The Underground Always Dies Twice

 

According to the memoirs of Evan Dando, frontman of The Lemonheads, his father used to listen to The Fugs, the first underground band in history, one almost no one remembers because true underground music never survives in collective memory. Dando didn’t inherit his father’s taste for The Fugs, but he did inherit a fascination with the books of Ed Sanders, the poet and leader of that band, who dropped the banjo to write The Family, the definitive account of Charles Manson. Sanders understood something the counterculture refuses to admit: Manson wasn’t an accident. He was its logical conclusion, its bloodstained diploma.

John Waters knew it when he dedicated Female Trouble to Tex Watson, the most feral member of the Family. Dando knew it too when he recorded a Manson cover, just as Dennis Wilson did when he slipped Charlie’s songs onto Beach Boys records, and just as Guns N’ Roses did before David Geffen forced them to remove their own Manson cover from the tracklist. They all saw in Manson the same dark mirror of the American dream that Sanders had documented. Today, Dando looks like the living embodiment of that cursed trinity: Manson, Dennis Wilson, and the Dude from the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski. A barefoot prophet of disaster as a way of life.

In 1990, Atlantic Records signed The Lemonheads. Dando had just witnessed two of his favorite bands, Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, crash and burn under major labels after years as gods of the indie circuit. The underground doesn’t forgive betrayal, but it doesn’t guarantee survival either. Then he heard Nirvana’s “Sliver” on the radio. That song was the bridge, from the dirty noise of Bleach to the distorted pop of Nevermind. Dando knew a new wave was about to break, and he could either surf it or drown. The Lemonheads stood at the end of the old ‘80s school, facing the chance to either belong to the next decade or vanish trying. He knew his band could go further than Dinosaur Jr. or the Pixies.

The Replacements had written “Johnny’s Gonna Die” in 1981, a prophecy about Johnny Thunders that would take a decade to come true. Thunders, guitarist for the New York Dolls, carried Lou Reed’s heroin poetry from Manhattan to London when he toured with the Heartbreakers on the Anarchy Tour in 1976. John Lydon accused him in his autobiography No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs of getting Sid Vicious hooked. The heroin Reed sang about as poetry, Thunders and Vicious turned into an epitaph. Reed died 12 years ago, on October 27, 2013, the same date, but in 1977, that the Sex Pistols released Never Mind the Bollocks, their only album, causing a national scandal. Dates in rock are never random: they’re scars that reopen with each anniversary.

On April 23, 1991, Johnny Thunders was found dead in a New Orleans hotel room. He had gone there to record his dream album with local musicians. That never happened. That same week, Dando was touring New York, playing CBGB, the sacred home of his beloved Ramones. He sought out the surviving New York Dolls and asked to attend the funeral. He wanted to be there when they buried one of the last bridges between the old and new schools. Dando would become another of those bridges, a fan of the Velvet Underground, Steely Dan, and Brian Eno’s Another Green World, as much as of Nirvana and the Butthole Surfers. Because that’s what no one tells you: rock doesn’t move forward, it recycles its own corpses. Every generation thinks it’s inventing rebellion, but it’s only repeating the ritual, changing the candles while keeping the same altar. When Dando heard that MC5 would reunite, even without their deceased singer, he was the first to volunteer as a replacement. Alongside Mark Arm of Mudhoney, he toured with the three surviving members of MC5.

The underground always ends up in two places: major labels or the cemetery. The Fugs faded away quietly. Manson still sells on t shirts at Urban Outfitters. Lou Reed died respected and admired, though not widely loved. Thunders died alone. Dando survived long enough to tell the story, because he fled to Brazil, not Berlin like Bowie, escaping his deadliest vices. Yet they all shared the same illusion: that extreme art has a future. It doesn’t. It only has imitators and coroners writing obituaries disguised as Rolling Stone articles.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth no one wants to face: counterculture isn’t resistance. It’s the research and development department of the mainstream. Manson gave songs to the Beach Boys because he dreamed of being a pop star days before ordering the murders that made him famous. Nirvana signed with Geffen, the same label that had censored Guns N’ Roses for covering Manson, just before changing the world. The underground doesn’t die when it’s co opted by the industry. It dies when it believes it can survive without selling out or self destructing. Kurt Cobain was Dando’s friend. He killed himself on April 5, 1994. It’s said he went to the grave believing Courtney Love had cheated on him with Dando. The press expected Dando to be the next to die after Cobain. That’s why he titled his memoir Rumours of My Demise, after a line from Mark Twain. Dando still plays with The Lemonheads, of which he’s the only official member. The reason he insists on being “a band” and not a solo act is simple: the shirts that say “The Lemonheads” sell better than the ones that say “Evan Dando.” The underground’s been dead for a long time. What remains is merchandising and nostalgia, repackaged for the next generation that thinks it’s discovering something new.