The angel that watches over Evan Dando from heaven has been doing a bang-up job for the past thirty years or so. Dando remains the dream boyfriend who would rather be playing his guitar and doing drugs than cuddle up. He is the Bertie Wooster of ’90s rock stars, with his happy dolphin smile and greasy blonde hair falling down alluringly over his eyes. An airhead with the soul of a poet.

Evan’s love for music was always entirely real, though, even if his songs were built backwards, with choruses at the end instead of in the middle, the stoned warmth of his rock star voice insinuating itself into the listener’s head like a woolen blanket that gave comfort while you looked out the window on a rainy afternoon. At the very least, his songs were always approachable. “Into Your Arms,” a not particularly memorable by-the-numbers song that Evan wrote at the height of his fame with The Lemonheads, spent nine consecutive weeks at #1 on the American Billboard charts, a feat matched only by U2.

Life can be a bitch, though, and charm alone is rarely enough to get you through. When I last saw Evan, it was wintertime on the Vineyard, where he had turned into just another Vineyard junkie, which was the fate that a stone-cold sober person would have predicted for him 20 years ago, if they were being kind. Evan always loved drugs as much or more than he loved music — and he loved music a lot. I remember sitting on a lawn on the Vineyard decades ago and listening to Evan and being struck by how much he loved the music he was playing. I also remember him lying on the sidewalk after a show in New York and talking to some kids about music, or trying to talk — through the haze of the drug that had taken over his life and mercilessly eaten away at his talent. The sincerity at least was still there.

The fact that Evan was alive was impressive, given that all the famous rock star junkies of our youth had lost their lives to heroin, which is a terrible drug, especially for creative people whose vulnerability is the source of their art and their fame, and must be protected at all costs. Heroin’s promise is that it is the mother that always loves you and will protect you from death. It opens a portal into another dimension where without it, you will die.

Has Evan Dando ever been in the same league as a songwriter with Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith? No. Few people ever will. The Lemonheads were merely the best teenage pop punk band that ever existed. If Evan had taken the business of rock stardom more seriously, then The Lemonheads could have filled stadiums on tour like Green Day. But Evan never took his stardom seriously enough. He was both childish and child-like. His young ambition was not so much to be a rock star, but to hang out and play music and do drugs.

He was also incredibly generous, which is why so many of Evan’s most memorable songs were covers of songs by artists he loved, like Big Star (“The Ballad of El Goodo”) and Gram Parsons (“Return of the Grievous Angel,” “How Much I’ve Lied,” his incredible duet with Juliana Hatfield on “$1000 Wedding,” where they each seem to be singing two different versions of the same song). Even when he was goofing on the Hair soundtrack (“Frank Mills”) or with Susanne Vega (“Luka”), his love for the source material was always sincere. In that way, he’s a throw-back to the great song interpreters of the past, a kind of slacker Dean Martin who would pass out on the couch at the end of the night and wake up to rip bong loads in the morning. I’ve done all the drugs that I could find, he sang with the Blake Babies, Hatfield’s band. It was obviously true.

Doing drugs and playing music was Evan’s life philosophy of sorts, in the same way that Dean’s philosophy involved singing songs and drinking martinis. It was also an obvious means of escape. I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else, he sang on “My Drug Buddy,” which is probably the best song that Evan wrote. The key being that Evan wasn’t actually asking for a friend to come over and keep him company, but to become a different person entirely — which is why friendships based on a common interest in drugs are generally inferior to the ones you form when you are sober.

It’s impossible for me to ever give up on Evan Dando, though. For one thing, no one sings a Gram Parsons song like Evan. Having recently watched him play two shows in Greenwich Village, apparently sober and with an encouraging paunch, looking for all the world like a liberal arts college professor in a retro tweed jacket layered over a T-shirt (the 1950s version of Evan Dando would have been a great college English professor, like a stoner version of the title character in J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man), I began to wonder if this time, he had actually managed to get clean, reportedly thanks to his Brazilian girlfriend, the daughter of a well-known folk musician, who had brought him to live with her down there. Maybe Evan truly wanted to get better. Maybe the drugs got boring. We booked a date to meet in St. Louis before he left for Europe.

