Among the memorable album releases from way back in 1992 are Eric Clapton's Unplugged, R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, Dr. Dre's The Chronic, and It's a Shame about Ray from the Lemonheads, a band led by this guy in the hoodie - Evan Dando. You remember him, right? Well, do you know what Dando doesn't remember about the stardom that followed Ray? Kissing Angelina Jolie, that's what. Read on in this section to find out how that's possible.

 

Fine and Dando

As Evan Dando revisits the 1992 album that made him a star, we offer four things you should know about him. By James Mayfield

Fifteen years is a long time in rock and roll. Long enough to gain fame, lose it and yourself along the way, and recapture it again. Long enough, even, to forget that you once locked lips with Angelina Jolie. And that's exactly what's happened to Evan Dando since his pop-rock band, the Lemonheads, first gained wide recognition for its 1992 cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson."

The song appeared on the Lemonheads' fifth, and what was then its most critically acclaimed, full-length record, It's a Shame about Ray. At the time, the band was a trio originally out of Boston - Dando, bass player Juliana Hatfield, and drummer David Ryan - that had attracted a small but passionate following. But "Mrs. Robinson" helped draw a much broader audience to the group. And when that audience found Ray, it had plenty to like. There were hooks: At just 30 minutes long, Ray offered a plethora of brief, catchy songs. There were looks: Tall, shaggy-haired, and handsome, Dando, the son of a former fashion model, was easy magazine-photo-spread material. In 1993, soon after Ray's release, Dando was even named one of the world's "50 dishiest people" by People magazine, an honor (?) that was probably due in no small part to his friendship with Johnny Depp.

But from there, the story took an almost-too-predictable course, one that involved a failure to find another hit, rumored (and confirmed) drug use, and a personal crisis that spelled the end of the Lemonheads in 1998. Dando didn't record under that band name again until 2005. When he did, Ray was there again: That year, he performed a couple of shows in which It's a Shame about Ray was played in its entirety.

The comeback spurred Dando to record new Lemonheads material; on the heels of 2006's The Lemonheads, another new album is expected to come out later this year. And that's inspired this month's reissue of Ray in a collector's edition that includes a 45-minute DVD of videos and live performances and some never-before-heard demo tracks that, like Dando himself, were once lost but now are found.

 

1 The simplest songs are best, if you can find them.

"I made the demos at home on a four-track on cassette," Dando says. "The demos are just a few tracks of me singing and playing the song twice. That was about as advanced as I could get on a four-track at the time. It's just a guitar and vocals. It's nice. "I was going crazy looking for them. Michael Krumper, who works at Razor & Tie now - he used to work at Atlantic [the Lemonheads' label] - had them. And thank God he had them, because now we've got a DVD, nine previously unreleased songs, and the record. It's very exciting. It just brings the album to people's attention one more time."

2 If Dando had to do Ray all over again, he might have hidden the hit "Mrs. Robinson" in a hiding place where no one ever goes.

"I wouldn't have put 'Mrs. Robinson' on the album," Dando says. "But I can't really complain about it at this point. It really did help get us exposure. Luckily, people ventured further and heard the other stuff."

3 He didn't find Angelina Jolie's famous lips to be all that memorable.

In the early '90s, "I was living at this crummy place in the San Fernando Valley, and Johnny Depp had a big house, all empty," Dando recalls. "He just said, 'Come over.' He's a real generous person. He let me live at his house for a couple of months. So, I got Johnny in a video ['It's a Shame about Ray']. Chloë Sevigny is in one ['Big Gay Heart']. And then I found out that Angelina Jolie was in one of our videos too. I made out with her for a couple of shots. That was for 'It's about Time.' Someone asked me, 'So Angelina Jolie is in your video?' I didn't know. Then I looked back on it, and, sure enough, he was right. My main girl in the video was Amy Smart. It was this really dumb-looking video."

4 He's come to believe that cover songs aren't so bad after all.

"I'm working on a new record right now with [punk rocker] Gibby Haynes," Dando says. "Back in the day, me and Johnny [Depp] and Gibby used to hang out. We're doing a covers record together. It's going to be a Lemonheads record, but it's going to be all over the place. There'll be some real notable guests on there, but I don't want to give them away."

