Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (11 page)

Neutral Milk Hotel traveled in two vans: a roomy rental van for the musicians, an old one for equipment. The expanded road band often included members of the Gerbils, Of Montreal and Elf Power, who also played their own sets. It became an ongoing comedy trying to keep a bunch of sleepy, distractible souls from wandering off during pit stops. In an attempt to shame the worst offenders into behaving themselves, the group came up with the nickname “Farkey,” which described someone who might be hypnotized by the offerings in a convenience store, wander out the back door and be nowhere to be found when it was time to get back in the van. But with Neutral Milk Hotel quickly gaining a reputation as a band that never made it to gigs on time, it was pointless to single anyone out. They were a band of Farkeys. And when their numbers were swollen with guest horn sections, zanzithophonists and assorted others, well, as Bryan Poole sighs, eight years later but still sounding exasperated, “The more people you have, the greater the Farkeydom.”

On February 7, the band headlined the final night of the Florida Popfest in Tallahassee in an Athens-packed line up that included The Music Tapes (featuring Static the television), Elf Power, Of Montreal and the Gerbils. Despite not taking the stage until 2
AM
and the new album not even being in stores yet, they played to a full room of ecstatic fans. It was a propitious beginning to the next phase in the band’s existence.

In April, Lance Bangs joined the
Aeroplane
tour for the
West Coast dates, traveling with Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and the Gerbils from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, but not returning with them to San Francisco for the important April 18 Terrastock II gig, where they’d appear with several dozen like minded combos, including Elf Power, Olivia Tremor Control and the reunited Silver Apples.

The initial stop in San Francisco was over Easter weekend, with shows at Bottom of the Hill on Saturday and Sunday, and Monday off. Unlike other bands Lance had traveled with, the Elephant 6 crowd wasn’t happy just doing radio station promos and hanging out in bars. They worshipped at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in its old location on Divisadero, went thrift and record shopping, visited the Musée Mechanique and looked for the best burritos. They were, he thought, “like great, smart, exploratory tourists, seeing the best of the weird sides of the country.” At one of those Bottom of the Hill shows, after a collision with Julian that took out the drums and a wall of monitors, Jeff tore his finger open, a terrible-looking wound for which he didn’t seek medical attention. It didn’t seem to inhibit his playing.

As public awareness of
Aeroplane
rose during the early part of 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel found themselves on the crest of a wave of popularity, facing ever larger and more passionate audiences. And the merch sales, always the touring band’s lifeline between living fat or living skinny, increased as well. Laura Carter recalls, “But the money, that happened so fast. We’d always been where we were making $200 a night, and then just, like, suddenly, bam! bam! bam! bam! We were making more money off merch than off
shows. We had Elephant 6 T-shirts, which we called ‘the cash cow,’ and we had the same NMH shirt that we’re still selling, the maggots one. We would shut down the merch section during the show, and then just run back there after the last song.”

This increased revenue triggered one of the most extreme instances of Farkeydom that would befall the band, the legendary Scott Spillane Pizza Hut Incident. The date was probably April 25, 1998, and Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and the Gerbils were traveling between Minneapolis and Chicago to play a show at Lounge Ax. Laura Carter and Jeff were riding by themselves in the equipment van. Everyone stopped at a Pizza Hut for lunch, then got back on the highway. A couple hours into the trip, Jeff and Laura saw the other van make an abrupt U-turn. Laura says, “This is before the days of cell phones, and we’re just like, ‘What the fuck? We’re gonna miss the show!’ So we just keep driving with the equipment—if nothing else, we’ll get it all set up for everybody.”

Scott Spillane picks up the story. “That was scary! Two hours down the road when we realized we left the money in Pizza Hut. Funny thing was after driving back, we got there just as the shift changed. So we come in and everybody’s different. ‘Have you guys seen a black bag?’ ‘No.’ Fuck! What do we do—they’re ripping us off!! Freaking out. And I look back in the booth and I don’t see anything. I’m thinking, how can we accuse these people of stealing?”

Laura: “He left somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars in cash, in a backpack, under the table.”

