Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (10 page)

The record cover was a collaboration between Jeff Mangum and Chris Bilheimer, R.E.M.’s staff designer. But the first bit of art came from the pen of Brian Dewan, a visual artist, inventor, filmmaker, carpenter and musician from New York. The iconic line drawing of the enormous
Victrola soaring above a smoky city is his. Brian’s first Elephant 6 collaboration came when Julian Koster asked him to provide drawings for posters to be inserted inside early singles by The Music Tapes. These singles had three-dimensional pop-up sleeves with mechanisms designed by Chris Bilheimer that Julian and his friends painstakingly cut out with x-acto knives—a fact Brian discovered when Julian asked if he could recommend a good die-cutter. Julian supplied Brian with words and drawings, and Brian adapted this material for the poster, which featured land- and waterscapes decorated with mysterious slogans like “March of the Father Fists” and “Every time you light a cigarette with a candle a sailor will not return from sea.”

Not long after the Music Tapes commission, Brian got a call from Jeff Mangum, who identified himself as Julian’s housemate. Would Brian be interested in doing some artwork for his new record? Intrigued by the tape he received, Brian agreed to draw two things for Jeff: a flying Victrola and a magic radio. That Victrola would become a shorthand symbol for Neutral Milk Hotel and
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
, but first it was just one in a stack of potential graphic elements that Jeff brought to Chris Bilheimer when it came time to design the jacket.

Chris Bilheimer was a fine arts student at the University of Georgia when he stumbled onto his dream job with R.E.M. in 1993. Grateful for the opportunity to make a living making art (and to make art on the best equipment “Losing My Religion” could buy), he was a notoriously easy touch for indie artists needing record covers or poster design. Chris had told Jeff to call if he ever needed help; for
Aeroplane
, Jeff took him up on the offer.

Bryan Poole recalls that Jeff “was always into that oldtimey, magic, semi-circus, turn-of-the-century, penny arcade kind of imagery,” examples of which he’d find in thrift shops on his travels. Among the pieces that Jeff brought Chris was a vintage European postcard of bathers at a resort, and this was the image that Chris—working closely with Jeff—cropped and subtly altered to create
Aeroplane
’s front cover. The other source material included a book of historic circus posters, a clip art book of cloud formations, Will Hart’s Elephant 6 logo and Brian Dewan’s aerial cityscape.

Although Chris Bilheimer mainly works on computers, his aesthetic is more analog than digital. The disparate images selected for the album design ranged from Brian Dewan’s crisp new drawings to the slightly grubby old postcard. How could all these pieces be given a visually cohesive look? Chris solved the problem by scanning the back of the postcard and using the foxed, spotted, off-white paper as the background against which all other images were screened. In this way, everything appeared to be about the same age and printed on similar paper, with the overall effect one of slow decay. Chris even left a splash of dirt on the postcard—just above the girl’s waving hand—a touch that’s easily overlooked on the CD cover, but obvious on the larger LP jacket. The CD contained a piece of art absent from the album, two reproductions of tiny human figures beneath dramatic clouds. These images appear on the back side of the single sheet of paper on which the CD cover was printed, with the mysterious numerals “205/6” a carryover from the back of the vintage postcard.

Instead of a standard lyric sheet, Chris arranged the
song titles, lyrics (which Jeff provided) and other information like a broadsheet. Every song had a title except the one that starts “The only girl I’ve ever loved / Was born with roses in her eyes.” He asked Jeff what to call the track. Jeff said he was thinking about calling it “Holland,” or maybe “1945.” Chris suggested he combine the two titles, which is how he named what would become his favorite song on the album.

Chris: “I wanted to have a little bit of a ‘circus coming to town’ feel without an obviously circusy-looking image. And so I laid out this whole thing and printed it out and crinkled it up and then scanned it back in and laid it on top of old paper. I work really hard to make things look like they weren’t made on a computer. Even though I’m not using traditional graphic methods—it’s the same reason bands like recording with tube amps and recording to tape instead of to hard drive—it has that tactile warmth to it. That’s what I try to do with graphic design. Especially by designing something, printing it out, fucking it up and then scanning it back in.” Most of the fonts used came from old typography books and were set by hand, although the headline is set in an especially handsome computer font derived from Vineta, an in-line shadowed Clarendon designed in 1973 by Ernst Volker.

