To read an extract from Mark Everett's autobiography, click on the links
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Mark Oliver Everett likes to keep himself to himself. He will take his dog,
Bobby Jr, for a walk, but, aside from that, he’s happy staying in all day.
Yet, strangely for such a reclusive individual, his life is pretty much an
open book.
Until now, that was just a figure of speech, reflecting the fact that
Everett’s songs – written and performed under the stage name E, with his
band, Eels – have courageously recorded some of the saddest and most
traumatic events of his life, including the suicide of his sister, Liz, and
the death from cancer of his mother (both documented with painful honesty
and musical brilliance on the Eels album Electro-Shock Blues).
Now, however, there’s an actual book.
And a television documentary. And two compilation albums. Taken together – and
they’re all available this month – they sum up his life and career so far.
“I’m not someone who likes to look back,” he says, “but it’s useful to clear
the decks.” He adds that the simultaneous emergence of book, documentary and
albums is pretty much a coincidence. “Universal has wanted to do a best-of
for a while, but I wanted to wait until I had time to do it properly. The
book came about in a pragmatic way.”
Everett had just finished his Eels with Strings tour; having gone twice round
the world with a larger-than-usual seven-strong group, he “really had the
desire to do something that just relied on myself for a while”, he explains.
“One of my best friends has been pestering me to write a book for years, so
I thought this would be a good time. Writing sounds so easy, but it turned
out to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve learnt now why all the
great writers are alcoholics.
“Every time I venture out of the world of songwriting and recording, I think,
‘This will be such a relief.’ Then I find everything else is harder. But now
that there’s all those years wrapped up in a package, it’s a great feeling.
Everyone should do it.”
Things the Grandchildren Should Know offers a typically no-holds-barred
account of Everett’s life so far, including the moment when, at the age of
19, he found his father dead. He tried, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate him.
The shock and trauma is, for him, mixed with surreality – he is actually
touching his father, a man so emotionally removed from his children that
Everett has, until this point, considered him essentially as an item of
furniture in the house.
The harrowing stuff is lightened both by an engaging writing style and by a
series of illuminating revelations. Everett accepts the irony that “the
grandchildren” may never know these things. So far, he doesn’t even have
children. He married Anna, a Russian dentist he met at a health farm, in
2000, but the marriage ended five years later. Now 44, Everett is single
again. He explains the demise of his marriage, and of other relationships,
by referring to the title of chapter nine – “I Love Crazy Women”. Still, in
lieu of grandchildren, we’re happy to learn, for example, that, up for an
acting role, Everett was coached by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Unfortunately,
Everett is cagey about what she actually taught him. “I’m not sure she’d
want me to reveal her secrets,” he says, but when pressed, does mention:
“She told me never to rehearse my lines in front of the mirror, because it
makes you self-conscious. I think I can tell you that. I don’t think that’s
the whole basis of her success.”
We also learn that the sound of Eels was hugely influenced by hearing
Portishead on the radio. “It reminded me of the fun I used to have making
strange little sound collages on a tape recorder for my sister,” he says. “I
realised when I heard Portishead that I could incorporate some of that
spirit in my songwriting. In my mind, there were endless possibilities.”
Everett launched immediately into a flurry of activity that produced
favourite Eels tracks such as Novocaine for the Soul, Susan’s House and My
Beloved Monster. The last of these is one of his many songs to have reached
a wider audience via movie soundtracks, with Everett’s unflinching
world-view – “She will always be the only thing / That comes between me and
the awful sting / That comes from living in a world that’s so damn mean” –
proving no obstacle to the track appearing in Shrek.
Those early songs can be found on Meet the Eels, a first best-of collection,
which also encompasses Mr E’s Beautiful Blues, It’s a MotherF***er and my
favourite Eels song (and title), I’m Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn’t
Break Your Heart. A stunning collection (I should declare an interest: I
wrote the sleeve notes), it underlines that if you’re looking for
songwriters who consistently combine raw emotional honesty with invincible
musical hooks, then you have to rank Everett alongside John Lennon and Kurt
Cobain. That’s how good he is.
Longtime fans will prefer Useless Trinkets, a rarities collection of two CDs
and a DVD that includes many of the band’s radical live reworkings, some
excellent covers (notably, Prince’s I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man
and a feedback-drenched If I Was Your Girlfriend) and both Eels Christmas
singles (shop early for next year).
If you missed the documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives when it aired on
BBC4 in November, and have since been badgered by friends telling you how
great it was, you get another chance to see Everett try to come to terms
with his father’s life when the BBC repeats it later this month.
Hugh Everett III was a physics genius who, it is increasingly believed, solved
the most puzzling problem associated with quantum mechanics: that very,
very, very small particles don’t behave the way the rest of the universe
does; that they seem to be both wave and particle at the same time
(apologies to people who really understand this stuff). When Everett was
studying, the accepted answer to this quandary, proposed by Niels Bohr, was
that two contradictory things might be happening, but only when you observed
what was happening did anything happen at all. The absurdity of this
position was highlighted in the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment, in
which a cat is put in a box (this is all hypothetical): depending on the
state of a subatomic particle, the cat will either live or die. In Bohr’s
world, the cat can’t actually be dead or alive until we open the box and
find out. Everett’s many-worlds theory suggested that, in fact, the cat was
both dead and alive in two separate, parallel universes.
Okay, these theories sound equally crazy to you and me, but Everett’s is
becoming increasingly popular with scientists (and in popular culture). Back
in the 1950s, however, he made the mistake of confronting Bohr face to face,
and his ideas were – unsurprisingly – rejected.
The documentary, which shows Mark Everett tracing his father’s life, learning
about his theory and realising how the rejection of his genius turned him
into the cold, bitter man he knew, is heart-tugging stuff. “To be that smart
and to have the regular chimps ignore you . . .” Everett muses now. “If he’d
gotten some encouragement, what might have happened? But he didn’t, and it
pretty much ruined his life.”
Everett described making the documentary as “awkward, painful but
transformative”. “When they first came to me, the idea gave me a pain in the
pit of my stomach. When they showed me the finished programme, I liked both
the people in the film.
“Also, it was conveniently timed in terms of my ego. If it had happened a few
years back, I would have felt like the Julian Lennon of physics. Now I’ve
had some success myself, meeting all these people who admire my father’s
work – it’s the icing on the cake.”
He seems to have found a degree of contentment after some harrowing years.
“I’m at a nice point. I don’t have a struggle right now. It really
was character-forming, but I sometimes felt that the intensity could have
been turned down a couple of notches and that would have been okay.”
Having told the story of his family in such detail in various media, he’ll
need to look elsewhere for songwriting subject matter, I suggest. “Yeah, I
don’t need to do any more of that for a while.” He takes a moment to let
that thought sink in. “I guess I need another family to write about.”
With anthologies and autobiography wrapped up, he is looking to the future
now. He has finished a new album and is working on another. “I do hope I’ll
be around in 40 years to write volume two. My goal is that that will be a
really boring book.”
We know what he means, of course, but Eels fans know the likelihood of Everett
creating anything to which the word “boring” might apply is pretty remote.
Things the Grandchildren Should Know is out on January 17; Meet the Eels
and Useless Trinkets are out on January 21 on Universal. Parallel Worlds,
Parallel Lives is repeated later this month
Legend!!!
dave, wals, uk