Brian McMahon, guitarist and cofounder of the Electric Eels, wrote the new memoir Jaguar Ride (HoZac) to tell the story of the confrontational and underappreciated Cleveland protopunk trailblazers. But it’s not till the book’s waning pages that he says something explicit and direct (inasmuch as he’ll allow himself to be) about how he understands the band’s short life: “A peculiar strain of non-selective toxic antibody that cannot exist outside the context of the diseased environment which sustains it.”
“Ground zero for the writing was around 1996, when huge attention was being paid to the Eels for the first time by major music papers,” McMahon explains. “I’d heard there were some bootlegs out there and began thinking, ‘Paul [Marotta] did save those tapes,’ you know?”
“Like the Eels, I wanted the book to evolve organically. If you notice a tree growing over a fence and out another way, what do you do? Follow it,” McMahon says. “I applied avant-garde techniques to break things up, like I did in the Eels. There’s intense wording that’s hard to work through, and I found rereading it I had to get back in the zone. I call it a hard book for me to write, and I want it to be a hard book for people to read. We should all have to pay for this.”
McMahon will sign copies of Jaguar Ride at Bric-a-Brac Records (3156 W. Diversey) this Saturday (4/15) from 4 till 6 PM, followed by a performance by Indiana punk band the Cowboys.