The venue in St. Louis was just as packed on a Friday night as Evan’s shows were in New York. He started off by playing “Return of the Grievous Angel,” with its glorious invocation of being “out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels / And a good saloon in every single town,” which Evan croons to perfection before delivering the money shot dear to every cowboy-loving college boy romantic:

“Oh, but I remembered something you once told me

And I'll be damned if it did not come true

Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down

And they all lead me straight back home to you.”

Live, he has lost maybe two thirds of the top register of his voice, but the sweetness and vulnerability are all still there. He can compensate by moving songs down a register, which is a trick he did on bad nights even when he was young. In St. Louis, he has exchanged the professorial tweed for a Levi’s jeans jacket. His unwashed golden hair hanging down in front of his face allows you to squint and imagine that he is 25 years younger. He sings “Hard Drive,” which is a song that other people clearly wrote for Evan:

“This is the house I'm building here

This is the girl I'm marrying

This is the chord I'm strumming now

This is the faith I'm leaning on.”

It’s an ex-addict’s invocation of presentness and being in the moment, which was not exactly true to life when Evan recorded it. It was a song about what Evan’s friends wanted him to be once he got clean. “Rudderless,” a song off The Lemonheads one great album, It’s a Shame About Ray, is more to the point:

“Slipped my mind that I could use my brain

I'll stay up all night and crash on the plane.”

Which is a perfect Evan Dando couplet. The song ends with one of his trademark odd concluding choruses:

“Ship without a rudder's like a ship without a rudder's like a ship without a rudder’s like a...”

Only Dr. Seuss could argue with that. Evan segues into a rousing version of “My Drug Buddy,” which I realize could also be a Dr. Seuss book.

Once he arrives at the heart of his shows, Evan often seems to lose himself. He stands on stage and free-associates stray snatches of songs that arise from his tape-recorder brain. Sometimes the effect is charming and ADD-like. Sometimes it’s a mess. His audiences are generally forgiving, if baffled. What saves him, at least most of the time, is that he seems fully present, and works hard to maintain the connection with the audience, even though he doesn’t always have the time or the inclination to explain the leaps that his brain is making. He starts to strum one song, only to break it off mid-note and play another song, whose lyrics he doesn’t always remember.

Evan starts singing “Barrytown,” the Steely Dan track, and the audience sings along to help him out. Then he switches songs. I’m a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah. I get the connection, which is that he ripped off “Dirty Work” to make “My Drug Buddy.” He looks out on the audience with his happy dolphin smile, welcoming whoever gets the joke.

The interlude having ended, he rips through another dozen of his ’90s hits. The one that seems to resonate the most with the audience tonight is “The Outdoor Type,” a song which I have always imagined as the theme to the great unmade 1990s slacker sitcom whose best approximation was probably the film Reality Bites, in which Evan had a memorable bit part as the stoner ex-boyfriend.

“You can do no wrong!” someone shouts out from the audience.

“Yeah, that’s what everyone tells me,” he answers, with an aw-shucks grin. It’s staggering to imagine how much money he shot into the arm that is holding his guitar. But at least he’s self-aware about it.

Is he here? Sure, he is. He’s here, in pieces. Which is okay.

“I like his hair,” says the girl sitting next to me, who is here with her mom, who is my age, and appears to know The Lemonheads entire back catalog by heart.

On stage now, Evan is on drums, by himself, playing a dirge-like version of “Lyin’ Eyes” by the Eagles. He’s not making fun of the song, but rather appreciating its greatness by stripping away all the elements that made the record feel slick, and replacing them with his own kind of broken charm, which comes in and out through the static like a familiar song on a far-away radio station.

After ten minutes of sitting on the edge of the stage and watching the crowd leave, the tour manager brings me back to an office, where I give Evan a hug, in return for which he gives me a cigarette and a lighter.

“I just have two. They gave me two,” he apologizes. I tell him about my daughter, who is a 15-year-old punk.

“The Lemonheads were the bougie-est punk band on the planet,” he laughs. “We started in ’86, so right, ten years after Ramones, you know? But we were really strict. We wanted to be like Slaughter and the Dogs, like the Pagans. We wanted to be like Minor Threat. My English teacher came down to hear us practice once, and he said, ‘It sounds like someone falling down a very long staircase.’”

Evan went to Commonwealth, the famously liberal Boston high school which had only one rule, which was no roller skating in the hallways. He loved it so much that he spent five years there.

“Tell me about Gram Parsons,” I ask him. “Because you have had a love and a connection to him that has lasted your entire life.”

