Mrs. Robinson

Zoo Freaks, this is the one that snuck up on a whole generation and then refused to leave the request line. The Lemonheads take on Mrs. Robinson is not a museum piece and it is not a polite tribute. It is a Boston kid with a buzz-saw guitar and a grin he could not quite hide, racing through a song written for a movie about a lost college graduate and an older woman who knew exactly what she wanted. Paul Simon wrote it. Simon and Garfunkel made it immortal in 1968. Evan Dando and company recorded their version in a hurry in Berlin, and Atlantic Records shoved it onto the back end of an album that was already finished. The result still sounds like somebody kicked the door open on a church social.

The original was born for Mike Nichols and The Graduate. Simon had been kicking around a tune he thought he might call Mrs. Roosevelt, because any three-syllable name would fit the meter. Once the film locked in Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, the name stuck and the song became the signature of a picture that told the truth about restlessness, class, and bad decisions made in swimming pools. Art Garfunkel has said they simply dropped the character's name into the blank and kept singing. Decades later, when the home-video anniversary of that film needed a fresh angle, somebody reached out to a band that was just starting to get famous for songs that lasted about two minutes and left a mark. Dando has told the story a few different ways over the years, which is part of the charm and part of the hazard with him, but the version that holds up is this: they were on a European run, they landed in a good studio in Berlin with producer Julian Standen, they learned the changes, they hit record, and they were done before the session had time to get complicated. Nic Dalton, the Australian who had stepped in on bass, is the one you hear locking the bottom end. It was easy. It was fun. It was never supposed to be the calling card.

It's a Shame About Ray had already come out in June 1992, produced by the Robb Brothers, with Juliana Hatfield on bass and harmony and David Ryan on drums. Twelve songs, under half an hour, written in a stretch when Dando had decamped to Australia and started trading lines with Tom Morgan of Smudge. The title track came out of a Sydney newspaper story about a kid named Ray who had left school and landed on the street. The cover photo is actress Polly Noonan and her car. College radio already loved Confetti, the title song, and My Drug Buddy. Then the label, under Danny Goldberg, decided the Berlin cover belonged on the record whether the band wanted it there or not. Later pressings carry it as a bonus track. Dando has been blunt about it for years. He did not want the single. He has called the cover disrespectful. He has said Paul Simon hated it and that Art Garfunkel liked it, which only made the argument better. He has also said the royalties kept him afloat in lean years. Both things can be true. The single cracked the Top 20 in Britain and Australia and chewed up the American alternative charts. The album went gold. A song the singer claimed he did not love became the door a lot of people walked through to find the rest of the record.

Listen to what they actually did with it. The Lemonheads do not caress the melody. They sprint. The acoustic jangle of the Simon and Garfunkel single is replaced by a bright electric slash, a drum part that refuses to sit still, and a vocal that sounds like Dando is smiling through the whole scandal. Where the original hangs in the air like a warning, this one tumbles forward like a party that started before the parents got home. The famous woo-woo-woo hook is still there, but it arrives with dirt under its nails. Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee still answers. Jesus loves you more than you will know is still the line that stops you, only now it sounds like a dare. They kept the bones and changed the temperature. That is why it worked on the radio next to grunge records that were twice as long and half as cheerful. People called the album bubblegrunge, which was a clumsy way of saying the guitars had teeth and the tunes had hooks. Mrs. Robinson was the proof.

The band that made it started as teenagers at the Commonwealth School in Boston. Evan Dando, Ben Deily, and Jesse Peretz first called themselves the Whelps, then took the name from a candy that was sweet on the inside and sour on the outside. That description has followed Dando ever since. Early records on Taang! were closer to hardcore and college-rock punk. Lovey, the 1990 Atlantic debut, arrived a year before the world was ready. Ray arrived right on time. Hatfield's presence on the album proper gave the harmonies a second center of gravity. Dalton's presence on the cover gave the hit a different set of fingerprints. Peretz, who had been there from the start, later directed the video for the title track, the one with Johnny Depp wandering a desert house. The Lemonheads were never a stable lineup. Dando has been the only constant. They went quiet in the late nineties, came back in the mid-2000s, and have kept circling ever since, with new players and old songs.

Dando became a magazine face in that stretch, the handsome one who seemed to wander into every room already halfway through a story. The tabloids loved the chaos. The songs were better than the chaos. Into Your Arms, the Gram Parsons-adjacent cover that followed, gave them another radio life. Come On Feel the Lemonheads pushed the pop further. Then the center wobbled, the way it does when a person is carrying more than a set list. He has written about those years himself in the memoir Rumors of My Demise. He has also kept writing. The band that cut Mrs. Robinson in a Berlin studio is, in any practical sense, Evan and whoever is standing next to him. These days that has meant Farley Glavin on bass and John Kent on drums, sessions that have reached as far as São Paulo, and a newer album called Love Chant that brought old friends like J Mascis and Juliana Hatfield back into the room. There is also a Townes Van Zandt project in the works, which tells you where his ear still lives: plain songs, hard truths, no decoration that does not earn its place.

Mrs. Robinson has had a second life of its own. Martin Scorsese dropped the Lemonheads cut into The Wolf of Wall Street, under a scene about a fortune coming apart. The band has not always been eager to play it. Dando has said, more than once, that he hates the song and has no love for the man who wrote it. Zoo Freaks know how that goes. The hit that builds the house is not always the room the builder wants to sit in. What remains is the performance. A short session in Berlin. A label that would not take no for an answer. A 1968 standard dragged into the feedback and the flannel and somehow made sharper. If you came in through this track, go back and sit with the rest of It's a Shame About Ray. Alison's Starting to Happen, Rockin' Stroll, Ceiling Fan in My Spoon, the title song that never quite tells you who Ray was. The cover got them in the door. The album is why they stayed.

The Lemonheads still answer to the same front door. The official site is thelemonheads.net, where the tour dates and the new records live. Facebook is The Lemonheads. Instagram is @thelemonheadsofficial. On X they are @TheLemonheads. And when you want the station that still treats a two-minute guitar song like it matters, you are already home with the Zoo Freaks at THE ZOO. Keep the dial where the sour candy still has a sweet center. Mrs. Robinson is up next, and she has not gotten any more respectable.