College-rock hero Evan Dando of the Lemonheads will tell his life story in a new memoir.
Dando’s Rumors of My Demise—named after a paraphrase of a famous Mark Twain quote—will tell the story of the Massachusetts singer-songwriter’s rise to fame with the alternative rock band, publisher Gallery Books said in a news release. No publication date for the book was given.
“The book…will chronicle Dando’s rise to fame, the fun that was had along the way, the inevitable fall, and its aftermath,” Gallery said. The book will be co-written with Jim Ruland, the music writer who recently collaborated with punk band Bad Religion on the book Do What You Want.
Dando co-founded the Lemonheads in 1986 with his friends at a Boston high school. The band broke out in 1992 with the album It’s a Shame About Ray, which spawned two hits: the title track as well as a cover of Simon Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson.
Gallery says the book will cover Dando’s “bacchanalian tours with the Lemonheads, two gold records, and…several lifetimes’ worth of drugs, sex, and parties” and will “set the record straight on everything the media got wrong and include never-before-told stories from the tumultuous band history to what it was like to be famous in the ’90s before the Internet turned everything toxic.”
“My life is a muddy river,” Dando said in a news release. “I thought I should add more dirt.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
