ELECTRIC EELS The hulking, peroxide-blond John Morton had just been kicked out of a private high school when he met Paul Marotta at the Lakewood YMCA coffeehouse. While they were walking to the park later on, some jocks in a car hassled the diminutive Marotta. Morton promptly beat one of them up, sealing the friendship.             After Morton started attending Lakewood High, he met two kids who'd been expelled from Catholic schools. First Marotta introduced him to Dave McManus. "Davy had the longest hair I had ever seen," says Morton. "And he had this limp. I was immediately attracted to him." McManus knew future Eels guitarist Brian McMahon, who impressed Morton with his sophistication by shoplifting a premixed cocktail in a can. "I was still trying to cop beer," says Morton.             McManus, McMahon and Morton went to see a Captain Beefheart gig and were disappointed by the hyped local band that opened. The three decided they could do better, and in late 1972, the Eels were born. Initially, the group consisted of two amps-on-1 1 guitarists and one yowling singer with an affected lisp. "So it was no drums and certainly no bass," says Morton. "That was a conscious decision." Even when the Eels later added musicians including future Cramps drummer Nick Knox, the two-guitars/one-voice approach remained the essence of their sound,             True harbingers of punk, the Eels' lyrics celebrated junk culture, attacked relationships and proffered obnoxious gender and racial slurs merely to provoke some sort of reaction. But the most intriguing lyrics feature hallucinatory car-crash and hospital imagery. On "Cards And Fleurs," for instance, McManus requests, "So please reserve me a table in the operating room/And tell me how much to tip the anesthesiologist." McManus, who has a clubfoot, spent time in the hospital as a kid. "I (asked] why he didn't get it operated on," says Morton, "and he said he did. This was the best they could do. He said he remembers waking up—he was four years old—coming out of the anesthesia, and there's a doctor sawing away at his foot. That'll give you dreams."                With three combustible personalities, an Eels rehearsal often resulted in violence. Says Morton, "If you didn't like something, there were no qualms about just punching somebody as opposed to saying, 'Asshole.' I was the biggest of the Eels, and I won the fights. I can't say I'm proud of that, but that's the way we were." After getting assaulted one too many times, McMahon quit in late 1973 and Marotta took his place.             In the midst of the internal dissent, rumors reached Morton that his life was in danger because of his various affairs with married women. Says Morton, "I heard through the grapevine that ... somebody said, 'We can get him killed for 200 bucks.' I said, 'Well, time to move."' Morton relocated to Columbus, and the Eels followed.             Columbus could not have been a worse place for the Eels. The college town, remembers Marotta, "was the land of the Eagles and Steve Miller Band. The bars we played in were really hostile to us."             "Brian wanted to have barbed wire in front of us to protect us from the audience," says Morton. "We never did that, but it made sense." After one gig, the police arrested McManus and Morton. A handcuffed Morton kicked a cop in the groin, and Columbus' finest responded by breaking Morton's hand.             Following the Eels' return to Cleveland in the fall of 1974, Marotta quit the group after a second Extermination Night (minus Rocket) on Jan. 19, 1975, that resulted in, the Eels getting banned from the Viking Saloon. Marotta describes the Eels' set that night: "There's only one guitar player playing, and that's me, because John was too drunk to play. And Davy's just sort of rambling on. They each had a microphone and were yelling at each other. I was pretty embarrassed. I thought, 'This is just nonsense."'             "That was one of the worst nights of my life," says Morton.             After Marotta quit the Eels, McMahon rejoined. But owning no prospects and having been blacklisted from the only club in town that would book them, the Eels broke up within a few months. "We really thought we were gonna be popular and a big hit," says Morton. "We thought, 'The kids are ready for this.' We were quite astonished when we got booed." "WE WANTED TO HAVE BARBED WIRE IN FRONT OF US TO PRO- TECT US FROM THE AUDIENCE." —JOHN MORTON next page!!!!