A Twist of Lemon

The roots for a clichéd vagabond rocker lifestyle were planted early. Until Dando was 9, his parents — hippie surfers — included him and his older sister, Holly, in their worldwide search for the perfect wave. "I learned that traveling all the time is the funnest thing for me to do. Nothing makes me as happy as going somewhere entirely new, wandering around, and noticing different kinds of shells, different insects, and different trees," says Dando, who has no permanent home. Instead, he's on a first-name basis with all the employees of his favorite hotel — the Chateau Marmont, in L.A. — and carries his most prized possessions (shells from Australia, the place where he most likes to "kick back"; stray buttons he finds on the street; and a 1969 issue of Life magazine with Dando's pet cultural icon, Charles Manson, on the cover) in his guitar case.

"The other side of always moving around," he adds, "whether it's something about being scared of being in one place — I don't really know. I do get in a rut when I stay in one place. I go and have breakfast, and then, like, what else is there to do? Sometimes I'm not the most comfy person — I can freak out." What freaks him out most? "Just everything. Like highways and like the physics of how many people there are, and you have the weight of cars all driving next to each other, and how people aren't so good to each other. It makes me sad. The only things that make me feel better are singing and writing songs."

When his parents split up in 1976, Dando and his mother and sister moved to Boston. "Up until my parents divorced I was really happy to just frolic among the wildlife or whatever. I was majorly into bird-watching," says Dando. "When dad left, I was an angry kid." His mother, Susan, a former model who now sells real estate in New York City, agrees but adds, "He's not angry anymore — he's a real sweetheart. But he's also sort of a fragile type for this life."

After the divorce, Dando started writing songs with his cousin Eric, and by the time he hit high school he had dyed his hair blue, formed an early versionof the Lemonheads (named after a candy), and experimented with drugs. "I tried heroin 'cause it seemed like the naughtiest thing I could do," he admits. "I got over that really quickly. I didn't want to be a zombie for the rest of my life."

But as songs like "My Drug Buddy" on Ray and "Style" on the latest album indicate, Dando still has a relationship with pot and possibly other drugs. "I'm worried about the fact that the reason I do them is, like the song 'My Drug Buddy' says, 'I'm too much with myself, I wanna be someone else,"' he says. There are also bizarre Dando rumors, including one about a trashed, feces-stained New York City hotel room — supposedly the result of a bout with heroin; another, costarring actor Johnny Depp, has a stoned Dando on a high ledge of an L.A. hotel, singing old Stones songs. Dando finds such rumors "funny" but denies both. "Johnny and I, we jam acoustically," he says. "We always wanted to do a version of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame.' It seems like a really sad song — a metaphor for life."

Leave it to Dando to find the dark side of such a benign standard. Fortunately he's got more than a year of touring, singing, and talking to reporters to keep him out of trouble. "Maybe some day I'll be able to stay somewhere I like for a long time and get used to it and chill," he says. "Right now it's better for me just to stay on the road pretty much most of the time." *