Changed for Evermore

If you’ve heard the rock, blues and folk sounds blended with hip-hop on Everlast’s acclaimed new album “Whitey Ford Sings the Blues,” you might think that rapper is playing with a new beat.

He is. But it’s not just his music.

“Here, listen to this,” Everlast says, his eyes glinting as he leans forward in a cushy chair upstairs at the House of Blues before a recent concert appearance. He points to his sternum. From his chest comes a faint but clear click . . . click . . . click.

“It’s called a St. Jude’s heart valve,” he explains. “And every time it opens and closes, it clicks.”

One evening last February, Everlast, a.k.a. Erik Schrody, finished the final session for the new album--a sharp departure from the rap chants of his old, party-minded group House of Pain--and went home to sleep. When he opened his eyes, it was four days later and he was in a hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai, with his new heart valve clicking away.

“Waking up and seeing my mom and dad together in the same room for the first time in years, right away I knew something was wrong,” says Schrody, 29, whose outgoing manner and big, solid trunk give no indication that less than a year ago he was at death’s door.

Born in Long Island and raised largely in the San Fernando Valley, he’d known since childhood that he had a defective heart valve. But doctors didn’t expect it to become a serious problem until he was in his 50s.

Needless to say, its surfacing at this time has had a profound effect on Schrody’s outlook.

“As weird as it sounds, it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me,” he says. “First of all, it’s over and done with--as long as I take care of myself, and I live so much healthier now than I did before. And, you know, I smile a lot more than I did before. I’m grateful about this. This is great.”

That’s a sense that comes across on the album, where the heady musical mix carries lyrics that often speak of a deep appreciation of life, from the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I encounter with a homeless man in the hit “What It’s Like” to the repudiation of hip-hop materialism in “Ends” to several stare-downs with the Grim Reaper, including the chilly shooting tale “Painkillers.”

His merging of white rock and black hip-hop is being tabbed by some critics as the most arresting since the Beastie Boys’ emergence, and comparisons to Beck have also been made. “Reinvention in rap has never been highly successful in the eyes of its fans,” wrote the music magazine Request. “But it’s never been done right--until now.”

Reception for the new sound was a bit tentative when the album was released in September. But sales have accelerated, reaching weekly figures of more than 100,000 recently and now totaling more than 600,000.

All that music, though, was finished before the heart failure.

“You know, I think that maybe, though not on a conscious level, there was an awareness that something was wrong,” he says. “And it came out in my writing.”

The truth is that profound changes had already occurred in Schrody’s life well before either the making of the album or his own te^te-a-te^te with death.

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Schrody keeps checking his watch and getting up to peek out the door of the club’s Foundation Room, impatient for the sun to set. As a Muslim, he fasts all day during Ramadan, and he’s hungry.

It was a spiritual hunger during his days with House of Pain that led him to embrace Islam two years ago. The L.A.-based group was one of the biggest in rap in the early ‘90s. Party anthems and street tales, including the huge 1992 single “Jump Around,” made the trio the most prominent and successful white hip-hop act after the Beastie Boys.

But the good life soured. The business side became ugly and the relationships between Schrody, Daniel “Danny Boy” O’Connor and Leor “DJ Lethal” DiMant, close friends since meeting while students at Taft High School, had degenerated into constant bickering. In 1996, on the day of the release of the trio’s third album, “Rise Again,” Schrody told the others he was quitting.

“It’s one of them things, I went through a crucial period of manhood in front of a lot of people, from 18 to this age,” he says. “That’s really where you shed the kids’ stuff, you know what I’m saying? Somewhere in between you get the feeling that I’m getting a little too old for some of this. I’ve been fortunate enough to really be able to take it to the edge, see what everybody is raving about out there and go, ‘You know what? Those people are raving about the wrong things.’ ”

His friendship remains strong with his former House mates--something he says would not have been possible had the group stayed together longer, and had he not found Islam.