“I actually got into him in 1990 or something. 1988,” he recalls. “I wrote this song, ‘Ride With Me,’ and it reminded my friend John Bing of Gram Parsons. He's like, ‘You should really listen to Gram Parsons.’ Which is a pretty backwards way of getting into it. So John Bing gave me The Gilded Palace of Sin, and then the Submarine Band record, and GP. He gave me all the records.”

What Evan liked about Gram Parsons at first was that he had hung out with the Rolling Stones at the height of their fame, which was also Evan’s ambition. “That’s all I liked about it,” he laughs. “I was like, ‘Oh, Gram Parsons, that cool dude that kind of influenced the Stones.’ Everyone loved Gram. And I didn’t even know the music that well then. But I got into it, and it really opened up a lot of things for me about relaxing while you are singing, about just being yourself inside a song.”

It’s a particular connection to make, I suggest, between what Gram Parsons and Minor Threat have in common, which is the gift of being yourself inside a song. But he shrugs off the connection between himself and Parsons. “The best Gram-like singer these days is Chris Robinson,” he says. “He’s got the chops.” The Gram Parsons T-shirt he used to wear on stage was made by a friend. “She also made me a Townes Van Zandt tape in like ’92, when barely anybody really knew about him. One of the best things about being in a band is turning people onto stuff. Doing covers. Some people will hear this, maybe they’ll hear the original stuff.”

His own favorite band coming up was the Replacements. “They were like my Rolling Stones. I went to see them like 12 times,” he remembers. “It was an event every time. It was different. It wasn’t always great, but I always loved it because it was like an event. They didn’t get all dressed up or nothing. I liked those types of bands. You could be in the audience and aspire to be them. I think The Lemonheads are another band that starts people playing in a band because it’s not so hard. I know we influenced a lot of people.”

I ask him about the feeling of being young and beautiful, and having a hit song, and whether that felt good or bad. “It’s not that fun,” he remembers. “You want your music career, so you go along with stuff. And mainly, it’s stupid. But they need an angle. They’re going to get one somehow, if you’re going to do okay. And I always thought, ‘I’m not going to take it too seriously. They’re going to pick someone.’ Then they use your face and turn it into a hook to sell the music, which was a bummer. So I quit The Lemonheads. I was in the Blake Babies, and we shared a practice space with the Pixies. And it was awesome. But then we got this offer to tour Europe, and I was like, ‘I got to fucking do it. I got to do it.’ And so I got the band back together.”

And then there was heroin. We talk about some mutual friends who were addicts, and what became of their lives, by way of confession. Suddenly, he looks vulnerable.

“Here, you can touch my scars,” he says, giving me his hands. I run my fingers over his track marks.

“It’s a terrible thing. A bunch of years gone, yeah. And it’s so scary too. It makes you hyper-afraid of death when you’re on heroin. Because you just want to do heroin forever. Then you think about it, and you’re like, ‘Well, I’m actually setting myself up to die really quickly, really soon.’ So it’s very scary. And I just got away from it. She helped me a lot,” he says, gesturing at his Brazilian girlfriend, who is a gentle but assertive presence, which is a style I recognize from my own time in Brazil. “She pulled me out of this joint that I was in, man. I had to sleep with a ski pole in my hand. It was fucking hard. It was the worst.”

What made it especially bad, Evan says, was living on the Vineyard, which had always been a place where he felt protected. “That’s how I thought I’d get away from heroin,” he says. “I didn’t want to be a Vineyard junkie, they’re the worst. I went to the Vineyard to be like, ‘Well, I'm not going to be one of those Vineyard junkies, like Janet Haggerty or something, fuck that. I’m not going to be that.’ And then sure enough, I go into Crow and Eggs, and I had fucking tracks all over my hands and everything. It was horrible.”

The place he is living now in Brazil is a haven for musicians, he says. It’s like Topanga Canyon. Their house is way up in the jungle. It’s more like a compound, actually, with four houses with eight bedrooms, a guesthouse, and a separate studio at the bottom. “In the jungle, with monkeys, just amazing. It’s so nice,” he says. I am invited to come and visit anytime.

We are definitely on the same wavelength now, vibing at 1:30 AM on a Friday night in St. Louis, having both lived through some of the same shit. Now it is possible that we will both live forever. At the least, we are both still alive.

