Blinking Lights and Other Revelations: The Story of Eels

Author

Prologue

On August 3, 2010 at 9pm, E takes the stage of The Galaxy Theatre in Santa Ana, California. For a musician who doesn’t particularly like life on the road, the prospect of beginning a two-month, four-continent, 50-date tour would never be a thrilling one, but for the man born Mark Oliver Everett it’s even more daunting right now.

It has been more than two years since E completed his last formal tour and four years since he has gone out with a proper band. In recent years he had broken with his tradition of touring after the release of each new album. In the summer of 2009, he put out Hombre Lobo, an album of garage-rock and delicate indie-pop ballads, but citing a lack of enthusiasm for touring and a desire not to short-change his audience by giving them a show he wasn’t fully invested in, he stayed home. Then at the beginning of 2010, he released End Times, a stark, intimate break-up album. Not only didn’t he support that record with a stint on the road, he refused to do press for it (although he did finally acquiesce and give a couple of interviews). So as he walks onto the stage by himself to kick off this evening’s warm-up show, it’s clear that something has changed, and it’s not just that he’s actually putting in a public appearance. In fact, the full implications of this change won’t even be clear to those in attendance until weeks later.

On August 24, he will be releasing Tomorrow Morning, the ninth studio album from his band, Eels. Anyone who has followed the exploits of Eels over the last 14 years can tell you that Eels are a band in the same way that Nine Inch Nails are a band — in other words, it’s really just one guy who surrounds himself with a collection of sidemen (some who hang around longer than others) who help out on the albums and tours. Fiercely protective of his privacy, the 47-year-old singer-songwriter has always cultivated an aura of mystery, which is ironic since his music tends to be intensely personal, touching on suicide, depression, death, the end of love, and the struggle to find meaning in the face of life’s futility. Eels fans — who, really, are E fans — respond to the juxtaposing impulses of hope and anguish that power the group’s best songs, but they’re also searching for clues into the mind-set of that witty, sarcastic, peculiar man who created them.

With each new Eels album, E introduces new dimensions to the persona we’ve come to love: curmudgeonly, caustic, despondent, satiric, romantic, antagonistic. Not only do the records display different aspects of his personality, they also reveal different styles — if he last put out a more pop-influenced disc, the chances are very good that bruising guitars await the listener the next time round. This unpredictability extends to the tours — you can commit a new Eels album to memory and still be surprised by a live performance that has radically reinvented songs that are but a few months old. Consequently, when you go to an Eels show, you’re signing a tacit contract with E — he likes to mix things up and constantly keep the material fresh, and he assumes you can roll with that. For fans, this has always been an easy deal to make, and so we attend his concerts armed with a sense of endless possibility. And because it’s been so long since he’s toured, tonight’s show is especially fraught with anticipation.

And perhaps E senses this too. How else to explain the evening’s opening act, a painfully unfunny local ventriloquist comedian who includes among his puppets a Sarah Palin doll? Performing a routine that stretches out interminably and contains many off-colour gags, the comedian seems to be E’s way of gently torturing his audience who are eagerly awaiting his imminent arrival. And when he does take the stage to a symphonic swell of ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’ over the loudspeakers, he’s dressed in a white jumpsuit and sports a bandana, sunglasses and long beard that conspire to cover his entire face and head. He’s back, yet he remains hidden.

Despite the amount of new material to début on this Tuesday evening, the crowd isn’t surprised that E starts off with one particular song from the past. Although it’s in no way inspired by Santa Ana’s Galaxy Theatre, E likes to play ‘Daisies Of The Galaxy’ whenever he’s here, as its last verse (I’ll pick some daisies/from the flower bed/of the Galaxy Theater/while you clear your head) never fails to elicit hearty cheers from the crowd. Soon enough, the rest of the current line-up of Eels emerges — along with E, there are two other guitarists, a bassist and a drummer. And what becomes clear rather quickly is that while the band members attack the songs with pummelling fervour, this might be the most light-hearted, angst-free Eels road show anyone has ever witnessed. Though tonight’s set list concentrates on Hombre Lobo’s alternately wistful and horny songs of unrequited love and End Times’ miserable desolation, the band’s garage-rock looseness gives even the saddest songs a bounce that makes their melancholy seem a far-off memory rather than a lingering hurt.

