track 29: hello cruel world

It was the summer of 1992, my hair was dyed black and one of my favorite musicians, Tori Amos, was playing a shoe at the Carefree Theatre in West Palm Beach for her Little Earthquakes tour on August 16. It would be a while before Tori would be playing at giant arenas. I wanted desperately to see her play and my Mom and Dave agreed to go with me since, quite frankly, I didn't have any friends. Or at least any who'd be interested in going. Actually, no, no friends. No job, either. I went in for an interview some place and ended up spending two days canvassing Homestead with a group of environmental activists campaigning to save the Everglades. I had very little idea what I was doing with them and it was obvious after the second day when they said, "maybe not." Anyway, we decided to make a weekend out of it, driving up, seeing the show, staying in a hotel and heading back the next day. It was a huge bonus for me because it meant a weekend away from home and the stepfather.

Once there, we find the theatre, which is a small place, about the size of my high school's auditorium. Maybe a bit larger, but not much. Inside, there are a couple of guys passing out cassettes, samplers of the opening act. It wasn't until the opening act took the stage that I realized that the guys at the door were up there: A man with the unlikely name of Parthenon Huxley and a man called E.



I think his band consisted of him (on a keyboard, looking on at Tori's piano with envy), Parthenon and maybe one other guy. He played a set of melodic pop that was both funny and heartbreaking all at once. A lot like my life. Audience members shouted out requests at one point, one of them being "Have you never been mellow?" E was great, though and my mom & Dave liked him a lot more than Tori. The next day, on our way out of town, we stop at a Peaches record store and pick up the cassette of A Man Called E, which becomes one of my favorite albums ever.



hello cruel world
so this is you
a broken heart
but with a view
i'm looking out to face another day
the angry mob
the happy mass
this birthday cake
may be the last
i'm looking out to find another way
Norman Rockwell colors fade
all my favorite things have changed
but what the hell
hello cruel world

It was love at first taste and I completely identified with E's outlook, "Fitting in the with the misfits," "Are you and me gonna happen" and "You'll be the scarecrow" are constants in my ipod. I even wrote him a fan letter and in it wrote something like "thank you for NOT playing 'Have you never been mellow'!" He responded with an autographed photo that said "Rick- Have U never been mellow? -E." which to this day is taped to my wall at home.

One week after the show, Hurricane Andrew was on its way to Miami. Everyone was hunkering down for the worst. I remember the last thing I did before the storm hit was shave my head. My hair was down to my shoulders, which made the awful heat worse than it was already, and like I said, dyed black. When I tried to re-color it red, I ended up with red roots and... black hair. Tried to bleach it and got this insane rainbow effect. Shaving my head was the only solution. Then August 24th Andrew hits Miami. Luckily, our house was fine. Our neighborhood is powerless for a few days, trees are down but nothing too awful. My stepfather's cousins, who lived in Homestead, where the storm hit the hardest, completely lost their house. We take them in and all live together for a few months.



When E's second album, Broken Toy Shop came out, I picked it up immediately, stupidly on cassette. If anyone out there wants to drop $100 for a copy from amazon, I'll send you my mailing address! Then he disappears for a while, only to resurface in 1996 as the leader of a band called The Eels, singing "Novocaine for the soul" on MTV. I get their debut, Beautiful Freak and don't like it much. I like Electro-Shock Blues somewhat more and keep compulsively buying their music for years despite never really loving it. Until I'm in my 30s, living in New York and my flatmate gives me a promo of their best of collection, Meet the Eels and the rarities album, Useless Trinkets. Maybe listening to the music with an older, more experienced pair of ears allowed me to really understand it, to connect more. But it connected deeply and I've rediscovered a lot of the older Eels songs since.



Reading E's (ok Mark Oliver Everett's) book, Things the Grandchildren Should Know this year really made me an eternal fan. Once again, his ability to combine humor and sadness is something I admire and even identify with. I connected to that book in a way that in turn allowed me to make an even deeper connection with the music. I had always wondered how E had gone from A Man Called E to "Novocaine for the soul." I think get it now. Ha.

Click here to see the video for my favorite Eels track, "Last stop: this town"!