At a Loss for Not Losing

Album: Lemonheads, It's a Shame About Ray, 1992

Best Track: "Bit Part"

Lasting Memory: For me, listening to this album evokes feelings of complete contentedness, competence, and conviviality. This has everything to do with where I was and what I was doing when this album came out in 1992 and when I just about played my cassette copy blank throughout 1993.

For 20 of the 24 months during that two-year period, everything was right in my world. I was in my early 20s and enjoying all the extracurriculars being legal in a college town can offer. I had a steady job. I was wrapping a magnum cum laud bachelor's degree. I got to spend an entire month just driving around the United States. I even got halfway decent at shooting pool.

In short, my life back then was the exact opposite of the ones being lived by the characters in nearly all of the songs on It's a Shame About Ray, who are shiftless drug addicts, emotional cripples, and just not all that bright.

Ray features exactly two happy songs, "Rockin' Stroll," which really is about a kid being pushed in a pram, and "Kitchen," which I'm pretty sure is about having met-cute while shooting up heorin. (H/T Mixtape 4 Melfi).

"My Drug Buddy" might have counted as a happy song as well if the platonic love wasn't being directed more toward the drugs than to the person with whom lead Lemonhead Evan Dando is getting high.

"Allison's Starting to Happen" also might qualify as happy, but there's such a subtext of Allison becoming unattainable at the exact moment that she becomes interesting that I can't help but throw the song onto the sad pile.

All the rest of the tracks on Ray are stone bummers lyrically. The songs rock for the most part, but as "Bit Part" and "Rudderless" show, even things that are enjoyable in the moment are bound to have regrettable consequences. I can't tell you how many times I've thought of adopting the coda to "Rudderless" as one of my lifetime soundtrack songs. I mean, how cool and appropriate would it be to have this playing in the background of every one of my that-was-really-dumb moments:

Slipped my mind that I could use my brain
Ill stay up all night and crash on the plane

Ship without a rudder is like a ship without a rudder is
Like a ship without a rudder is like a ...

Handmaiden to addiction and stupidity, loss is also a prevailing theme on Ray. The title track is about the death of fellow junkie Dando sort of knew. The two cover songs that close the album are "Frank Mills" and "Mrs. Robinson."

Odd, then, that this album should stir such fond memories. I guess it's all about context trumping content.

Up Next: Lemonheads, Come on Feel the Lemonheads, 1993