This is new for Eels fans, who have followed E as he’s negotiated a litany of pain. By this point, those tragedies have been so well documented by journalists that they risk losing their meaning — specifically, the deaths of his father, mother and sister, which left him an orphan at the age of 35. But for much of Eels’ lifespan, E’s complicated relationship with his family has been the driving force of his creativity, the prism through which the artist has tried to make sense of his world. However, at tonight’s show it becomes apparent that E has fundamentally turned a corner; except for a hard-rock version of ‘I Like Birds’, a cheery nod to his mom’s love of the winged creatures, there are no songs that deal explicitly with family matters.

In its place is a celebration of summer. The group rip through The Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer In The City’ and Billy Stewart’s rendition of ‘Summertime’ from Porgy And Bess. E throws free popsicles to the audience at one point. Later in the night, he even dances around during the extended funk-like finale of ‘Looking Up’, making like a white-boy James Brown. Songs as mournful as ‘I’m Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn’t Break Your Heart’ retain their eloquence, but where previous Eels tours built towards their comforting, hopeful send-off, this show is pure up.

At the end of the night, E comes back to the stage for one last song, his guitarist The Chet by his side. E is not one to talk much during shows, but he takes this opportunity to say a few words.

We want to thank you for making this a very special, fun night, he says. It’s been a while. The crowd roars in response, happy to have him back. We appreciate it very much, he adds. And then he goes into the delicate opening guitar chords of ‘A Magic World’. The audience knows the song well — it’s a story about new beginnings. It’s a story about a newborn baby filled with excitement at the amazing possibilities that await him.

Because he uses first-person even when he’s singing in the voice of a fictional character, sometimes it can be hard to know what’s autobiographical in his songs. But ‘A Magic World’ is very much taken from his life, inspired by baby photos of himself that he discovered in the attic of his childhood home. It’s a song about the bottomless optimism and idealism that children possess when they’re born — a rare Eels song to unabashedly embrace such purely happy emotions. It’s an intriguing way to end a concert, suggesting perhaps that E has reached a point where he too feels born again, although not in the religious sense. (By all accounts, he remains a devout atheist.)

E has documented the many twists and turns of his emotional journey, not only in song but also on the page. With the publishing of his great memoir, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, in 2008, he grappled with the heartbreaks of his life while detailing the musical adventures that helped him transcend those traumas. It’s a terrific read, but it only presents one aspect of what E and Eels have meant to their fans. For example, E’s autobiography doesn’t delve very deeply into the collaborators and friends who have known him over the years and who watched him evolve as an artist and as a person. In addition, Things The Grandchildren Should Know obviously lacks the critical distance to examine fully the highlights, challenges and missed opportunities of E’s canon, not to mention its outright silence in regards to some E material that ranks with his best recorded moments.

These are but some of the reasons for the existence of the book you’re now holding. Some would argue that E’s story has been well covered by the man himself, but as any songwriter knows, the experience of a song only half-belongs to the musicians who make it — the other half becomes interpreted, celebrated, re-evaluated and judged by those who listen and take it into their hearts. With this in mind, Eels: Blinking Lights And Other Revelations is an attempt to make sense of E’s life and enormous creative legacy through the perspective of a music critic and long-time fan, as well as through the memories of those whose personal insights can help create a three-dimensional portrait of one of America’s most distinctive, valuable and underrated songwriters of modern times. Twenty years after the release of his first solo record, A Man Called E, such a book is long overdue.

After tonight’s show at the Galaxy, E and his band head off to Japan and Australia. But for us to understand how E has reached this phase of his life — to understand how he has not just survived but thrived in a creative climate that has become increasingly inhospitable to artists such as himself — we head to Virginia to take a closer look at that newborn who nobody called E. Back then, he was just Mark.

