Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Lemonheads - It's a Shame About Ray Deluxe Edition

This is probably my most High School album. There's a great story with it too. I made Evan Dando sit through it once, so now you will.

I went to high school in Jakarta, Indonesia. The American/European CDs the one chain of CD stores would stock were pretty erratic; you never knew what you would walk in and find. Imagine my delight when I found It's A Shame About Ray nestled in the racks during a Sunday of leisurely shopping at Pondok Indah mall! I listened to it all day long! I told everyone I knew about it Monday, including this boy I sort of had a crush on, Daniel Eiland (boy, I hope he doesn't Google himself EVER). He then proceeded to get mad at me because he claimed to have "hidden" it in the store so he could go back and buy it, and tomorrow was his birthday!

I felt kind of bad, but didn't really feel that the CD was "hidden". When I got home (this part gets complicated, I lived with a friend and her family, and her mom did commercial baking in the house) "Mom" was excited to show off this giant sheet cake and cupcake display she had made for the Boy Scouts. The cake was pretty big, and she encouraged us to touch it. We did, tentatively, and discovered it was hard as a rock! She had made the icing into a gluey substance that looked just like the real thing and "iced" a box. I immediately had a brilliant idea.

The next day at school I presented Daniel with a beautiful white sheet cake with green icing border and, written in my own unmistakeable handwriting, "Happy Birthday Daniel!" with all sorts of little doodles. He was shocked, to say the least. I also let him have the CD. I ran off before the secret of the phony cake was exposed, but eyewitness reports were pretty detailed. He was impressed by both moves, he later told me, and I found a copy myself at another less popular mall's CD store.

Oh yeah, the deluxe reissue! The music sounds great, the bonus tracks really should have included the actual b-sides, but the demos are interesting. The DVD is where the action is though. That Evan Dando was quite the hottie back in the day, and I swear there are multiple videos here of him sitting on a beach/cliff with the wind blowing his hair around and he just looks all high.

I will now present a video not from Lemonheads, but of Superchunk. I love the slumber party scene which prominently features a picture of Evan looking sexy in his PJs from Spin Magazine which I totally had hanging up.

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