Of the proto-punk bands that hailed from the city with the dullest football helmets in the world, only the Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, and Devo made much of an impression on listeners from the rest of the US. Simple parochialism certainly played its part; NYC’s callow sophisticates looked askance at them as yokels from a city no one cared about situated on a lake most of them couldn’t name. And they were hardly alone—when I googled Cleveland to find out what it’s chiefly famous for, one of the responses I got is “It’s not that big.”
But it’s the bands that generated zero excitement outside Cleveland that truly interest me—I’m talking Cinderella Backstreet, the Styrenes, Mirrors, and the art terrorists who made up the electric eels. The obscurity of both Mirrors and the electric eels is easily explained—each band released only one single during their tenures.
What’s more, the electric eels only played five gigs during their existence, for the simple reason that they terrified audiences and alienated club owners, who ultimately passed on booking a band that, according to the Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators, might take the stage with a gas-powered lawn mower. The electric eels looked forward to the violent and unpredictable antics of the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe—when they weren’t physically assaulting their audience the electric eels were physically assaulting one another, and when they weren’t physically assaulting one another you could be sure they weren’t in the club.
Some long-due appreciation finally came the electric eels’ way in the form of 2014’s Die Electric Eels. The songs on the compilation hail from the Velvet Underground/Stooges tradition, with some brain-damaged garage rock tossed in. The results are abrasive and sizzle like downed power lines; Die Electric Eels is equal parts attraction and repulsion, but if you like your music raw it’s a sure winner.
“Agitated” is the perfect example of their approach. Dave “E” McManus’ vocals are pure snot, the lyrics are hilarious (“I’m so agitated, I’m so convoluted/I don’t know what I know, but I’d just like to shoot it”), while Paul Marotta plays very twisted guitar. “Cyclotron” is a more straight-up punch to the solar plexus, but the same pieces are in place—McManus doesn’t seem much concerned with singing in tune, Nick Knox batters the drums like an inspired amateur, and the lyrics string together amusing non sequitur such as “Shaving with two razors will help make quite a mess/TV set.”
“Anxiety” is a slice of White Light/White Heat noise—McManus is buried six-feet deep in the mix, while Marotta plays crushing guitar that occasionally descends into out-of-tune chaos. The well-beyond-the-speed-limit “Accident” is a three-plus minute car crash, and not of the fender bender variety—I’m talking straight through the windshield like a human rocket, bucko.
And speaking of automobiles we have the disappointing “Jaguar Ride.” The song goes “chuka chuka shucka,” making me wonder if it’s in dire need of a tune-up, while the lyrics are decidedly uninspired—it’s a prosaic love song free of interesting details, although that “I got no thoughts on the way I beat you up last night” at song’s end makes me take a harder look at the lyrics that precede it.
On “Tidal Wave” the guitar brings James Williamson to mind, while McManus puts staying in tune well behind expressing his fear of tidal waves, which I doubt pose a big risk in the Forest City—seems to me he’d have been better off worrying about falling trees. “Splittery Splat” has a thinner sound than most of the compilation’s songs, but the guitar work is every bit as anarchic; “You’re So Full of Shit” is all crash, bang and boom, and boasts such great lines as “Molotov cocktails, death and dada,” and the awkwardly phrased (but wonderful) “You’re full of shit and your (sic) ugly of face.”
I’m not wild about the slow “Sewercide” despite lines like “Stick your head in the gravy sewer clown,” and the immortal “Join the sewer navy.” The same goes for the bass-heavy and reverb-drenched “Natural Situation,” on which McManus out-of-tunes me into boredom with a tale of some young female somebody who’s either dead on the ground or lying in a hospital bed. As for “You Crummy Fags” it’s an acoustic guitar exercise in homophobia and a shitty conclusion to the album.
Cleveland was one of the major hubs of the pre-punk movement, but it was also the scene’s most poorly documented one. For a variety of reasons much of the city’s best music never made it onto vinyl, and we have the folks who’ve put together compilations like Die Electric Eels for correcting the historical record. The electric eels proved that not only did Cleveland rock—it also shocked, and the world be a lower voltage affair without them.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