Scott: “I dunno, it was quite a few thousand dollars. Probably three or four thousand bucks. But it was a black
bag and it was actually sitting on the floor in the shadows, luckily. It was still there.”

Laura: “So lucky. And they made the show. After that we instantly went to the bank and we’d get money orders and mail them back to ourselves.”

The next night, they played the Blue Angel Café in Chattanooga, the last show of the tour before going home to Athens. That’s where Bryan Poole witnessed the most devotional act of Neutral Milk Hotel fanship he ever saw, a girl who drove from Arkansas to give Jeff her grandmother’s rosary, talked with Jeff for a little while and had to head home without even seeing the show.

The Farkeys were in force again come July 29, when Neutral Milk Hotel was booked to headline at Toronto’s venerable Horseshoe Tavern. Bryan Poole reflects, “We’d always do these tours, Elf Power and Neutral Milk and Gerbils, I don’t know how many people that is in total, twelve to fifteen people. Nobody can make a group decision, there’s no consensus on what to do or where to go. It becomes a real problem. Neutral Milk Hotel was notorious for showing late to gigs, barely getting to gigs, more than a few times. We totally misgauged how long it was gonna take to get there, and then couldn’t find our way out of Montreal. ‘Ah, we’re still like 250 km away, we’re not making sound check…. It’s 10 o’clock, we’re still not there.’ Elf Power’s supposed to open the show. Ended up not getting to this club until midnight. Sold-out club. The owners were freaking out. We finally get there and they’re like super excited, wild-eyed, waving us into the back alleyway, running to get the stuff on stage. There’s people just packed, standing there, no equipment onstage—you can imagine, these people
are there for a couple hours, staring at a stage with nothing on it. So Neutral Milk Hotel just went and played, and then Elf Power played afterwards. But the thing is, those were the best shows. They barnstormed the stage and the next day, the Toronto paper gave this outstanding review of how great it was. The live shows were always just really chaotic.”

The band had just a week off the road before leaving for Europe in early August, beginning that part of the tour with huge festival gigs in Sweden. And finally in mid-October they came home to Athens. Jeff was noticeably worse for wear. Lance Bangs recalls a series of illnesses that left the singer sniffly, sweaty and seemingly exhausted. Where once any stop in Athens was an excuse to play an opening slot for Elf Power or a house party, now Jeff consciously turned down opportunities to perform. The whole band was still in town, but on some strange level it was as if Neutral Milk Hotel didn’t exist anymore. Without anyone saying anything, the momentum of their surprisingly successful career seemed to dissipate, and the people who cared about the music and about the players watched warily to see what would happen next.

On December 5, there was an early birthday party for Chris Bilheimer at the old school building on Meigs Street
where a bunch of artists lived. Elf Power played, and then Jeff got up to sing. The audience was made up of friends, bandmates, people he could trust. He opened the set with a new song, one that he introduced as being unfinished, apologizing in advance for “the really sick parts.” It was called “Little Birds,” a stark, cyclical dream about a menaced child who feels himself being filled up with tiny feathered fliers who pour out of the bathtub tap and enter his body, protecting him from his murderous father. At the introduction, his friends laughed. The laughing stopped as the darkness of the narrative took hold. Jeff’s voice was reedy and relentless as he whipped out the frightening, confessional lyrics.

Did you know the burning hell it took your baby brother?

Did you see how far he fell and how he made us suffer?

Another boy in town at night he took him for his lover

And deep in sin they held each other

So I took a hammer, nearly beat his little brains in

Knowing God in Heaven would have never could forgive him

So I took a hammer and I nearly beat his brains in

Lance Bangs remembers feeling chills as Jeff sang this song, still the only post–
Aeroplane
composition he’s played in public. When he finished, “Everyone’s blown away and applauding and really supportive. And he goes on to do mostly solo versions of stuff from the record. Scott picked up a horn and went down the hall and into the bathroom, playing the horn parts so they were coming muffled out of the wall.” For other horn parts, Jeff encouraged the audience to sing them.

