Exclusive: Parker Pubs’ The Many Facets of Eyedea tells the story of legendary Twin Cities rapper

Writer Parker Pubs’ new book, The Many Facets of Eyedea: Selected Writings & Oral History, is an in-depth oral history of the late freestyle battle champion and innovative MC, Micheal “Eyedea” Larsen. In addition to featuring features 50 songs and 25 poems by Larsen, the book is based on archival interviews with Eyedea, along with interviews with his collaborators, friends, and loved ones like his mother Kathy Averill, his longtime collaborator DJ Abilities, and fellow rappers like Sage Francis, Murs, El-P, and Aesop Rock.

The book’s introduction is by Eyedea’s mentor and fellow Rhymesayers MC, Slug of Atmosphere and the oral history covers Eyedea’s early years as a champion battle rapper, the Eyedea & Abilities albums on Rhymesayers, his explorations into freestyle free jazz and grunge rock, and his untimely death due to opiate overdose in 2010.

Parker Pubs’ The Many Facets of Eyedea: Selected Writings & Oral History is out now  and we’re thrilled to share an exclusive excerpt from the book’s fourth chapter, discussing Eyedea’s work with his grungy post-hardcore band, Carbon Carousel.

Abilities and Eyedea. // photo credit Dan Monick

The Many Facets of Eyedea: Selected Writings & Oral History: selections from CHAPTER 4 

CARBON CAROUSEL

During his hiatus from Eyedea & Abilities, Eyedea formed the band Carbon Carousel with Jeremy Ylvisaker (guitar), Casey O’Brien (bass), and JT Bates (drums).

Eyedea: I was listening to the Beatles White Album, and I was like, I can do this. I started to understand that you don’t need to be some really super freaky jazz piano player to write a good song. And then at some point I just came to the realization that if I didn’t start singing or playing guitar until I was 40, I’d be kicking myself in the ass saying, Why didn’t you do this when you were 25?

Carnage: From 9-5 every day he’d do music-related things. He made it a work day. If he was learning to play piano, he played piano for seven hours with an hour break to walk his dog and eat lunch. Who has that kind of determination? He set his sights on making it happen.

Jeremy Ylvisaker: I was his guitar teacher. He decided to start taking some lessons, and he would come to the music store I was working at. The staff was like, Oh my God, that’s Eyedea. I loved his sound on guitar. I loved what he came up with.

Eyedea: I got really interested in playing guitar and writing music in a more traditional way, rather than producing it in the traditional hip hop sense. At one point, it was attempting to blend and blur genres—it was this guitar-driven live band with rap verses on top of it. Then I just started singing and decided it really makes more sense to turn this into a rock band. I decided to fully embrace the rock element of my personality.

Jeremy Ylvisaker: They tried to add me to Face Candy (on guitar), and that sounded terrible. It was so messy. It was just more nimble with less harmonic information. But that same group started doing these rock songs that Mikey was writing. So it was a transition into being two different bands.

Eyedea: Face Candy wound up turning into this band called Carbon Carousel—distorted guitars and me talking about the same bullshit I always talk about. I was doing the music that, at the time, was my most honest and the truest and made me the happiest, but I was getting the least amount of love from the world for it.

Jeremy Ylvisaker: We played a lot for a while, and it was starting to catch on. It really alienated a lot of rap fans.

Eyedea: Hip hop people were disgusted. So I just said, fine, I’ll go play punk rock shows and venues. And then it worked.

Brady O’Rourke: Carbon Carousel was an experience to see live. It was loud, in your face, and abrasive.

El-P: Mikey seemingly would do nothing that wasn’t him. He would do nothing that didn’t further his artistic heart. There was no compromise, and there was nothing that anyone else could say to discourage him from taking that path. It’s pretty fucking ballsy of him to step out and make a rock record. He clearly didn’t give a shit, and you gotta fucking love that. It’s rare.

