Home in time for E

Welcome to the wild world of Mr E.

Eelsville, if you prefer. Even if you’ve never been here you’ve probably heard tell of it. It’s located somewhere between Raindog Park, Carvertown and F Scott Fitzevon Heights, a well-tended neighbourhood, quiet as Pleasantville on the surface, but a peek behind the Venetian blinds reveals some Very Special People. People like Dog Faced Boy. Gorilla Girl. The Teenage Witch. The Beautiful Freak. Bus Stop Boxer.

Mostly these folk stay indoors, but sometimes, when the calliope sounds and the weathervanes whirl like spinning tops, when the lightning rods twitch and a squall causes the leaves to levitate in figures of eight, they’ll venture outdoors to roam the parks and playgrounds, some of them sad-faced and surly, some stoic in the face of ridicule. Today our beloved monsters are picnicking in the park.

Over there, between the swings and the jungle gym, a blind albino busker sits on a tiny practise amp, playing a tinker toy piano. As you pass by, he lifts his shades, winks one scary pinhead eye and says, “It’s a motherfucker”, then flips the glasses back into place. A hundred yards down the street, a homeless guy tries to sell you some XXXX porn in a brown paper bag: Girls Without Skin. Vendors begin pulling down the shutters. Something’s afoot – you can feel it like a tapeworm in your intestines. A train whistle sounds in the distance. The Souljacker’s back in town, carrying a suitcase full of names and dragging his bad leg behind him like a gimpy Gene Vincent. His presence precedes him a like a bad smell, like threatening rain. You quicken your step until you reach the safety of the hotel.

Up the elevator and into room 527. Inside, the suite’s window is open, and two chairs have been dragged out onto the balcony. Somebody tells you to sit, so you do. A man in a uniform brings two bottles of water and several silver teapots. You wait for the man to show.

Time passes. Or you pass time.

Someone says: This is Mr E.

You stand and extend your hand.

Mr E’s wearing tinted glasses.

How are you? he says.

Not bad, considering.

Considering what?

Considering we don’t get too many of your kind round these parts anymore. Not since September anyway.

Yeah? Did everyone else bail?

Yeah. Paranoia. Travel insurance costs. And so on.

Well we never make any money anyway so it’s not an issue for us. I think the only reason we got a tour bus is because Janet Jackson cancelled her whole tour or something, so we got lucky.

You didn’t get her pyrotechnics into the bargain?

We’re tryin’. Although I did get her outfits.

I think you’ll need some buffing up to fit in there.

What are you saying?

Nothing. I better stop talking now.

Before he became Mr E, mayor of Eelsville, he was plain old Mark Oliver Everett. He was brought up in Virginia, under the shadow of his quantum physicist father Dr Hugh Everett, described by Scientific magazine as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. As a teenager Hugh Everett corresponded with Einstein, and his book Everett’s Many Worlds Theory, with its concept of parallel universes, had quite an effect on the sci-fi boffins of the 1950s.

From the earliest age though, Mark Everett knew he couldn’t follow his father’s path.

“I just never had it,” he says. “He was like a genius physicist and I flunked out of beginning algebra. It just wasn’t my thing. There was never any pressure to be anything though, in my family. To a fault. There was no interest. Y’know, his mother was a poet, people say math and music and poetry all are kind of related in some way as far as the genes go. I dunno, maybe I’ll have some genius mathematician son or something. A better idea than being a musician, probably.”

Everett Jr got bitten by the bug at the age of six when he begged his parents to buy him a drum set. Ten years later, inspired by Neil Young’s After The Goldrush, he began a long process of honing his songcraft on four-track home recording set ups (years later he would use that old Goldrush upright piano on Daisies Of The Galaxy).

Frustrated with life in Virginia – “it sucked”, Mark Everett packed his belongings into his car and drove the 3000 miles to LA, moving in above a garage in Atwater Village, sustaining himself with a series of soul destroying jobs and recording songs at night.

“I didn’t know anybody at all, in the whole state,” he remembers. “Y’know it was all the way on the other side of the country. So it was a pretty crazy thing to do at the time, but I was just at my wits end in Virginia, there was nothing left for me to do. The biggest thing that came out of growing up there is I’m happy a lot more in my life now because I just always appreciate how much richer my experiences are since not being in that situation. There was just nothing there to do except get drunk and take drugs every night just to try and forget where you were.”

