A Man Called (E) Demo Tapes

recorded between 1983-1988

Living in Virginia as a struggling musician can be hard. Ask Mark Everett and he'll tell you all about it. Having been a musician since the age of six, he's written countless songs. In the early 1980's he began recording his songs (semi) professionally and he started both registering them and sending them out to record companies. He wasn't very succesful and after a few years he had collected what he more than once referred to as 'the largest collection of rejection letters in the world'. That did not stop him from paying for the recording and printing of his own album Bad Dude In Love in 1985 and continuing making tapes.

It's not known how many demo tapes were made between 1983 and 1988 (when he left Virginia for Los Angeles) but a small search on the website of the U.S. Copyright Office will give you (amongst many, many others) these results:
February '85 demo's (registered in February, 1985)
Summer To Fall '85 (registered September 25, 1985)
Cover Demos '86 (registered on December 2, 1986)
Yeah Demos (registered April 1, 1987)
June 1987 Cue Masters & 3 Home Demos (registered June 23, 1987)
Dig Me: Demos and Stray Cuts, vol. I (registered August 21, 1987)
Feel It Demos (registered December 2, 1987)
Feb.-May 1988 Demos (registered May 16, 1988)
July-August '88 Demos (registered September 6, 1988)

The songs that were on those tapes are unknown, but some of them have been registered individually:
Thelma Lou (recorded in 1983, registered on January 6, 1984)
Story Of Us (registered December 3, 1984)
Eunice (registered March 26, 1985)
Life Ain't Livin' Without You (registered April 20, 1987)
The Sky Above (registered January 22, 1988)

recorded between 1988-1990

When sending out tapes to record companies did not pay off, Mark Everett decided to move to Los Angeles and try to hand over his music personally. "At least they will have to look me in the eyes when they reject me", he said. He left Virginia in August or September 1988 for sunny California. Back in Virginia Mark Everett was known as 'Mark E'. Once in Los Angeles he just went under the moniker 'E'.
"I always carried a tape with four or five songs on it with me", said E in the august 1997 issue of WATT magazine. "I had a different tape each week. I knew no-one in Los Angeles and I'd give anyone who knew anybody a so called 'Nashville Handshake'. At the moment I shook somebody's hand, I immediately pushed a cassette in there." Elsewhere in the same article E mentions that looking back he can see why he was rejected for years. "I was completely anti-social. I locked myself away, I wrote songs and I recorded them with an enormous passion and drive to make it. All the while I got better and better at writing. Especially in the beginning, the material I wrote was very bad. Looking back, I see that my progression was based on experience."

Some of the work E recorded in his early years in Los Angeles are on these demo tapes:
Mark Everett "E" Sept.-Oct. 1988 Demos (registered October 27, 1988)
Jan.-March 1989 E Demos (registered March 30, 1989)
April-July 1989 E Demos (registered July 10, 1989)
This Is E : Demos (registered April 20, 1990)
E - Diary Of A Stable Boy (registered August 6, 1990)
E - A Dollhouse In The Sky (registered December 17, 1990)

Note that not all of these tapes (and the pre L.A. tapes) consist of completely new material. E often reworked and changed songs a bit and then included them again on a demo tape. One of the most intriguing titles is Born On The Day Marilyn Monroe Died, a song that has never surfaced but that was on the demo that attracted the attention of Polydor Records...

[thanks to alcy and Bert Wasbeer for pointing us in the direction of these Copyright files - alcy's more complete list can be found here]