Nothing did more to further the cause of Alternative Nation-building than 120 Minutes, MTV’s Sunday-night video showcase of non-mainstream acts. For nearly two decades, the program spanned musical eras from ’80s college rock to ’00s indie, with grunge, Britpop, punk, industrial, electronica and more in between. MAGNET raids the vaults to resurrect our 120 favorite and unjustly forgotten videos from the show’s classic era.
#34: Eels “Novocaine For The Soul”
Throughout this long day’s journey into teenage nostalgia, your 120 Minutes scribe has mostly kept a lid on his own biography. But we’re on a collision course with the above video and its singer circa 1996, the year Eels’ debut, Beautiful Freak, was released. Turns out frontman Mark Oliver Everett—back then he went by the handle “E”—would be the first musician this writer interviewed in a quasi-long career of interviewing dudes in bands. Everett was a bit of a jerk, but you would be, too, if you were sitting on a fire escape the morning after playing Conan and were getting grilled for a half-column in a college newspaper. E, you are forgiven. Cool video. You really transcended the Beck Lite thing and wrote one of the best musical autobiographies the world has seen. If only we knew it all back then.
One reply on “120 Reasons To Live: Eels”
Classic video and great song, but I’m a much bigger fan of his later albums. It takes a serious badass to put out 3 different concept albums in 1.5 years.