120 Reasons To Live: The Lemonheads

Nothing did more to further the cause of Alternative Nation-building than 120 Minutes, MTV’s Sunday-night video showcase of non-mainstream acts. For nearly two decades, the program spanned musical eras from ’80s college rock to ’00s indie, with grunge, Britpop, punk, industrial, electronica and more in between. MAGNET raids the vaults to resurrect our 120 favorite and unjustly forgotten videos from the show’s classic era.

#13: The Lemonheads “It’s A Shame About Ray”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk_M47yLruM&feature=related

You might recruit Johnny Depp to be in your video if you were, say, a middle-aged Tom Petty and you wanted a fresh face for your narrative song about a young, ridiculously good-looking rock star. But when you’re the Lemonheads, fronted by definitive alterna-hunk Evan Dando, adding Depp to the cast results in an uncalled-for surplus of high cheekbones. It’s like Zoolander. A commercial breakthrough and staple of the summer of ’92, It’s A Shame About Ray firmly shifted the Lemonheads from scruffy, sarcastic Boston pop/punk outfit to established modern-rock hitmakers. We suspect the influence of Australian musicians Tom Morgan and Nic Dalton (the latter appears in the video for the title track) had a lot more to do with Dando’s great leap forward in songwriting prowess than the album credits indicate, but let’s leave it at a hunch—that’s how rumors get started. Despite its consistency and wealth of concise, radio-ready pop songs, It’s A Shame About Ray got noticed mostly because of a crappy cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” originally a single that was later tacked onto the end of the album as a bonus track.