“I’ve got like two albums, almost,” he says, excited. “I want to play them for you. I’ve got one ready, pretty much. And another one will be able to be finished in like two months. So I’ll be able to put two albums out right away,” he says. “All original stuff. Because I got back that thing,” Evan explains. “Because it really went away when I was on heroin. It really fucked it up.”

America doesn’t feel any different now than it did in 1990, Evan says. “It’s just uptight as fuck,” he says. “Think about it. This is a country founded on people that were too uptight to live in England. If it was Italy or something, I could understand. But it wasn’t Italy. It was uptight as fuck already over there. And they’re like, ‘No, you guys don’t have enough rules here. It’s too loose. You got to go somewhere where we can be really Puritan and Calvinist.’

“That’s Boston,” I suggest.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he agrees. “But you know what? It kind of infected the whole country, that weird whatever it was. I don't know. It’s Calvinist. But, come on now, I love America.”

What’s missing from America these days is the magic of drugs, now that they’ve been made legal. “It was the funnest thing to do, right?” Evan says. “And the secret-est thing. It was a secret thing with people that you know really well. If it wasn’t illegal, I wouldn't have done it.

It was his older sister who inadvertently gave Evan the ambition of being a drug addict when she gave him The Family, the Manson family opus by Ed Sanders. “I thought it was about the family,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, good, I can know about the family, the nuclear family.’ Then it was like, ‘Uh-oh.’ I was like ten, and I read it, and I was so into it. It was like, ‘Wow. Jesus is love, and love is God, and God is death.’"

Brokenness, the fact that there are pieces of you missing in plain sight, is hard to accept when you are younger. As you get older, you are left with no choice but to make a virtue of it. Time is moving too fast.

“People have strengths and weaknesses and gaps. They just do,” Evan is saying. “I did drugs at first because I just thought it was part of being in a band, like the Stones and stuff. I thought, ‘I want to get high and play rock ‘n’ roll,’ I just thought that was the right way to do it. And then I stupidly said, ‘Kids should take drugs if they want to start a band.’ I was stupid. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what have I just said?’ And then I lost twenty years of my life.”

“If you had one of those Nudie Cohn jackets made,” I ask Evan, “what would you put on it?”

“Oh, wow. I think I’d have the Road Runner and the Wylie Coyote, and I’d have the moon,” he answered. Then he told a story about living with Gibby Haynes at Johnny Depp’s house and losing his Porsche, along with the clicker to open his gate, and breaking the prop hands from Edward Scissorhands, and sleeping with Kate Moss, who was Depp’s girlfriend, before the actor finally threw him out. He remains close with Gibby Haynes, though. Then we talk some more about doing dope.

“You know what?” he asks. “Your friends tend to decrease in quality. They’re not as cool. Your real friends, I’ve always been lucky. I had great friends. And when I started doing dope, there they all went. They don’t say shit, but they hang back. And that’s the strongest message of all. They don't want to talk.”

“That shows that they love you,” I say.

“Exactly, and they’re hoping. But they’re not betting. But it’s cool now. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of old friends, I think, right? Haven't I? Bill Stevenson’s one of my favorite people. And we did a bunch of stuff together, and he came and played drums with us last time, I think it was in Kansas City, because we lost our drummer, and Bill had five hours to learn the songs. I love that guy. He’s a closet Steely Dan fan.”

Evan takes out his old guitar and plays. It’s an old Elvis guitar he got for two grand in 1993, which means it’s probably the same guitar I heard him play on the lawn of a rented house in the Vineyard. Songs are always made up of other songs. Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle” is a rip-off of “Eleanor Rigby.” Neil Young took “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to make “Mr. Soul.”

Faulkner had a great quote about writing, I say. He said that “All books are made out of other books.” Stealing is part of the art.

“But not from the Stones,” Evan counters. “It’s not smart.”

We talk about the Faulkner novel he is reading, and Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, and Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. There are so many great books left to read, and so many songs to write.

“I’m really happy not to be living in America right now,” he says. “But I love being here.”

“It’s great to see you,” I say sincerely. “And it’s great to hear your joy in playing.”

“Yeah, I hope so,” he says. “That makes me feel really good.”

He’s getting married in Brazil at the end of December, he says. I should come for the wedding, and bring my wife. If I’m here, I’ll be there, I promise. At least I will try.

“Try,” he says.