Chapter One

He was born on April 10, 1963 in a hospital in Washington, DC, and at least one of his parents was thrilled at his arrival. Named Mark Oliver Everett, he was the first son of Hugh Everett III and Nancy Gore Everett, who lived in nearby Alexandria, Virginia. He had an older sister, Elizabeth, whose friends called her Liz. She wasn’t yet six, a large age gap between siblings, and in truth Nancy had been pregnant once before Mark, but she lost the child in a miscarriage. However, that wasn’t going to stop her from getting pregnant again — even if her husband was against the idea.

In a diary she kept many years later, Nancy acknowledged that Hugh didn’t much want a family, but for her it was a way to validate their marriage. She clung to the hope that perhaps fatherhood would grow on him, like the pets. It was a funny way to put it, but by all accounts not entirely inaccurate. Hugh had been equally unexcited about the birth of Liz. He and Nancy were dating when she announced to him in the fall of 1956 that she was pregnant with Liz. His response was to ask her to get an abortion. Nancy countered that she was keeping the child, adding that she didn’t want to get married if the only reason was the pregnancy. That November, they got married, but as Hugh Everett III biographer Peter Byrne noted, he may never have fully honoured his new bride’s request for their marriage to be more than just an arrangement for the child. Everett was charmed by baby Liz, Byrne writes in The Many Worlds Of Hugh Everett III, but, consumed by his career and the pursuit of leisure, he left the nurturing to Nancy. If she wanted to raise children, that was between her and Dr Spock.

The career was Scientific Warfare Analyst at the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, or WSEG. Hugh was working for the Pentagon for a group that, according to a 1979 study prepared by Institute for Defense Analyses research analyst John Ponturo, was concerned with bring[ing] scientific and technical as well as operational military expertise to bear in evaluating weapons systems … employ[ing] advanced techniques of scientific analysis and operations research in the process. Put simply, Hugh was conducting war games. In the wake of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of World War II, nuclear war had become a growing threat, one that the US government wanted to be on top of. Consequently, the Department of Defense (which only recently had been renamed from the Department of War) recruited physicists to calculate the extent of death and damage that would be generated by different war scenarios involving nuclear weapons.

As for Hugh’s pursuit of leisure, it was, ironically, a by-product of the climate in which he made his living. Because of the fear that nuclear annihilation would destroy humanity — and that this would be happening sooner rather than later — American culture began to embrace an anything-goes mentality around its margins. In her book, I Was A Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, And The Cold War Imagination, critic Cyndy Hendershot touched on this odd phenomenon. The Cold War period in American history was an age when taboo and transgression became highlighted, she wrote. As taboos were emphasised more and more in 1950s America the allure of transgression was heightened. Creatively, this shift was signalled by sexually charged horror films, which reached their peak with 1960’s Psycho, but regular Americans were experiencing it, too. As Byrne observes in his Hugh biography: If the world was going to end in a radioactive bang, better have some ‘fun’, reasoned many middle-class Americans.

For Hugh, this meant affairs. And while Nancy tried to appear hip and modern by accepting his dalliances — even trying her hand at being a swinger herself — her decision to stop using birth control and to get pregnant with Mark was at least partly provoked by her annoyance with her husband’s promiscuity. But her hope that Hugh would warm up to their children never quite happened. As Mark himself put it in his forties: I think he thought of us kids as experiments and wanted to let the experiment play itself out. Or as one of Hugh’s physicist co-workers recalled to Byrne: I never met Hugh’s kids, and he never talked about them.

McLean, Virginia is about a 20-minute drive west of Washington, DC and 25 minutes north-west of Alexandria, Virginia. Mark and his family moved to McLean when he was two. In 2000, the city’s population was nearly 39,000 — in 1970, it was 17,698. It was a pretty sleepy little place, says Bobby Read, a musician who moved to McLean around the same time as Mark did. There was very little commercial stuff. There was a small shopping centre. There was a Hardee’s, there was a sports shop. There was not very much [there], though I must say it grew very quickly in the years that I lived there.

Part of the reason for McLean’s quick growth was the influx of government employees. The Central Intelligence Agency opened its headquarters in nearby Langley at the end of 1961, with the building becoming fully occupied by May of the following year. Read’s father was an analyst for the CIA, eventually doing daily briefings for the President. There were two branches, Read says of the CIA. One was a covert branch and one was a non-covert branch. Read’s father worked in the non-covert sector, but Bobby got to experience the other group first hand. I actually worked at the CIA for a summer job, he recalls. You know, pushed a mail cart around. I saw the father of one of my best friends there. And he came up to me and he said, ‘Don’t you dare tell Frankie you saw me here’.