Chris had agreed to help Jeff with the design prior to hearing the record. Once he did, he was “absolutely blown away by it. I thought ‘holy crap, this is the best record in ten years!’” While this made him excited about the project, it also stirred up unexpected emotional responses. For example, during the design process, he and Jeff initially worked up a different back cover based around the lower portion of the vintage postcard, showing the woman bather’s feet trailing off into the water. Chris was very attached to the image,
but Jeff decided he didn’t want to use it. Chris: “I remember almost wanting to start crying. And I was driving home, thinking, ‘I really need to back off and not be so emotionally involved. It’s not my record!’ I learned a really good lesson about designing. And ultimately I think he made a good decision.”

Although
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
is not the most famous record Chris Bilheimer worked on, nor the best selling, it remains the design he’s most proud of, and it occupies a prominent place in his portfolio, where music industry people regularly exclaim over it. Once he was bemused to find someone selling a “really crappy, kinda high schooly pencil sketch of the cover” on eBay, with a description claiming it was the original layout; he emailed eBay and got the auction pulled.

Even after the art was completed and the album released, Chris maintained a relationship with Neutral Milk Hotel, often seeing them play at house parties and formal gigs around Athens. Chris recalls, “There’s three times in a row where I saw them live and I started crying. It was something you really couldn’t put your finger on. The music was really beautiful, and the lyrics might have been obtuse and not something you could directly relate to, but there was something in Jeff’s voice, just the sound of his voice, that encapsulated so many different feelings at the same time. It was just incredibly moving. I think the goal of most art is to transcend your medium or your surroundings—and that just happened at every show, for me, anyway.”

Up on stage, the players tapped into a trancelike—but hardly calm—state where the unexpected was the norm. Performances turned frighteningly physical, bodies and instruments flying, blood bring drawn without anyone realizing they’d been hurt. Ben Crum says, “They are easily the best live band I ever saw. There was a powerful energy to their show that I really haven’t seen anywhere else. It was definitely dangerous. There often seemed to be a very real chance that someone, probably Julian, would get hurt. Jeff was always doing things like picking him up and throwing him into the drums.”

Julian soon discovered that their onstage behavior was frightening people in the audience. Fans wanted to talk with them after shows, but they’d hesitate, as if they were approaching dangerous, possibly demented people. This perception was a major impediment, since the band was hoping most nights to find an agreeable floor on which to
crash. Sometimes it was only after Jeff, Jeremy, Julian and Scott settled in at a fan’s house that they discovered their host was petrified of them. They found this disconcerting and troubling, and wondered how to handle the situation.

Still, it’s hardly surprising that the sight of Julian playing piano with his nose, Scott with his fabulous cantilevered beard jumping around like an inflamed Viking, Jeremy flipping out behind the drum kit, Jeff falling into that drum kit when he wasn’t howling words so intensely beautiful that they made jaded hipsters feel things they didn’t necessarily want to feel, that all of this barely contained chaos would startle and worry people who came to it freshly.

There were nearly six months between the completion of the
Aeroplane
recordings and its February 1998 release. Merge planned a tour to begin on February 14 in Birmingham, starting out sharing stages with Superchunk and finishing with Of Montreal and the High Llamas. The band spent the time before the album’s release gearing up for the tour. Their sets, which had averaged around 45 minutes, would need to be expanded to a maximum of 90 minutes for the road dates. Friends like John Fernandes and Will Westbrook were brought into the touring band and taught the horn parts, culminating in a marathon rehearsal session in a freezing practice space on the edge of town during the first week of February.

It was hard enough expecting a newly expanded band to play the songs from
Aeroplane
and those older Neutral Milk Hotel songs that had survived in the live show into 1998, but Jeff set additional hurdles for the players. Up until the week they left Athens, they were still trying to figure out how to incorporate an ambitious, horn heavy improvisational cover
of Charlie Haden’s “Song For Che” into the set. This would only infrequently be played, supplanting an original improvisational piece based on the colors of the rainbow that had sometimes found its way into the live performances in 1997.

