Mark Oliver Everett is the 44-year-old singer in the American rock band the Eels. He has written this memoir for the grandchildren he might have should he meet a woman who isn’t crazy, and settle down. Most of the women in his life, he explains, have been terrific but extreme – and good luck and amen to them, but right now he’s a bit tired. No wonder.

Everett’s father was a quantum physicist who had a theory about different versions of ourselves splitting off and spinning into different scenarios that was so ahead of its time that he was completely ignored. So he went to work for Robert McNamara in Washington, and stored dried food and guns in the basement of the family home in case Armageddon should visit their neighbourhood of diplomats and CIA spies. Everett Sr and his wife didn’t give two hoots what Everett Jr or his sister got up to, and, left to their own devices, the siblings were soon bang into drugs and listening to the Plastic Ono Band.

Right off, Everett had an ear for pretty melodies. “Show me a kid who innately doesn’t like the Beatles,” he writes “and I’ll show you a bad seed.” Most of all, Everett loved Levon Helm, the singer-percussionist in the Band. Those of you who have seen Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, his 1978 film of the Band’s farewell gig, will recall that Helm is the one who manages to drum while simultaneously letting out incredible lead vocals. (“The night they drove-ow-ow old Dixie down-olliew-ow!”)All this without bending his neck. To this day, Everett copies Helm’s short, scratchy beard in tribute, puffing away on a cigar in the author photograph looking like someone a hell of a lot more confident than the person apparently writing this book.

On several occassions Everett not only apologises for his efforts (“I’m just wandering through here, seeing what happens”), but for assuming his life would be of interest to anyone in the first place. This is unnecessarily neurotic considering the thrillingly eccentric story of his journey from kid who turned up in LA with nothing but cassettes in his jacket pockets to esteemed singer-songwriter playing stadium gigs and spending his money on electrotherapy to kill all the parasites in his body because “I hadn’t been feeling well since the late 1980s”.

There is a good reason for this malaise. Put simply: death knows Everett. People drop around him like flies. His father, his mother, his sister, his friends, wives of friends, bandmates, landladies, cancer, suicide, heart failure, accidents, overdoses. He goes on an important date and the spaceshuttle explodes, he arrives in London for a debut performance of his song Your Lucky Day in Hell and Princess Diana dies, he takes in the son of a local HIV-positive bipolar albino (seriously) who goes on to steal a milk truck and run amok in Texas, chased by police before a television audience of millions – and so on, until it gets so that whenever the phone rings in the book there is a series-finale catastrophe on the end of it. Like the day he finds out his flight-attendant cousin has just crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. Her husband died, too.

Everett reports all of this in an exquisitely unhysterical voice. His prose has none of the tongue-twisting, peck-along-in-rhythm riffs of his song lyrics (“the smokestack spitting black soot into the sooty sky”, he sings on Mr E’s Beautiful Blues). On the page, he just speaks, and continues to speak, in a cleverly uninflected way, minimising the surface area of drama and pain, even when recalling how his father’s ashes were put out with the rubbish.

Crucially, Everett picks the right stories to tell. A rare skill in the writers of memoirs. He tells us how his friend, the alcoholic folk singer Elliott Smith (who stabbed himself in the heart in 2003), was the only person who didn’t laugh when an enormous fluffy white dog came into a club one day and started to hump someone’s back – because Smith desperately didn’t want to make the humpee (or the dog) feel undignified. That’s the right story. The one that gives a perfectly small and clear snapshot of the turmoil within the subject and the condition of the world around him. It makes you trust every word coming off the end of Everett’s fingers. His book is a subtle, touching thing.

THINGS THE GRANDCHILDREN SHOULD KNOW by Mark Oliver Everett
Little, Brown £14.99 pp245

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