Hugh worked a little farther away, at the Pentagon, but Mark grew up only knowing that his dad did … well, something secretive for the government. In their basement was a Teletype machine that was hooked in to the Pentagon. If that wasn’t disconcerting enough, guns and boxes of food sat in the basement as well, creating a sense throughout the house that Hugh was prepared for the worst and perhaps the rest of the family should be, too. If Hugh’s children were rattled by his doomsday strategising, he was too preoccupied to notice. A chronic drinker and smoker, Hugh didn’t have much time for Liz or Mark, being more concerned with writing computer code or brewing home-made wine than properly raising his kids or even getting to know them.

When you’re a kid, whatever is going on inside your house seems normal to you, Mark said about Hugh’s rather passive form of fatherhood. It didn’t seem odd to me. I didn’t find myself longing for my father’s attention because it was never there. If it had been there and then taken away from me, that would be different. But it was just never an issue. It was just the way it was. To Mark, Hugh was simply an uncommunicative guy who fell asleep on the couch watching the CBS Evening News. The only time he ever resembled a human to me is when he would get down and play with the dog on the floor occasionally, Mark said in a 2009 interview. But otherwise, there was no sign that there was a human inside that body. It was more like a piece of furniture or a robot was in the house. It was only later in his youth that he realised that not all dads were like his. I barely had any conversations with him while he was alive, he said, even though he was always there. He was always a mystery to me.

His mother, Nancy, was her own puzzle. Almost exactly nine months older than her husband, she was born on February 13, 1930. Where her husband abhorred nature and athletics, she grew up in a family that loved the outdoors — in fact they ran a wilderness camp. Growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts, she rode horses and hiked. Raised in Bethesda, Maryland, his sporting interests were poker, ping-pong and, later, drinking alcohol and chasing women.

In Byrne’s biography of Hugh, Nancy’s journals suggest that she always thought of herself as a child trapped in an adult’s body. If she thought she was hiding this feeling from her son, she was mistaken. Mark described her as very childlike in some ways in his autobiography, thinking of her more like a sibling than a mother when he was growing up. (Nancy was funny, says musician Mike Kelley, who grew up in McLean around the same time. That has to be where Mark got his humour — Nancy could crack you up. She would say the funniest things — I’m not sure it was [always] on purpose, but sometimes I thought it was.) Nancy and her husband could not have been a more perfect cliché of a Cold War couple: he was the breadwinner and master of the household, and she was the dutiful wife, caring for the kids while secretly harbouring resentments against a society that looked dimly on women asserting any sort of independence. But that inequality was intensified by the fact that Hugh wasn’t just any husband. After all, how many men could claim to have written to Albert Einstein — and gotten a letter back from the revered scientist — by the age of 12?

I didn’t know he was a famous physicist, E said of his father, "because [back then] he wasn’t that famous because he wasn’t taken that seriously … But occasionally something would happen — I was aware that there were some Star Trek episodes and Twilight Zones and whatnot that were based on something he had written. And sometimes it’d be something like a neighbour would be playing in a hammock or something next door, and he’d come running over with a science-fiction book he had been reading that afternoon and say ‘Hey, Hugh is in this!’"

The something he had written was ‘On The Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics’, a thesis Hugh completed while at graduate school at Princeton. An incredibly complex argument — especially for those of us largely ignorant of physics — ‘On The Foundations’ was Everett’s stab at scientific greatness. To simplify Everett’s ground-breaking theory immensely, he postulated, at the age of 24, that there are innumerable universes in which every different outcome for every event is possible. Consequently, each possible outcome causes the universe to split into different branches, one for each outcome or decision. (For those who grew up with the Choose Your Own Adventure children’s books — in which the reader would be confronted with different decisions for the protagonist, with each choice pegged to a different page to continue on to — Everett’s theory espoused the belief that all those different choices were going on in their own parallel realities. The book, in other words, contained all the parallel universes.)