Ben Crum, asked about the improvisational and collaborative aspects of the band, says, “Jeff guided it, but everyone had some freedom. Those guys didn’t need much direction, though. Their instincts were good, and they knew how to complement the songs and stay out of the way of the songs and their direct route of communication to the listener.” Jeremy Barnes concurs, “Jeff wrote the songs and we experimented as a band to come up with arrangements. Jeff was very open to our opinions and receptive to our ideas. We were much more collaborative than a lot of bands I can think of, where one leader does everything, and passes jobs along to others. I think Jeff had confidence in his musicians, so he could lead without necessarily telling us what to do. There were no weak links in the band, and everyone really admired each other’s musical abilities.”

Lance Bangs, who attended those final
Aeroplane
practice sessions, noticed how gentle and encouraging Jeff was with the other musicians, telling them that he loved them and that everything was going to be okay. “And he wasn’t any kind of a taskmaster—never turning and glaring at anybody—it was never like that. Clearly, there was a love of his circle of friends that made it important for him to build this community and bring them along with him. And at any point that he’d wanted to, he could have gone out on his own and not had to split the money twelve different ways. It wasn’t about that: it was about building this community of like-minded people and supporting their eccentricities. That was really
inspiring, and kinda reestablished my faith in what the best part of music can be, building this protective enclave of misfits and lost kids. That really meant a lot to me, and added to my sense that it was really important to document this.”

As Jeff and company took those new songs out more frequently, the Athens music community became aware that something really special had been born. On October 14, Jeff got up onstage at the 40 Watt, in a slot opening for the Tall Dwarfs’ Chris Knox, and slew the room. Lance Bangs says, “There was a sense of all of us kinda realizing how special it was and making a point of not missing the shows, and not talking, not being as flippant as you might be if it was just some other band that happened to be playing where it wasn’t as crucial to catch every note.”

Neutral Milk Hotel would be on the road more than one day in four during 1998. February through April saw them canvass Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Minnesota. May was two nights in London, June three Florida dates, July a weeklong East Coast/Canadian tour sharing stages with Of Montreal, Elf Power, Papas Fritas and Marshmallow Coast (aka their Denver friend Andy Gonzalez). Then from August through October the band played Sweden, Norway, France, England, Brussels, Holland, Germany, Scotland and Ireland.

Although she played with Neutral Milk Hotel at nearly every show, Laura Carter’s most significant role on the tour
was that of mix-board translator, a position she’d first held for Olivia Tremor Control. For the first part of a Neutral Milk Hotel set, she’d sit with the soundman, physically handling the board and advising him of what to expect. “‘Okay, next song, Julian’s gonna throw that accordion on the ground and he’s gonna pick up the banjo—the pickup’s barely hangin’ on, so if it starts to squeal, that’s what it is!’ It was more like talking them through what was about to happen, because so much was happening onstage that without someone helping, it was a wail or squeal and the soundman would look at twenty instruments onstage and not know what to dive for.” Once the soundman was acclimated, Laura would jump onstage to play the songs on which she was featured, which were conveniently clustered near the end of the set. While ordinarily a club soundman might have been insulted to have a strange girl come up and tell him how to handle a band’s mix, Laura’s personable blend of humility and diplomacy managed to soothe hurt feelings before they erupted into attitude. She learned a lot and kept the sound from devolving into chaos on many a night.

But on some level, chaos was a friend to the band. Anyway, it was inevitable with so many disparate players, equipment that wasn’t always in the finest repair, complex arrangements and complex personalities. Laura reflects, “It was always falling apart. Half the time, somebody would give Scotty a joint before the show and he’d get up there to nail that big trumpet part and blank out—or nothing would come out of the hole. There’s always this struggle, but somehow I think when it came together, it was even more triumphant. Maybe the audience reacted even more to it, because it fails and gets a little bit stronger and by the third
time you nail it and everyone’s like, ‘Yeah!’ I think it made the audience pull harder for us, too, or engage more than if we had been perfect.”