Jeremy Ylvisaker: Carbon Carousel was like half improvised / half songs. We wound up collaborating a lot. Like he would have one or two parts and I would add a more expansive third part. On a lot of the recordings, it was just me on guitar, but it was his writing.

Casey O’Brien: Mike would play guitar to show us a riff or something, and we would figure it out from there. It was definitely total collaboration—no one knew what the fuck was going on. I’d never been in a hip hop grunge band before—I don’t think anybody had.

Eyedea: I write most of the music on guitar. I go at it with a sketch and say here’s a song that I have. We’ll sit down and fumble our way through getting this idea across. It’s heavy, it’s distorted, it’s pissed off a little bit.

Casey O’Brien: The writing experience was beautiful. Jeremy had this little studio, and we would spend a lot of hours in that room. It was a collaborative, creative time. It just felt like anything went.

Jeremy Ylvisaker: One time Mike Lewis told me, “Composing is improvising, improvising is composing.” It’s all just exhaling. Don’t try to recreate your entire life every time, just exhale.

Casey O’Brien: It was an environment where sounds mattered so much—just getting all these tones out of everything. Mike was a gearhead, and I went to audio engineering school for a year. We would have discussions about which threads we were reading on gearsluts.com—it was just fuckin’ nerdy. The Radiohead records produced by Nigel Godrich were a major part of the conversation. A lot of thought went into what that record sounded like. The drums on “Dummy” are just nuts. The sonic imprint of the record was as much a part of the composition as, say, a bass part. The sound was very intentional.

Jeremy Ylvisaker: As far as influences on the sound, Mike and I were thinking about My Bloody Valentine a lot, Jesus & Mary Chain, noisier bands. I would always play through multiple tiny crappy amps, so it would be like this stereo mush ball.

Eyedea In Crowd, 2010. // photo credit Kathy Averill

Carbon Carousel songs exhibited Eyedea’s new approach to writing. The songs were shorter, less story-based, with less focus on rhymes—they sounded more like Cobain than rap lyrics.

Eyedea: I sometimes write about things that are a little darker, but I still feel like it’s a way to connect with people who feel that way. When you’re angry and sad, a big part of all those feelings is loneliness. With music, I look for something to identify with. And when I do find something, it does help.

JT Bates: Carbon Carousel was a way for him to get out other emotions.

Eyedea: I feel not quite the same as anyone else, and I think what’s beautiful about that is, I think that’s what everyone feels about everything. You feel like you don’t really quite connect with anyone around you, and that’s what connects us all.

The song “Seizure Suite” includes what is likely the first real reference to opiates in his lyrics (“Jameson, Vicodin”).

Claire: I made him promise me at the beginning of our relationship that he would never do cocaine or heroin. It was a pact that we had. My mom made me promise I would never do those drugs, because they steal people from themselves. He read Molecules of Emotion about discovering the opiate receptor in the brain. One time he was reading Cobain’s Journals, and he showed me this part where Kurt Cobain was basically like, You should never even try heroin once, because once you try it, it will be the only thing you ever want to do ever again. So I said, See, that’s all the more reason not to do it. He said he felt like he was missing out on an experience or an understanding of it.

Sadistik: You could tell he really loved Nirvana and was exploring other genres deeply. I thought it was more a statement of where he was going. I remember listening to Carbon Carousel with him in a tour van, and he was really proud of it. He was proud of the outside-the-box stuff he was going towards.

Casey O’Brien: The ethos that Cobain brought was this idea of anti-establishment, anti-capitalist rawness that was somehow completely encapsulated in capitalism. I feel like we were in the middle of that idea. I’m not sure if that answers your question.

Carbon Carousel released 15 songs across the EPs The Some of All Things, or: The Healing Power of Scab Picking (2006), Single Series #1 (2007, with Abzorbr), and Nervous (2007) on Eyedea’s own label, Crushkill Recordings. A couple demos and the song “Excess Marks the Spot” were released on the posthumous album The Many Faces of Mikey (2015).