“That’s probably true,” says DiMant, one of many well-wishers at the House of Blues and now a member of hip-hop/rock hybrid Limp Bizkit. “He’s definitely more humble now. Way more. He used to get mad all the time, was hard to hang out with. Used to blow his top.”

It was pretty dark after the split, though. At 27, he’d made a move that looked like career suicide. Rap was all he’d known, having first made a solo album under the tutelage of Ice-T at 18 and then moving on to House of Pain.

But his ambitions were wider. Since he was a kid, he’d been into rock and pop music. The Stray Cats “blew my mind,” he says. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and KISS were high on his hit list. And he had a love for singer-songwriter traditions running from Johnny Cash to Tom Waits.

But when he talked of incorporating it all into his own music, many at Tommy Boy Records, charged with selling his albums, scratched their heads.

“They wanted me to pick a direction--’You can’t do both rap and rock,’ ” he says. “I was like, ‘There’s no reason I can’t do both.’ I felt there was no reason I couldn’t have a single on [rock radio station] KROQ and a single on [hip-hop outlet] the Beat, different singles on each one. But they were a little nervous.”

“I think when we first were presented with Erik’s new musical direction, we were surprised with what we got,” says Martin Davis, Tommy Boy’s head of marketing and promotions. “But we were really excited about marketing it. It was so different that as long as we could present it in the right light, it gave a lot of space to work.

“It allowed us to use some of the urban skills we developed to market at street level with our ability to push things to the mainstream at the same time, build it from the ground up.”

Schrody was nervous as well. He’d never really written songs before. He credits his manager, Carl Stubner, and record producer Joe Dante for supporting his vision. But it was Islam, he says, that gave him the strength and confidence to see it through. The same goes for his recovery after surgery.

“Because I came to this two years ago is one of the reasons I think I’m still alive,” he says. “I don’t think I would have been strong enough to understand. When I was recovering, I didn’t take it like, ‘Why me?’ I took it like, ‘OK, there’s a lesson to be learned.’ It’s kind of what Islam deals with, tells you that it doesn’t matter who you are. God tries the people he loves.”

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The scenes in the House of Blues greenroom before and after the show befit the comeback taking place in Schrody’s life. Old high school friends mill about with such cohorts as DiMant, Cypress Hill’s B-Real and Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath, with others including actors Sean Penn and Stephen Dorff and director Ted Demme.

Everlast’s mother, Rita Schrody, is a boisterous hostess and cheerleader, but she becomes reflective when she’s pulled away from the crowd to talk about her son’s health crisis.

“Something like that brings you closer together,” she says. “His friends have been fantastic! They were there for him.”

She also supports his spiritual path.

“I admire that,” she says. “I’m a Catholic, and he was brought up Catholic. But he started explaining this to me years ago. It’s kept him out of a lot of trouble. And if you believe in God, it doesn’t matter to me [which religion it is]. He’s grown and matured.”

Nowhere is that more evident than on stage, where there’s a sense of contentment and warmth and a feeling of belonging with his new musical associates, who have taken the intriguing sounds of the album and transformed them into a truly distinctive, innovative melange of guitars, Space Age keyboards, hip-hop turntables and jazz-based rhythm fills.

“I always tell people that if this gets unhappy for me again, I will quit and go work at Home Depot to earn money and have my music as my thing at night that I do to make me happy,” he says. “I’m fortunate enough to have a perspective, ‘cause I’ve seen big money. So it’s not like that’s the lure of it--’I want the cars, I want the women, I want the money.’ Been there, done that.

“When we first started doing our little tour, we did promo things. We were playing in clubs with like 10 people. With House of Pain I would have been, ‘I’m not doing this show.’ But with this band, it’s like, ‘Let’s go out there and play for us, man.’ I don’t care if there’s 10 people or 10,000. I want them to enjoy it, but it ain’t for them. It’s for me. I’m the one who has to smile when the day is done.”