As mentioned, this is an exceptionally rudimentary explanation of Hugh’s theory, but for its time Hugh’s notion was considered highly controversial, butting heads with the era’s leading theory, forwarded by Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the so-called godfather of quantum mechanics. Bohr believed that everything in the universe behaved according to one of two quantum principles, depending on whether the object was larger than an atom or not. Hugh’s theory argued against Bohr’s separation of items, instead placing everything under one category of classification in order to determine its behaviour.

Bohr, at the height of his acclaim and standing, disapproved of Hugh’s theory and told him so. As cliquish as any other group, the scientific community huddled around Bohr and rejected Hugh, who left academia soon after to work for the government, where he could earn a far larger salary than he would within a university’s ivory towers. But over time, Everett’s so-called many worlds theory began to take hold, particularly in the world of science-fiction writers, who used this radical proposal to construct stories involving parallel universes. (The short-lived 2009 American TV sci-fi drama FlashForward paid direct homage to Hugh and his son by, among other things, including photos of both men tucked away inconspicuously in the background of the programme.) Eventually that acceptance spread among the leading physicists, so much so that those who came to agree with his theory named themselves Everettians. (I think by default I have to be an Everettian, Mark once responded when asked if he believed his dad’s theory.)

But mind-bending, cutting-edge physics was not the concern of young Mark. Even on the cusp of stardom decades down the road, he wasn’t quite sure how to explain his upbringing. I don’t know, it’s hard to talk about without sounding melodramatic or corny, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. I just … came from a family where we really weren’t emotionally in touch with each other whatsoever. We grew up in this suburb in Virginia, and it should have been fine, but it wasn’t. My dad was this genius guy that was just off in his own world. He was always there physically, but to this day I can’t tell you anything about him. I just didn’t know him at all … There was two kids, me and my sister, and we were kinda on our own basically … We had no idea what we were supposed to do with our lives …

He and his sister may have had no idea, but at least they had each other. Most people who grow up in thrall to music have an important person in their formative years who turns them on to great songs. Maybe it’s a family member or a best friend. For Mark, it was Liz. She introduced him to the albums of Neil Young, whose Seventies records provided a road map for the sort of eclectic, challenging, uncompromising career that Mark would follow in his own artistic journey. I think one of the concerts that made a big impact on me was when I was 16, Mark said later. "My older sister took me to a Neil Young concert — this is when we lived in Virginia — and it turned out to be the Rust Never Sleeps concert, but the album Rust Never Sleeps hadn’t been released yet … I was just expecting Neil Young And Crazy Horse to get up and jam in front of us but it was like this mind-blowing, theatrical presentation that not only had Neil Young never done before but that nobody had ever done before. And it’s still maybe the best concert I ever attended."

But beyond her impeccable taste in singer-songwriters, Liz was a kind-hearted older sibling, allowing Mark to pal around with her and her friends, giving a painfully insecure little boy a safe haven. He could not have been clearer about her importance to his early years than when he told Word in 2008, I learned everything I knew from her.

They were brother and sister without question, man, says Kelley, alluding to their similar sensibility. Mark had the wit, and Liz had the wit. She was as sharp as Mark.

She loved Mark, says Timo Goodrich, who met Mark when they attended Churchill Road Elementary. I found it kind of astounding — if you have siblings, you have a way you interact with them, and then when you see another family and see the siblings, you go, ‘Wow, that’s strange’. My brother used to give me a noogie every day, but she just adored Mark. She was really very motherly towards Mark, and vice versa. It was quite apparent that they had a special relationship. Whatever might have happened in the household, they would comfort each other.

Mark was lucky to have Liz because, frankly, there wasn’t much of anything else around to grab his interest. Beyond the plethora of government employees living in his neighbourhood who had moved there because of its closeness to DC, he felt surrounded by what he referred to as the real Virginia people, who were to his mind nothing but rednecks.

