The village VOICE * April 1 17, 1992

Auuuuugh!
Rock

By Mike Rubin

The Electric Eels

Now that punk is dead again, for the umpteenth time, the seal on its death certificate authenticated the day Arista boss Clive Davis got down on his knee and sang "Mammy" to Courtney Love's lawyer to the tune of a million bucks, the time has come, again, to retrace the path that the little bastard took to get from its birthplace in a basement amplifier to its gravestone epitaph on Saturday Night Live. While trying to carbon-date the "first punks" Leakey-style is a loser's game-it's pointless to stress the seminal influence of a band that next to no one has heard-the future is in the past. Or, to put it another way, those who do not know their rock history arc doomed to Ned's Atomic Dustbin.
    Besides the irony of four Cleveland misfits who never saw the inside of a recording studio having their imperfect sound forever preserved on compact disc, the Electric Eels' God says Fuck You (Homestead) makes a convincing case for a band whose first single came out in 1978-three years after they ceased to exist-as one of. the dear departed's most important progenitors. Any New, Yorker writer or your mom can tell that rock is noise; the Eels' low-fidelity oeuvre, even to a rock listener, sounds like "just noise"-or crap. But what the Eels were doing way back in the Nixon/Ford years of 1972-75 wasn't merely raising a clatter. Without the benefit of a safety net-no certified "scene" or clubs, specialized labels- or built-in booster groups-they defined the conventions of noise rock when there were none, and it's hard to think that they could have expected any reaction to their inept-sounding racket other than utter horror. Compared with the Eels the Stooges were virtuosos; the sense of sonic accident chronicled on Fuck You helped to establish an art music in which context was everything. Sure, any two-year-old. can do it, but flag planting counts for something. Just like Jackson Pollock was a genius and the Cooper Union student with a scribble scrabble portfolio is a plagiarist, the Eels were innovators and Hole are hacks.

    As befitting the volatility of their 'recordings, the Eels drew their lineup incestuously from past and future members of fellow Cleveland monsters of margin rock Rocket From the Tombs, Pere Ubu, the Cramps, the Mirrors, and the Styrenes, with the only real constant being guitarist/sleeve artist John Morton, a visual cross between Alan Hale Jr. and Meatloaf. (Former sometime-Eels Jamie Klimek and Paul Marotta have themselves recently resurfaced with several stirring live shows and two albums: the Styrenes' Homestead overview It's Artastic!- Cleveland '75 to '79, which proves mainly that Eno-vintage Roxy Music cutouts were available in the Midwest, and the Mirrors' all-new Another Nail in the Coffin, which sounds like a post-Dub Housing Pere Ubu might have if they'd matured instead of molded, and which, in true Eels tradition, is already impossible to find.) During their chaotic "career" the Eels played only six live shows, and given the vacuum that existed at the time, as well as the reported nature of their performances-starting a lawnmower on stage, bone-breaking run-ins with the police, repeated fistfights with the audience and among themselves-the fact they played even that many gigs is astonishing. Yet, since then, they've been cited repeatedly in the cosmologies and secret histories of the revisionists and diarists recounting the undie rock apocrypha of long out-of-print recordings and limited editions (before that term referred to a deliberate marketing ploy by the Mauve-Colored Vinyl Lobby). It's a reputation that far exceeds their limited discography: two singles and a 1989 collectors-imprint album of mostly unreleased material, Having a Philosophical Investigation the Electric Eels, all reprised on the new CD. Part of the Eels' posthumous appeal involves their "purity"; it's difficult for a band who fizzled out before their records were even released to sell out. Deified without quite being identified, the Eels occupy a place in rock's back pages bigger than a footnote but smaller than a bread box     But if "history" were all that were happening, Fuck You would be a snore. Instead, it's a buzz right from the opening blare of "Agitated," where singer Dave E.'s. nasal roar strikes a universal chord, like Charlie Brown's "Auuuuugh!" when Lucy pulls the football away. Completely raw and unpolished, Morton's guitar chimes in, thicker than six overdubs and wider than Ron Asheton's waistline. World, meet "aut rock," an autistic unlearning of the formalities that pop music had developed, the little extraneous things like instrumental ability, vocal harmonics, and production values. Pushing amateurism toward abstraction, the Eels discovered the purifying, purging, liberating exaltation of horrible noise, arriving at an explosive shock shared only by early hardcore., "No compromises to the recording process would be made," read the liner notes-thus, every guitar chord bristles with a rough crackle, every drumbeat shivers with accidental echo. Angst-ridden before that was a genre unto itself, Dave E. sings with one of the recorded era's most protrusive speech impediments: "Wheah are you now?" he moans in "Natural Situation," as tone deaf as love is blind, "Dead on da gwound." Taking the mixture of metal riffing and free-jazz raffing first fermented on the Stooges' Fun house and the MC5's "Skunk (Sonicly Speaking)," the Eels plugged it into bad equipment. Never mind Seattle; this is true grunge.
    As close to no-holds-barred as it is to complete contrivance, the Eels' electricity beckons with its seeming case but daunts with its wild abandon, coming out in grunts and exclamation points and scrunched-up faces, as complex as the list of items in Dave E.'s refrigerator and as basic as nursery rhymes ("Bunnies" nicks both its tune and subject matter from the traditional "Little Rabbit Foo-Foo," while most of Dave E.'s choruses consist of some meditation on a "nah-nah-na-nah-nah" theme), As a time capsule God Says Fuck You takes us nowhere really, except back to the exhilaration of that first moment when young people got tired of being Part of the solution and realized that being part of the problem might just be more fun.