Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

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Dusty in Memphis
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Pet Sounds
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Low
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Music from Big Pink
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London Calling
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Loveless
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by Miles Marshall Lewis
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Kim Cooper

2005

The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
15 East 26 Street, New York, NY 10010

The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright © 2005 by Kim Coooper

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cooper, Kim.
In the aeroplane over the sea / by Kim Cooper.
     p. cm.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-2437-1
1. Neutral Milk Hotel (Musical group). In the aeroplane over the sea. 2. Alternative rock music--History and criticism. I. Title.
      ML421.N44C66 2005
      782.42166092′2--dc22

2005026672

I am enormously grateful to those who opened up their memories to a stranger seeking to make a narrative from their lives. At every step I found extraordinarily creative people who were kind, thoughtful and touched by the magic of this album. It was a rare experience, and I hope some of its wonder is apparent in these pages. I hope too that it’s not too painful for the subjects to see their pasts on the microscope’s slide.

Thanks go out to Jeff Mangum, whose approval of this project precipitated many of the interviews within, and whose songs are the reason for them.

To Craig Ceravolo, my old friend from the curatorial trenches, who brought his Elephant 6 expertise on matters musical and personal, and was a valuable sounding board and assistant. While he is the only member of Great Lakes not mentioned by name in this book, he is present on every page.

The Happy Happy Birthday to Me kids, Mike Turner, Eric
Hernandez and Leslie Dallion-Superstar, for welcoming Craig and me into their home in Athens, facilitating key interviews and cracking us up with terrifying true tales of Florida.

To Lance Bangs, Jeremy Barnes, Ross Beach, Chris Bilheimer, Laura Carter, Ben Crum, Bill Doss, John Fernandes, Geoff George, Jamey Huggins, Julian Koster, Martyn Leaper, Heather McIntosh, Bryan Poole, William Schaff, Robert Schneider, Scott Spillane, Jason Norvein Wachtelhausen and Briana Whyte for their stories.

Thank you, Mike Appelstein, Gavin Bachner, Kevin Carhart and Charlie Farmer for sharing NMH rarities. To Matt Taylor for excellent questions about Robert’s use of fuzz. Thanks, Windy Chien, Irwin Chusid, Phil Drucker, Andrew Earles, Martin Hall, Kathy Harr, John Herman, Jim McIntyre, Nancy Ostrander and Fred Stutzman for small kindnesses. To my grandparents, Barbara and Harry, for large ones.

I am indebted to David Smay and Keith Bearden for their feedback on the manuscript. To Vivien Johnson, whose book on Radio Birdman sets the bar for oral histories of rock bands. To Andrew Hultkrans for recommending me to Continuum, and to David Barker for being such an enthusiastic and gracious editor.

Thanks most of all to Richard, who is the best partner any writer could have. I’m blessed that he is mine.

Kim Cooper

Lincoln Heights

June 2005

Editing a fanzine in the 1990s was an open invitation for young bands to send me their music. At first, the flood of albums, cassettes, seven-inches and (ultimately) CDs was a thrill, but I soon grew to dread the postman’s call. There was no way to listen to all of this product, or to form coherent opinions about it. So when something both contemporary and extraordinary was slipped over the transom, it really made a splash. My weary ears knew rare glee on finding
If You’re Feeling Sinister
by Belle & Sebastian, Chicago chamber pop gems the Chamber Strings, the psychedelic Solarflares and frat-rock revivalists Fortune & Maltese in the review pile. Neutral Milk Hotel first impressed (
On Avery Island
, their 1995 debut full-length) and then astonished (1997’s
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
, which is why you’ve cracked this little book’s spine).

Of all the recordings to emerge from the Athens-via-Denver collective called Elephant 6, Neutral Milk Hotel’s
second album is the one that’s worked its way under the most skins.
Magnet
magazine named it the best album of the past decade, and
Creative Loafing
devoted a cover story to one fan’s obsessive quest to understand why band leader Jeff Mangum dropped from sight soon after
Aeroplane
’s release. The record sells steadily to an audience that finds it through word of mouth.

Weird, beautiful, absorbing, difficult,
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
is a surrealist text loosely based on the life, suffering and reincarnation of Anne Frank, with guest appearances from a pair of Siamese twins menaced by the cold and carnivores, a two-headed boy bobbing in a jar, anthropomorphic vegetables and a variety of immature erotic horrors.

Mangum sings his dreamlike narratives with a dreamer’s intensity, his creaky voice occasionally breaking as he struggles to complete each dense couplet. The music is like nothing else in the 90s indie underground: a psychedelic brass band, its members self-taught yet scarily adept, forging polychromatic washes of mood and tribute. The songs stick to one narrow key, the images repeat and circle back, and to listen is to be absorbed into a singular, heartrending vision.

Raw myth and archetype entwine, both within the grooves and in the backstory. Anne Frank’s final document, a private diary scratched out against the threat of death, is paired with
Aeroplane
, Mangum’s last sustained piece of art to date, produced by a supportive collective during America’s last great boom time, immediately acclaimed by the international crit-oisie, yet apparently leading to a creative end as dead as Anne’s. Characters die only to be remade by alchemical confluences of sexual magic; are suicided, stab their families, become monstrous, are lost, swim
on waves of love.

Jamey Huggins, a member of Great Lakes and Of Montreal, was both a friend to the players and a huge fan of the band. He describes
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
the way a religious man speaks of his favorite bit of the liturgy. “I’ve cried while listening to the album. I still hear things in it that I missed from previous listens. The thing with this record is that it can’t be heard casually—it has to be an event! You, first of all, have to listen to the entire thing. The track sequencing alone demands it, if the tide and momentum don’t pull you along. These songs should not be broadcast as singles on a radio show. They are all linked to this prescribed chain and it all flows together. You can put it on in a room full of friends and conversations will just drop. People regularly hold their water to finish listening to this record. People sit in cars in driveways all over the world waiting to cut the engine and go inside until that chair squeaks and Jeff ‘gets up to leave.’ This album commands attention, but never demands it, you know?”