IS Evan Dando a troublemaker, or does the trouble find him? “I’ve been in so many cataclysms,” he begins, pleading innocence. “The LA riots. 9/11, I was two blocks away…” But it may be harder to blame fate for his latest predicament. “I sat on a glass table and I reached down to pick up a fucking pencil and all of a sudden blood’s flying all over the room,” he jabbers, explaining why there’s a bright blue cast on his left arm. “I hit an artery and I severed two tendons. They operated that night – and I still made the gig the next day in Argentina. They gave me a shot of morphine… I was like, ‘You’d better give me a lot, because I need more than everybody else!’”
For reasons that never become entirely clear, Dando conducts our Zoom interview while ambling shoeless around a nondescript hotel lobby in Newark, New Jersey. But his heart lies 5,000
