The Lemonheads

It’s a Shame About Ray

Deluxe Edition

(Rhino)

Sometimes album reissues are little more than curios that cash in on a capitulation to taking the listener to the specific glory days of that release. I will be the first to admit It’s a Shame About Ray does indeed do that for me, but there’s much more to this record. In hindsight the melancholy balladry, sparkling sunshine pop and smirky, spikey punk here may very well make this the best record of 1992—with competition from Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic—in its compact dash, clocking in at under 30 minutes, and without a second of it wasted. In its day it was largely heralded as an understated masterpiece and was at ground zero for the brief boom of an “alternative” rock takeover, but more than 15 years on, Lemonheads rarely get their due. That Ray’s legacy has languished might not be a mystery. The band was ultimately a one-man trip and it is that creative engine—Evan Dando—who must ultimately be blamed for derailing the band’s impossibly bright future. His slide into drugs, disillusion, and general disregard took him from a gifted and pretty posterboy of his generation to “Where is he now?” fodder. Where Ray should have been the flagship of a great career, it’s more of a totem for what should have been. For too long, the real shame has been that the Dando’s underachievement has cost It’s a Shame its rightful legacy.

Dando has been at work successfully restoring the Lemonheads name, particularly with 2006’s exceptional, self-titled return recording. Now it’s time for Ray.

Part of the beauty of this album has always been its brevity. Hell, fans balked when it was reissued within a year of its initial release tagged with a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” To add even more now might seem like a bad move. Not so. This deluxe edition is a glorious revisiting complete with demos from all the album’s originals, along with a DVD of period videos and footage. The extra material only reinforces the genius here. Few records start so strong, with the infectious explosion of “Rockin Stroll,” the semi-sweet rock-and-roller “Confetti,” and the gorgeously sublime confessional nature of the title track, in which Dando cemented his status as one his generation’s great voices. On through to the organ-fueled haze of “My Drug Buddy,” the bristling and chunky hyper fun of “Alison’s Starting to Happen” to the offbeat but beautiful cover of Hair’s “Frank Mills,” there’s a lot of real rock magic here. Few records of the 1990s bottled this perfectly blended batch of slack, aimless wonder, gutsy uncertainty, darkly underpinned visages, and underlying zeal for fun. This is unquestionably a classic album. Listen again for the first time.

—donny kutzbach