Other shows

Apart from the above mentioned 1992 shows, concerts were supposedly played ath the Endfest festival in Seattle on August 8th and opening for Jackson Browne in Denver. Plus E claims to have been the first to have played at the Largo club in Los Angeles, somewhere in 1992. We are unable to find any records to prove those concerts though.

After the tour with Tori Amos concluded, E was very enthousiastic about his musical future. He spent the majority of 1993 working on the album Broken Toy Shop (released on December 7, 1993) and performed live here and there. Here's a show we can confirm, opening for Graham Parker:

10/21/1993

San Juan Capistrano, CA

The Coach House

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After the release of Broken Toy Shop in December 1994, there was even talk of touring again with the new material. This time E would need a drummer though. That's where future EELS drummer Jonathan 'Butch' Norton came in. "I was asked to come and audition for E's Broken Toy Shop tour. Mutual friends thought I would be a good fit for E. We bonded immediately", said Butch in an interview with Eelsfan.de.

Unfortunately the planned tour was cancelled as in early 1994 Polydor dropped E from their roster and they cancelled all promotional activities. Butch and E did some shows together in February and March of 1994. Here's what Butch said about this to the now defunkt website Efansite.tk: "We did two shows at some very little coffee houses in San Francisco [...] for some West Coast music conference. We also did a KFOG radio thing [...] In L.A. we played at UCLA for some big college booking conference and that was it." We won't speculate on those dates, so we won't place them here. It's fairly safe to say though that the two San Francisco shows were a part of the Gavin Convention, that took place between February 15 and 20, 1994 in the Bay Area. Here is what we have confirmed for early 1994:

02/00/1994	San Francisco, CA	KFOG Radio	-
02/13/1994	Oakland, CA	KPFA-FM In Studio	setlist/more

Devestated by the loss of his recordcontract, E started writing songs again. After all, that was his life and since his arrival in Los Angeles in 1988, he'd gone without a record deal for years anyway. Some of the songs he wrote in that period, like Mental, ended up on the album Beautiful Freak, that was going to be E's third official solo-album until EELS came along. Other songs, with titles like Shovel and I Don't Even Know What I'm Looking For (a response to U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For) were shelved. They were played in september 1994 on KCRW radio and during some sholo shows in September 1994:

09/20/1994	Long Beach, CA	The Que Sera	-
09/25/1994	Santa Monica, CA	KCRW Brave New World	setlist/more
09/30/1994	Los Angeles, CA	Alligator Lounge	-

These are the last shows known played as 'A Man Called (E)'. Later in the year Butch and E see a band called Mrs. God play at an open mic night at The Mint in Los Angeles. They hook up with Mrs. God's bass player Tommy Walter and they form a band. Next stop... EELS.