Granger Helvey, a musician who met Mark in the early Eighties, understands what Mark means about McLean’s redneck contingent, but only to a degree. There’s so much Civil War history here, Helvey acknowledges. So you still see a lot of pickup trucks with rebel flags in the back window — or, you know, Stars-and-Bars bumper stickers. There’s still a lot of Confederate spirit. But for Helvey, who grew up in Roanoke, a Virginia town much further away from the hustle and bustle of the DC area, moving to northern Virginia was almost culture shock. I thought [the McLean area] was far from redneck, he says, but at the same time you didn’t have to go far to find a pickup truck either. There was still that element.

Luckily, though, Mark’s father’s job kept him shielded from the elements of Virginia he detested. They lived in a kinda upper-middle-class, upscale neighbourhood, Helvey says. They were not wanting. I don’t say that there was a pomposity or an arrogance there, but, you know, I can see where he might think that he was maybe just a cut above the rest.

I view them as a kind of quintessential Cold War family, says Byrne, who also grew up in northern Virginia. They weren’t really rich or anything, but they were well-off. They could afford everything that they needed. It was kind of a typical nuclear family — you know, the two parents and the two kids and the house and the dog and all that. And having grown up in that culture, I was very familiar with the difference between the outward appearances and what was going on inside the family. A lot of people felt the Everetts were kind of normal.

You can just say I didn’t get enough love, Mark explained in a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times. I mean that’s the simple way to say it. People like that spend their whole lives working against it, making up their own memories. It’s just a really lonely, desperate way to live your life, you know. But while Mark has talked about the lack of discipline he received from his parents, who were awfully permissive of their children, at least one friend of his from that time says it wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.

Growing up, there were the grown-ups, and then there were the kids, says Goodrich, whose father also worked for the CIA. "And every now and again, we ran into each other. In that environment, so many [parents] were like, ‘Oh, [we] have to go to the country club’, so a lot of us were running around — there was no focus. Today, I’m noticing parents are totally focused on their children. That was not the case back then — they were basically, ‘OK, we had you, we wish you well, good luck, we’ll see if we can save some money for college’. Parents had their thing going, and they were living their life. So we weren’t abused by any stretch, but they were living their life."

Goodrich remembers that when he and other friends went over to Mark’s home, Hugh seemed utterly oblivious to what was going on around him. His dad used to always be smoking Kents, Goodrich says. He’d walk around in his blazer smoking his Kents and jotting things down and going into some door that we never really knew where it went. And then he would come out, walk into another room, writing something down, look up and say, ‘Oh yes, there’s five kids in my living room — hi’.

But even if Mark’s parents were largely absent as parental figures, in hindsight he realised that they had actually been supportive, even if it was in their own unusual way.

I do have to give him credit, Mark said about his dad. He let me play drums in the house every day. The boy had purchased his first kit at a neighbourhood garage sale at the age of six. His parents gave him the $15. And I wasn’t like most kids who buy a toy drum set from the garage sale next door and play it for a week and then lose interest in it. I played them every day for 10 years. And I have to take that as some sort of endorsement that he let me do that in the house. Because I know now, as an adult, that if there was some kid playing the drums every day for 10 years, I’d go insane.

From such humble, loud origins began Mark’s interest in playing music. And when Mark reached his teens and started playing in bands, his dad showed enough awareness of his son’s activities to borrow the name of one of Mark’s groups, Monowave, for a software company he financed in the late Seventies.

Years later, after his father had died, Mark would speak to one of Hugh’s closest friends, physicist Donald Reisler. Mark asked him what his father would have made of the fact that he had become a musician. I think, if your father had had the emotional vocabulary, he’d have been very, very pleased with what you did with your music, Reisler responded.

But that was a long time in the future, when Mark was well into his forties, almost everyone referred to him as E, and his mother, sister and father were all gone. Enough years had passed that when he was writing his memoirs he was able to be nostalgic for the home that had caused him so much grief as a child. Some nights, all these years later, he wrote, "I’ll sit here and think about when I was really young and how great it felt when things were OK and we were all there in the house: my father reading the paper, Liz playing Neil Young over and over in her room, my mom laughing her goofy laugh at something that wasn’t that funny to begin with. When I think about the feeling of being in the middle of that, I’m overwhelmed with desire, like I’d give anything to spend a night