Over Under

Lauren Ambrose is following up her unforgiving role on HBO's Six Feet Under with, of all things, a sitcom. By Ken Parish Perkins

 

"Is there something harder than making people laugh?" asks Lauren Ambrose, the 30-year-old actress who costars with Parker Posey in Fox's newest sitcom, The Return of Jezebel James. Well, yeah, maybe there is something harder - like making people sad or making them want to wring your neck. Ambrose managed to do both of those things for audiences while also being moody, despondent, and, yes, even funny during her run as Claire Fisher on the HBO drama Six Feet Under. In the four years she spent on that show, Ambrose earned two Emmy nominations, thanks in part to her being brave enough to abandon an actor's almost instinctive need for viewers' empathy. Fisher was, you'll remember, a character who left a human foot in the locker of an ex-boyfriend without a hint of, well, oops. Yeah. That's hard.

Still, there is something to be fearful of as Ambrose takes on her new role in Jezebel James. The show stars Posey as a hard-driving, successful author who wants her slacker younger sister - played by Ambrose - to carry the child she cannot. Jezebel James has been greatly anticipated, as it marks the return of Gilmore Girls creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino to TV. Like Gilmore Girls, Jezebel James features a rat-a-tat style of dialogue and a premise that's based on quirky female relationships. But unlike Gilmore Girls, Jezebel James is filmed like a traditional sitcom - before a studio audience. "Amy is interested in going back to old-school comedy, which is appealing to an actor to sign on to," Ambrose says. "She's smart and a great writer and comes from Roseanne, which was genius, and she wants to get back to her roots."

And while Ambrose says Sherman-Palladino's machine-gun dialogue doesn't bother her, she does admit to being slightly terrified at the prospect of having to be funny. She shouldn't be. Early in her roughly 10-year-old career, she knocked out several comedic roles on the big screen: Can't Hardly Wait, in 1998; and two independent films, Swimming and the well-titled Psycho Beach Party, in 2000.

The latter two of those movies also featured Ambrose's other talent - singing, something she has worked on post-Six Feet Under.

She made her Broadway debut in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of Awake and Sing! in 2006, starring alongside Mark Ruffalo. And Ambrose received glowing reviews for her star turn in New York's Shakespeare in the Park production of Romeo and Juliet last summer, just months after she and her husband, photographer Sam Handel, had welcomed their first child, Orson Halcyon Handel, into the world. It's more than worth noting that Ambrose beat out Sienna Miller for the role of Juliet.

In addition to taking on stage roles, Ambrose has followed up Six Feet Under by delivering a strikingly nuanced performance in the 2007 feature film Starting Out in the Evening.

So far, everything in Ambrose's career seems to make perfect, almost scripted, sense: small roles in indie movies, followed by a supporting role in an HBO drama, followed by star roles in stage productions, followed by a star role in a big-screen drama. And then … a sitcom? It's a brave and different choice. And even though Ambrose says she wishes everything in her career had been perfectly planned out, she admits that "it never really works out that way. "Things that come your way are often surprising, like this sitcom," she says. "You can't make any plans."

 

Digging Up the Past

With Lauren Ambrose and the funereal Six Feet Under off HBO, the network looks to draw viewers by resurrecting a historical figure.

NEW TV SHOW: John Adams, HBO

SOUNDS KIND OF LIKE: That dead president guy from history class.

BUT IT'S DIFFERENT BECAUSE: Adams, as seen in this miniseries based on the compelling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Adams biography by David McCullough, is actually more than a white-wigged answer to a multiple-choice question. (By the way, the answer is C. The second U.S. president.) In this seven-episode miniseries, Adams is shown as being a respected Massachusetts attorney by day and a hard-driving revolutionary and passionately romantic married man by night.

PEOPLE YOU'LL RECOGNIZE: Paul Giamatti is convincing as Adams. (It turns out that our second president also hated Merlot. Who knew?) Laura Linney is Abigail Adams. Adams's longtime rival Thomas Jefferson is played with surprising sneer by Stephen Dillane (who was Leonard Woolf in The Hours). St. Elsewhere's Dr. Jack Morrison, David Morse, is George Washington. And Justin Theroux - who had a brief but memorable run as Joe on Six Feet Under and who as a Washington, D.C., native may have this presidential-history stuff in his blood - plays John Hancock.

AMERICAN HISTORY IS CHEAPER THAN ROMAN HISTORY: You’ve got to give HBO credit for trying its hand with another historical epic. After all, the network was burned by the intensely expensive and lightly watched series Rome, whose expansive set outside the Eternal City helped drive the cost of the series to a reported $100 million. In creating John Adams, HBO went cheaper — and more authentic. It filmed much of the series on the streets of Colonial Williamsburg.

WHEN TO SEE IT: It begins airing on HBO and the network’s related channels March 16, and it runs through April 27. — John Ross