Still another: Smashing Pumpkins' pedal-mashing fuzz-overdrive twinkle-sob hymn "Today" peaked at #4 behind "Into Your Arms." I'll burn my eyes out before I give it less than a 10.

(Bonus Beat: A. G. Cook's 2020 hyperpop take on "Today.")

Last one: Dead Can Dance's renaissance-faire plinky-plonk sitars-and-ouds goth-folk trance-inducer "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" peaked at #8 behind "Into Your Arms." You might call it a pretentious six-minute dirge, but I say dream on, my dear, and renounce temporal obligations. It's a 10.

(Bonus Beat: The Gravediggaz flipping the sick "Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" bassline on their 1994 track "Here Comes The Gravediggaz.")