Everett scored a deal with Polydor in 1991 and released two solo albums, A Man Called E and Broken Toy Shop. In 1995 he began working under the Eels umbrella – basically himself and drummer Butch (aka Jonathan Norton). His first DreamWorks album Beautiful Freak followed, plus an underground hit in the form of ‘Novocaine For The Soul’ a song that drew some comparison with Beck, although it had been recorded back in 1993. Either way, the album put paid to any Johnny-come lately jibes, stocked as it was with a selection of perfectly skewed love songs (the title track and ‘My Beloved Monster’ to name two) plus a slice or two of underdog satire (‘Guest List’) and Short Cuts style cutaways (‘Susan’s House’).

The album did well, but E was about to be dealt a rotten hand. He’d already tasted loss – he found his father dead in 1982 – but in 1996 his sister Elizabeth committed suicide and the following year his mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He dealt with it by recording a strangely uplifting album called Electro-Shock Blues with a little help from T-Bone Burnett, Jon Brion and Mike Simpson of the Dust Brothers. The track ‘Cancer For The Cure’ was later included on the American Beauty soundtrack. Ask if he ever considered not writing about these events and E says this:

“Yeah, well originally when people, friends and family members, were all dying in this same period, my reaction as far as writing about it was always… it just seemed too typical. It’s like right now with all these (terrorist) tragedies, everyone’s writing all these anthems, and you just know that’s gonna happen, it’s very predictable that Michael Jackson’s gonna do a song about it or whatever. So my reaction was always like, ‘I’m not gonna write about any of this’, first because it’s all just too painful and personal, and secondly because it all just seemed too obvious a thing to do.”

So what changed his mind?

“There was a defining moment when I actually woke up one night and I had this feeling that’s hard to put into words, but I was thinking in terms of this clear blue beautiful sky put together with all these tragedies happening. And I just had the feeling of the two of them together and I realised that I could treat this stuff in a really different way that I wasn’t ever aware of being done before. And that’s when I started to get artistically really excited about the idea, and knowing that it was going to be therapeutic for me too. It was a terrible time in my life but when I think back about recording Electro-Shock Blues I had the best time makin’ that stuff. I miss the feeling of making that record in some ways. It seems odd maybe, but it was such a great thing to hang onto at that time.”

Was he conscious of the lineage of mourning albums like Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night and Lou Reed’s Magic And Loss?

“Yeah I knew those two. Those were about the only two that I could think of, but they didn’t really have the blue sky so much that I was aware of. Maybe Magic And Loss did a little bit. (Tonight’s The Night) is a whole other ball game, I think. And god bless him for that.”

Electro-Shock Blues wasn’t a big hit, but it is a pivotal record in The Eels’ canon, one that made possible both the new record Souljacker and 2000’s gorgeous hurdy-gurdy symphony Daisies Of The Galaxy, which featured collaborations with REM’s Peter Buck and Grant Lee Phillips. Tunes like ‘A Daisy Through Concrete’ and ‘Mr E’s Beautiful Blues’ could’ve formed the basis for any music oriented grief-counselling programme. Typical then, that George Bush Jr got the whole thing arseways in his 2000 presidential campaign, singling out the album as a corrupting influence on children. The evidence? A cartoon cover imprinted with titles like ‘It’s A Motherfucker’.

E: “We were really thrilled when that happened because we’re pretty much invisible in America, and for the guy who’s running for president to pick our record, out of all the better candidates for that kinda thing… when somebody called and told us we were all applauding and screaming we were so happy. Of course it was just ridiculous. I think on his campaign website you can still download my lyrics.”

During the recording of Electro-Shock Blues, Mark Everett did something he stills considers to be out of character. He took a break and went to a meditation retreat for ten days, where the rules stipulated no speaking, reading or writing.

“It had a productive effect on everything,” he says. “I think I should do it again, that was a few years ago now. It’s such a hard thing to do when you’re addicted to all the things that are going on every day in your life, all the phone calls and TV sets and reading and writing and everything else. It’s really hard, you feel like you’re going insane. I would have these passionate dreams at night about checking my phone messages!

