Eels Ongoing: For E’s A Jolly Good Fellow.

If you’ve followed the life and music of Mark Oliver Everett – more commonly known by his abbreviated identifier E, and/or as the one constant in the band known as Eels – you believe him when he declares that “Rock and roll is not for the faint-hearted…”.
Documented through the band’s records and his Vonnegut-esque kind-of-autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, there’s an often fraught personal history: a fearsomely dysfunctional relationship with his scientist father, the death of just about all his immediate family within a year, a passing morbid fascination with that most American of criminals – the serial killer, and his own experience of electro-shock psychological treatment. And then almost as an aside, releasing a trilogy of albums over the space of a year charting the rise, fracturing, and fall of his marriage, and the recovery after in almost forensic detail – including a fair chunk of self-examination and self-laceration in the songs. Even he now thinks that might have been a little too much.

So, there was really little surprise at some of the turns our conversation took. He was just back from one of his regular lengthy tours. First through Europe – where the English and Germans in particularly had taken to his sometimes bleak/sometimes cynically observed/sometimes revelled in worldview. Then on through the increasing collective madness of his American homeland. His voice was hoarse, just about shot from the incessant schedule, but he still happily chatted across a range of subjects from quantum physics to the karmic balance of koalas.
But it all comes back to the rock eventually. Even allowing lately he’s on another of the seemingly necessary breaks he takes from it – you may have even spotted him as a not-entirely-likeable recurring character in Judd Apatow’s Love series. “There are worse thing to do than still act like an irresponsible adolescent,” he dryly observed of his music career. “But I don’t really have a much of a choice, I do love it. Sex and drugs and rock and roll. Well, one out of the three isn’t bad. I actually would have started earlier if I’d known how much fun it could be.”

As there’s likely to be over such an amount of time, there’s occasional creative blockages – which tend to clear in a rush. Again there’s apparently albums’ worth of ideas and material squirreled away at his home and studio. “Umm, yeah – there’s stuff like that around here somewhere,” he mock puzzled. “But I’m more just cannibalising the best bits and pieces to put in newer songs.”
Then there’s a bit of artistic anxiety and superstition: “I always worry about talking about the ‘next thing’. But that’s probably just because I don’t know myself until it actually happens. Saying nothing stops me from looking foolish later.”

He then throws in the mixed feelings of being onstage and watching people “making out” to his sometimes despairing tunes: “Yeah - ‘I look in the mirror all I see is age, fear, and agony’,” he quotes one of his own lyrics. “And some guy’s telling his girl ‘Yes darling, that’ll always be our song…’. Ha! Are they really listening? I don’t really know. But it kinda gives me hope. I always worried out fans were the lonely guys at home who couldn’t get a date, but apparently they can – and they’re even kissing them…” There seemed a small note of triumph.

One of Eels other defining points is they never really seem to have one. Every tour a different mood, a different style. There’s been an Eels Orchestra, piled with a string section. Then a lean little power trio. A bigger bombastic check-shirted rock band variant. Or just E on piano, and a drummer. Or an almost Tom Waits-ian junkyard combo, complete with musical saw. It could cause problems: the sometimes ominous racket of the Souljacker album had them as almost threatening rock band – all mean-looking beardy guys coming at you. Having this gang touring just after 9/11 caused a few issues. “Yeah, we sometimes had some trouble at airports,” E ruefully admitted.

“We were always happier little travellers underneath,” he joked. “A kinder, gentler kind of rock band – who can still do misery when we needed to. Throw in a couple of Beatles and Elvis covers, or some Missy Elliott, or a singalong of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons. We got variety – it’s as much about keeping it interesting for myself as anything.”

The man known as E tends to be very honest, even when he brings up the delicate subject of his father – given that on one tour, the ‘support act’ was a documentary of his search for him – trying to work out the man he was. Hugh Everett III was a world-respected quantum physicist, a leading developer of the ‘multiple worlds’ theory, so beloved by Star Trek scriptwriters among others. Dr Everett was also a regular correspondent with no less than Albert Einstein – letters apparently full of arguments over unified field theory, and discussions of the weather. Father and son were fairly much estranged from Mark’s youth, the elder never quite approving of the younger’s career choice. But are there similarities in their approach to their very different areas of interest?

“Well, he certainly liked his own way too,” E ponders, and understates. “And there probably is some mathematics in making music – but I think I really owe more of that to my mother, who was an extraordinary poet. And sadly – typically - overlooked. Maybe it’s a mix of all those genes. Although I  don’t think quantum theory is often a big subject in pop songs.”

It was there I got to slightly trump the son of a Ph.D, pointing out that Something For Kate actually had a song named for Max Planck – German theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner in the field. E was perfectly, perversely, pleased: “And that was on like a top ten record? And it’s called Max Planck? I do love your country! Well, it’s one of the reasons I love your country,” he whooped.

He then went on to explain he’d never really done the Aussie tourist things, despite repeated touring visits: “Boomerang throwing? Nope. Happy snaps at the Opera House? Sorry, again.”
“I haven’t even cuddled a koala. And they are cute, really. Although someone told me they stink, is that right?” Umm, yeah – and then there’s the chlamydia, and a couple of other diseases. “Oh, is that right? That must be some sort of karma – there has to be a price to pay for being attractive to Japanese tourists.” There’s another dark chuckle.