The Sigla Blog

Pre-Christmas, bookshops were heaving with more music biographies than you could shake a Flying V guitar at. Most of them - Slash, Nikki Sixx, Ronnie Wood - ran the gamut of rock stardom excesses (groupies, drink, drugs). Things the Grandchildren Should Know, couldn´t be further away from the hedonistic rants of rock´s six-string A-listers. Written by Mark Oliver Everett, aka E of American band Eels, it shares a similar cache of personal and career highs and lows with the other rockers, finding common ground in the redemptive power of music.

Nowhere do egos get any bigger than in music and Everett is acutely aware that writing about yourself involves a certain amount of navel-gazing, something he admits rhetorically. He goes on to say, “There´s an inherent ME, I´M SO IMPORTANT thing about doing this that makes me uncomfortable. But I wouldn´t do it if I didn´t think it happened to be a very peculiar story”. And it´s not just peculiar. It´s a sad, strange story that has fate´s grubby paws all over it.

Everett has experienced more than the average quota of death in his life. In the first chapter, we learn of his sister Liz´s multiple suicide attempts, a knife attack on Everett by one of her boyfriends, his father´s death at 51 (found by Everett fully dressed on his bed, as if he “just sat down to die”) and how his cousin, a flight attendant, died on one of the hijacked 9/11 planes. Already his life starts to read, and sound, like a work of fiction. It´s an overview of what´s to come, and much of it happened before Everett found solace in making music.

From the outside, his was a fairly conventional family life, except that his father was a scientific genius who worked for the Pentagon. In his lifetime, his father’s ideas were judged too “out there”, but his theories were eventually seen as quite prophetic. A man who rarely spoke, Everett recalls their only physical contact as being the odd accidental cigarette burn when they passed in the hall. His mother was prone to what he calls “crying jags” and admits that “neither of our parents spoke directly or intimately to us about anything important”. He later discovered that despite their emotional frigidity, they attended swinger parties, which he describes as “all very Ice Storm”

This haphazard emotional upbringing is at the core of the book, and of Everett’s subsequent life as a musician. While it propelled his sisters towards drugs and alcoholism, it steered Everett towards introspection and creativity. After dabbling with delinquency in his early teens, he eventually focused on music and knuckled down to a series of dull jobs. Knowing he´d never realise his full potential in Virginia, Everett hauled himself, his four-track and guitar and headed for LA. Quickly, he bags a record deal with Polydor, and this becomes a cautionary tale of getting signed to a major label. Later, when he signs to Interscope, Beautiful Freak is released just as his sister commits suicide. Throughout the book and his life, every good event seems to be tempered by sadness, pulling Everett back down to earth.

More than the recurrent tragedies and personal loss, what comes off the page is optimism, and frequently, humour. Everett is attuned to the crazy randomness of life and when he nearly drives his car off a cliff or walks into the sea in despair, he always relents, returning to his music. His fledging days making music started in the 1980s when production techniques were more primitive and he paints a vivid picture of adapting to using computers. Inspired by hearing Portishead on the radio, using loops, samples and vocals, he begins to dabble with new recording possibilities.

Autobiographies, particularly ones by musicians, usually have more than a whiff of he ghostwriter about them. Not so this book. Although it occasionally suffers from “And then” syndrome and can get a little sloppy in terms of repetition and gaps, Everett’s underdog charm and ability to tell a story keeps us rooting for him til the end. Aware of his musical kookiness, he is surprisingly resolute when it comes to believing in what he does. Presenting Electric Shock Blues - written as a response to his sister’s death - to the record company, he is sure they won’t accept it, but they do. Later, when it comes to one of his most critically-acclaimed albums (Souljacker), they’re not as supportive. Everett, aware that an artist’s muse is always at the mercy of major label marketing, is consistently unrelenting, refusing to change anything about his work. It’s this David and Goliath arc to his story that elevates Things the Grandchildren Should Know above so many booze-and-binge musical narratives.

Things the Grandchildren Should Know is published by Little, Brown.

This review originally appeared in the Sunday Business Post on January 27th 2008.