Mark Everett -- E of Eels -- unravels why his dad was so pained
POP
IN THE eyes of his young son, Hugh Everett III was a silent, inscrutable figure who remained hidden behind his booze, cigarette smoke and scowl. "My father was so uncommunicative," the son, Mark Everett, once wrote, "that I thought of him the same way I thought of the furniture." It was only after Hugh Everett died in 1982 that his son began to learn that this stranger had been a man in exile from his own life. Over the last year, the younger Everett has gone back in an intense effort to unravel the mystery of his father and the result is a tale about parents and children, science and art and, most of all, genius and madness.
"I just knew that things in my life didn't seem to add up, the connections weren't there, and there was so much trauma in my family," said Mark Everett, who fled (and that is the appropriate verb) his native Virginia in his early 20s and came to Southern California in search of a music career. Known by the stage name E, he became the singer and songwriter behind Eels, one of L.A.'s most respected bands but one that is perhaps too quirky and stubbornly cerebral to cut through to any sustained mainstream success.
The musician, the last surviving member of his family, has often cataloged much of his family pain in his music -- he sang about his sister's suicide, for instance, in a wrenching recording titled "Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor," which was on an album with an illustrated cover showing her flying off to heaven -- but in recent months he left the recording studio and turned to other means to explore his childhood pain and the dark gulf that separated him from his father. The compelling results: A memoir that has won some powerful praise ("It's one of the best books ever written by a contemporary artist" is how Pete Townshend put it) as well as a BBC documentary titled "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" that airs in the U.S. this Tuesday on PBS.
Life-changing experience
THE memoir, "Things the Grandchildren Should Know," is nothing like the lurid rock-star confessionals that crowd the bookstore shelves. Instead it is, like the music of Eels, intellectual, wry and unflinching as it conveys complex emotions with simple, graceful language. The companion documentary, meanwhile, records a gentle quest by a poetic son to understand the wounded soul and life's work of his scientific father. Completing both of these unexpected projects in such short order has led to a fundamental change in the life of the 45-year-old musician.
