Eels frontman, E., has long mined personal tragedy to make uplifting art. Starting with 1997’s beautiful “Electro-Shock Blues,” a visceral elegy to the twin tragedies of his sister’s suicide and his mother’s death from cancer (events that occurred within months of his scoring his first big hit with “Novocain for the Soul”), and culminating with 2006’s sprawling “Blinking Lights (And Other Revelations),” E has incorporated his family biography into his music. But in the last two years, the erstwhile Mark Oliver Everett has gotten explicitly autobiographical. First, he hosted a documentary, which aired in the U.S. on PBS’ “Nova,” about his troubled genius of a father, Hugh Everett III, who directly challenged Niels Bohr with his “many worlds” theory and was crushed, professionally and spiritually, as a result. Finally, E published a sprightly memoir, “Things The Grandchildren Should Know,” late last year.
The book reveals Everett as a memoirist on par with Sedaris and as a smart ass philisopher who could hold his own with Vonnegut. The Vonnegut comparison is particularly apt. All that’s missing is the “So it goes” refrain as death compounds death. The tragic slow decline of his older sister is well-worn territory, but brings extra poignancy to both the book and the earlier eels LPs, while his bizarro accounts of a mad scientist father who spoke not more than a dozen sentences to his son during his life would be too fantastical, if it were not corroborated by the “Parallel Lives” documentary. Meanwhile, a beloved dg is put to sleep (so it goes), a ghost-watching neighbor unexpectedly passes (so it goes), a beloved roadie OD’s on heroin after a joke made in bad taste (so it goes) and a cousin is a flight attendant on the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 — probably into the side of the building where Everett’s dad once worked (so it goes and goes and goes).
There is a certain lump-in-the-throat quality to E’s memoir that is nicely cut with sweet reminiscences, plain-spoken confessions and good old fashioned piss and vinegar. There are few rock-n-rollers today who are as vital or as relevant as Everett. Would he to publish the Vol. 2 of his “Chronicles.” In the meantime, we can rejoice in the impending release of his first album of new material in four years, “Hombre Loco” (due out June 2nd).