If “Little Birds” was the direction that Neutral Milk
Hotel music was going in, Lance thought, there would have to be some major changes. “You can’t imagine where there’s room for cute, adorable Julian Koster to do some smiling toy instrument thing on top of it. There’s
no
room for that. And if you were to add a mournful Scott Spillane horn part—what you’re hearing is so much more direct and fucked up, that there’s not really room to take a step back and hear that. To me it was this weird delineation. It felt really natural when he did things solo before. It was a really amazing night, but it almost felt like things were coming to some weird close. It wouldn’t have shocked me to hear he was going to move. Because it always seemed like he was very transient and at any point he was capable of going away for a while to Chicago or New York or Texas or back to Ruston, or moving to the country or going overseas. It seemed like he at any point could take off. We were kinda hoping he’d stick around and that things would last.”

But it appeared that Jeff was rolling up the rugs on his career and without actually saying anything formal, disengaging from the crazy merry-go-round of touring, recording and talking with the press that had become his life. On New Years Eve, Jeff got up on stage at the 40 Watt early in the proceedings of a show featuring Elf Power, The Music Tapes and Sleater-Kinney’s Corrin Tucker. Hardly anyone was at the club as Jeff, with accompaniment from Scott and Julian, sang “Engine,” “Oh Sister” and “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” This would be the last formal appearance of Neutral Milk Hotel.

And inside the myth machine, an alternate version of Jeff Mangum was constructed and given breath. This Bizarro World Jeff was a crazy recluse, a Syd Barrett for the
late 90s. Fans who had found themselves deeply moved by Neutral Milk Hotel music felt personally betrayed by Jeff’s refusal to do the obvious, and follow
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
with another album, another tour, another round of conversations with the press. The traditional narrative of desire goes something like boy writes songs, starts band, gets hit record and all his dreams come true. There’s no room in that blueprint for the boy to decide, “Hey, this isn’t fun anymore; I think I’d rather do something else.” But real life doesn’t have to follow a script. Kurt Cobain didn’t understand that he could just get off the merry-go-round—and of course it’s harder to quit when you’re indentured to a multinational corporate entity—but Jeff Mangum knew that he could, and that he must.

The legendary version of Jeff’s story has him losing his mind and becoming a shaggy recluse. In fact, he did withdraw from his social network for a time, apparently overwhelmed by the last year’s flurry and suffering generalized ill health. But at the heart of his troubles was the hard fact that his wants and those of his best friends were, for the first time in years, maybe ever, utterly opposed.

Laura Carter speculates that “he was in a position where all of his buddies wanted to keep going, and he wanted to drop out and be like Robert Wyatt—be a recluse and then come out with an album in ten years and shock everybody. We all were Robert Wyatt worshippers. It’s that character, someone who does something great and just does their own thing completely. People don’t really think about them, and suddenly they put out another great album. That was more what he was comfortable with. And the press called looking for him, and he was very evasive. He didn’t want to take the
music to a true, professional level—like what Nirvana did. And it was amazing up to the very end! Never losing intensity. But I think that was the fear. He wanted to go out at its peak and not ride the peak out until it fades and then burns out. I think Jeff is instinctively an excellent business person. He might not know what the hell’s going on, but he’s got some sort of instinct for it that’s just good, the decisions he makes.”

At the end of 1998, Jeff found himself faced with an exceptionally troubling task. He was going to have to tell Scott and Jeremy and Julian that he wanted out. And he just couldn’t bring himself to say it. Laura, again, explains: “Here’s these people who have left jobs and suddenly are having success for the first time in their whole lives. How can you take that away from somebody who’s your close friend, and be like, ‘Uh, I don’t wanna do it anymore’? Those were the two ideas I saw being really hard for Jeff to handle. He just started shutting his friends out, shutting the press out, shutting everybody out. Scott would come over, ‘Let’s not play Neutral Milk songs, let’s just play music like we used to do,’ and he’d be distracted and just leave the room and go off to do something. He didn’t handle that very well, he didn’t talk to any of the guys or anything. He just freaked out and shut everybody out. He couldn’t tell his friends, ‘I love to play music, and we could keep playing music and be very successful, but I don’t want to!’ It’s just such a weird thing—if you love to play music, why would you be afraid of success?”