The Electric Eels band is, and will doubtless remain, an unbilled bit player to the mass audience that regularly queues up at the Main Street Theatre box office of pop/rock music; however to handfuls of industry insiders, once ticket-takers and concession workers who've gone on to achieve their own varying degrees of notoriety (frequently exponentially greater than that of the Eels), our unit was seminally significant — our sound elemental. Many of those artists, performers, and critics alike whose creative divergencies led them through crossroads illuminated by our doomed group's markers, have maintained that the Electric Eels held a compass pointing true north to punk. While that may indeed be the case, those considerations are not grist for this mill.

JAGUAR RIDE then is essentially a personal memoir ... and as such eschews any post-analyses of the Electric Eels' "actions" or estimates of the band's long-range effects (pursuits left to the truly zealous reader) in favor of tilling some near-random hour, day, or week for the, uh, eel-essence — that innate thing which tempted the group's founders off the course of the common rock band and instead into little-charted regions of music/philosophic synthesis. The resultant products of our divergent industry, while by no means unique in basic form and function, were distinctive 3-minute slabs of societal provocation ... dubbed "art-rock terrorism" by a most seditious and propagating breed of scalpel-wielding critic from the late 70's forward.

Although the frequency of these "autopsies" has continued to increase (in fact, I begin each one of JAGUAR RIDE's two-dozen chapters with an excerpt from a different "coroner's report"), their raw numbers to date have been insufficient to boost us beyond cult status. Ironically, an upside of all this obscurity is that the allure of the Eels persists and is even heightened by it (and our limited catalog of songs [30-some] doesn't seem to have hurt much either).

While popular success continues to elude the Electric Eels (for reasons now available on CD as well as vinyl), the very notion of such a thing — a notion entertained by nearly every other rock band — was not even a trace element in our group's raison d'être. In part, that's why we were different. By JAGUAR RIDE's halfway point readers will not only have come to understand how basically unlike our contemporaries we were, but a whole lot more about the trio that might've just as easily been an art clique, film company, or a writers salon (had typewriters been handy as guitars).

The attached CD* — featuring some original recordings of songs our terrible troika not only successfully flew below the radar of mainstream tracking stations of the day but moved with stealth past esoteric outposts of the then avant garde — will, I hope, turn the uninitiated reader into a listener ... and the skeptic into a disciple.


* Sorry, unavailable in the Online Version.