“After ten days of that you’d drive home and turn on the radio,” he continues, “and everything you listen to, no matter how shitty it is, sounds like the most amazing thing you’ve ever heard. Which is sort of like smoking pot and writing a song or something. You write a song and this is the most amazing piece of music the world has ever heard, and then the next day you’re not high anymore and you’re like, ‘This sucks! What the hell was I thinking?’ So there’s a dangerous part to it too, but then after a while you start to settle back in. I started a whole ’nother idea during that point, which was this album (Souljacker).”

The Souljacker concept derived from reports Everett had read about a serial killer who was convinced he could steal people’s souls as well as their bodies. On the new album, ‘Souljacker Pt 1’ is a dementoid, distorted jolt of electric blues that manages to be equal parts ‘Who Do You Love’, ‘Welfare Mothers’, ‘50 Foot Queenie’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. Part 2 was written on toilet paper in a breach of the retreat’s no-writing rule, and offers a quiet resistance to the notion that some sick fuck thinks he can thieve the human essence.

“In a broader context it just seemed interesting to me that people were losing their souls everyday, just living life, and they didn’t need a serial killer to take it away from them,” Everett says. “People didn’t even know they had one. And my whole thing that I discovered – and I’m not a religious person – is just the idea that there is something really good inside you, something that’s really important and strong and you can hold onto that if you want to, nobody can take that away.”

From this one idea of the Souljacker came a whole cast of quirky characters in songs like ‘Dog Faced Boy’, ‘That’s Not Really Funny’ and ‘Jungle Telegraph’, all animated by some pretty crafty musical backdrops courtesy of E and renowned producer and PJ Harvey/Sparklehorse/Giant Sand collaborator John Parish. But the Souljacker idea also informs the visuals, with E taking on an evil alter ego on the album cover and in the video, a hooded figure with mountain-man beard and shades.

The promo clip for ‘Souljacker Pt 1’ was shot by German director Wim Wenders, an Eels fan since he bought Beautiful Freak on impulse after taking a shine to the cover. E has a part in the next Wenders film, co-written with Sam Shepherd, which bears the working title In America (“I wanna change the name to In Afghanistan, but he’s not up for it!”). Wenders recently ended up on stage with the band in Cologne singing along to ‘I Like Birds’, and the ‘Souljacker’ shoot was distinguished by the presence of semi-legendary 57-year-old Berlin prostitute Molly Luft.

Frau Luft was paid 300 DM for the 11-hour shoot. “Usually I make that in two hours,” she later said, “but for Wim I would have done it for free.”

If all this sounds like the transcript of some lost Tom Waits song, then it comes as no surprise to find that Souljacker features a walk-on part from guitarist Joe Gore, himself a sometime visitor to Waits’ world.

“Records like Bone Machine have been a constant inspiration to me,” Everett admits. “With all the records I’m making I think about that one in some way or another. The main thing that I get from Bone Machine is the way he’ll really represent life in all its different aspects – there’ll be something really scary like ‘The Earth Died Screaming’ and then something really beautiful like one of the ballads, and all that occupied in the same space is a great thing to me because it’s a full, rich experience like life should be.”

Similarly, Eels love songs are for people who live in the basements, sewers and storm shelters of this world – one website message board poster dubbed E “godfather to all the babyfreaks with broken hearts”. Me, I think anyone who can pen a couplet like “In this world of shit/Baby you are it” has something special – the profound and the profane in ten syllables.

“To me that’s what makes it meaningful,” Everett concludes, “not because it has a bad word or anything, but because it’s very meaningful to find love in a shitty situation, it’s something to really hang onto. To me ‘It’s A Motherfucker’ seemed natural; I just thought I was writing a song for BB King or something. It just seemed like a classic kind of sentiment, it never seemed like something odd, but I guess once you hear me singing it with the piano and strings it becomes a juxtaposition or something. It’s not supposed to be, it’s supposed to be really natural.

Outside, on main street in Eelsville, the rain has stopped and the beautiful freaks have come back out to play. The mayor has banished all evil, he’s run the Souljacker out of town, god is in his heaven and all is right with the world. A midget and a bearded lady waltz to ‘World Of Shit’, Dog Faced Boy is hollering “Goddam right, it’s a beautiful day”, and on the breeze, you can hear echoes of our busker friend whispering to himself, as if making sense of an ancient riddle:

It’s a motherfucker.

Souljacker is out now on Universal