It's a Shame About the Lemonheads

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When did the Lemonheads write a song called “Big Gay Heart” and why was this Bostonist never informed? Hearing Evan Dando sing “I don't need you to suck my dick or to help me feel good about myself” to thousands of families lounging along the Charles at EarthFest last Saturday gave us the same awkward trying-to-crawl-out-of-my-skin feeling that most Ben Stiller films evoke. Luckily for the families, most of them were hardly paying attention. On the packed Hatch shell lawn, just upwards of sixty people stood near guardrail, actually watching the band.

It seems the Lemonheads never grew out of being an alt-rock, mid-nineties club-band. The band's first two songs, both newish (so neither from It’s A Shame About Ray), saw Dando fumbling with his distortion pedals, accidentally triggering cataclysmic thunder when he wanted subtle fuzz while moaning something about a “green hospital.” The next several songs were the ones we'd waited for. Dando launched into the opening chords of “It’s a Shame About Ray” with the standard alt-nineties slacker-rock indifference, washing the crowd in waves of nostalgia and self-indulgence. The song lacked its trademark sheen—which was mostly a product of a power-trio attempting the hatch shell—but the melody held strong and proved itself as timeless and infectious as any of it’s contemporary pop epics. The band proceeded to nail “Rudderless” and give “My Drug Buddy” the requisite outdoor hippie-festival preface of “this is a song about drugs, heh.”

The set stagnated from there as the amorphous crowd drifted across the bridges and through the give-away tents, littering on the ground for lack of adequate trash barrels and waiting for Soul Asylum to begin. (Somehow the brilliant irony of mass littering at "earthfest" seemed to be lost on everyone.) Regardless of lacking any meaningful sonic evolution post-nineties though, nothing can ever take away the rapture of hearing "It's a Shame About Ray" live. And yes, it was rapturous.