Suggestaholic!

I received an email from the Eels a few weeks ago, announcing a handful of North American tour dates. I’m a big fan of the “band” (Mark Everett, aka E, and whoever he feels like playing with), and had signed up to receive updates through their website.
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But I thought there must surely be a mistake in this latest dispatch. It said they’d be playing Philadelphia, but in a church. Rather inappropriately, I thought “What in the pan-fried hell??”
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I’d seen the Eels three times prior, and couldn’t remember anything especially churchy about the performances. Oh, they were spiritual alright, but the kind that involves roaring guitars, great songs, and cups of cheap beer. I couldn’t imagine E playing “It’s a Motherfucker” from the pulpit, but man, if it was gonna happen, I needed to be there.
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My friend Steve and I arrived at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, around 7:30. The tickets said the show was to start at 8:00, and past experience taught us the band is unusually punctual.
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There was already a line of humanity down the street, and we made our way to the end of it. The wind was blowing and it was chilly out there. But we’d only be forced to endure the elements for a few short minutes.
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Or so we thought.
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We waited, and waited, and for added emphasis, we waited some more. Everybody started out standing normally, but by 8:30 we were all clenched-up and stiff-legged, like Frankensteins who’d eaten too much cheese.
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It was freakin’ cold out, and the line behind us was now longer than the one in front of us. I didn’t see how all of us could possibly fit inside. But why wouldn’t they at least try?
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I was getting a bad feeling… I imagined the promoters and band members wringing their hands, and saying, “What are we going to do?! This was a questionable exercise from the start, and now it’s oversold by double?? Maybe we can sneak out of town without anyone noticing….”
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But they finally threw open the doors, and a big cheer went up. Probably because the folks in line were a tad older than the average rock show attendees, everyone filed into the church in a highly civilized manner. This was no Who in Cincinnati situation, it was more “After you, my friend…,” “No no please, after you…”
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And I’m not sure if I’m proud or ashamed of that fact.
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We entered the actual sanctuary (I’d wondered if the show might take place in some sort of activities hall, or something), and everyone sat down in pews, with their hands folded on their laps. This was going to be a strange evening.
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It looked like a giant bedsheet was hanging across the front of the room, and I noticed peeling paint and banged-up furniture. The place was kinda rough around the edges; are they now booking rock concerts for cash? I simply don’t know.
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I realized there was no beer stand, either. Rock ‘n’ roll without the golden elixir? What kind of crazy mixed-up world were we entering??
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As soon as everyone was seated, the lights went out. We all cheered, and a movie started playing on the bedsheet. It was a BBC documentary about E and his deceased father, an eccentric and distant genius, who was one of the leading quantum physicists of the 20th century. Even though E lived with him for the first eighteen years of his life, he didn’t really know the man, and during the film he tries to learn more about him.
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It’s an interesting story, but was being told in an odd setting. It was a rock concert in a church, and we were watching a movie about physics. It’s a difficult thing to get your head around… Eager (drunken?) music fans kept hollering sarcastic remarks like “Yeeeeeaah! Photons! Woooooo!!”
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Plus, the sound wasn’t very good. Occasionally E would say something funny on the screen, and half the audience would laugh and the other half would lean to a neighbor and whisper, “What did he say?!” It sounded like someone had plunged knitting needles into the woofers.
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They showed the entire one-hour film, and then E walked onstage. Just E, no band. He picked up an electric guitar, and started playing songs. The sound was still muddy and buzzing.
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Almost immediately he said, “We’d better get this one out of the way early,” and launched into “It’s a Motherfucker.” Afterwards he jokingly asked God for forgiveness, and I think my brain melted-down a little…
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Four or five songs into the set, we were all shaken by thundering drums. Turns out it was someone known only as The Chet, who accompanied E for the rest of the night on a wide array of instruments.
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The whole thing was quite interesting, the sparse arrangements, the setting, the movie…. But it was more theater than rock show, really. There was a lot of talking from the stage, and E read what he claimed were letters from his fans (in one the writer demanded to know why E is such a “cunt”). The Chet also read two longish passages from E’s autobiography, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, and they both put on a show by playing many, many instruments.
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Early in the evening E asked the audience what they thought of the film, and after everyone cheered their approval, he said, “Thank you. I’m comfortable being the Julian Lennon of physics.” Then he asked us what we’d rather have for the rest of the evening, more physics, or more music. When we reported we’d much prefer music, he muttered, “Yeah. Take that, Dad.”
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It was fun, and (here’s that word again) interesting. Truthfully, however, I was hoping for a full-blown rock concert, with bass, guitars, drums, and bad attitude.
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But I’d never fault an artist for trying new things. I mean, who wants to turn into the Beach Boys and perform the same exact show night after night for decades?
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E’s constantly battling his record companies, because he turns in albums they weren’t expecting, and is reluctant to play the music biz “game.” He’s always tinkering, and experimenting, and doing his own thing… And how can that be a negative?
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This particular experiment? It wasn’t a complete success, in my opinion. It certainly wasn’t a debacle, or anything close to it, but it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped.
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E is one charismatic mofo, so he’s always got that going for him, but there was no clear reason for the church setting, and a movie about physics as an opening act is an eccentric choice, undeniably. Plus, the sound was terrible, and with only two instruments at a time, the music was, you know, spare.
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During the movie E discovered some cassette tapes in his father’s things, and tried to play them. They wouldn’t work, so he sent them off to a professional sound lab, where the recordings were resurrected. Then we watched E play them, and hear his father’s voice for the first time in 25 years. It was a touching moment.
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On one of the tapes his Dad was mumbling some sort of incomprehensible scientific jibber-jabber, and the sound of drums could be heard in the background. It was E as a young teenager, practicing the first instrument he ever mastered. He told the camera his father was a bit strange, but he never complained about him playing drums in the house.
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Later in the night E took the drumsticks from The Chet. I’d never seen him play before, and he’s incredibly good. I mean, really good. I remembered what he’d said about his “strange” father, and how he never stood in the way of E pursuing his dreams. And it was a highlight of the evening, seeing him onstage in front of a devoted audience, thirty years later, bashing away.
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At that point E’s crazy-ass experiment worked, spectacularly. But there weren’t enough of those moments. As we were walking back to our car, through the cold again, one word kept popping into my mind: interesting. Not mind-blowing, or HOLY SHIT!, just interesting.
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‘Cause that’s exactly what it was.
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Meet the Eels at Amazon

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