Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (3 page)

One important Ruston hot spot was the Monroe House, so named not because its residents were from nearby Monroe, but for its location at 411 South Monroe Street—just across from the Fun-O-Mat, a combination bar, nightclub and laundromat. The five-bedroom house had once housed a fraternity, but the University severed its relationship with the chapter, and the frat boys gradually dispersed. Scott Spillane, who lived there, recalls it as an inexpensive crash pad where someone would always be passed out on the couch and the mornings were filled with the sound of guitar solos and drum practice.

Ross Beach lived in the Monroe House in the summer of 1993, when the housemates threw five all-night parties, each drawing about 150 people (not counting the inevitable visit from the Ruston police). Olivia Tremor Control—then comprised of Will, Bill and Jeff, drumming with metal coat hangers, presumably because he couldn’t afford drumsticks—was the unofficial house band, sharing informal bills with a variety of Ruston and Monroe groups. Ross remembers that Jeff “usually played a solo acoustic set during
which the entire loud raucous party would become a hush, with people sitting down on the floor to take in his performance. Anytime he took the stage, it was immediately compelling.” Jeff almost lived in the Monroe House, but moved out after just one night in fall 1993 because the signal from KLPI was bleeding into his Fostex X-26 four-track, making it impossible to record there.

Local bands could play at Monroe House parties, but the residents also had a deal with the Fun-O-Mat (later called the Dry Dock, after the owners took the washers out), so when bigger bands stopped off in Ruston they could get their friends’ bands on the bill as the opening act. And bigger bands
did
stop off in Ruston, which was uniquely placed halfway between Memphis and New Orleans on the north/south circuit, and between Jackson and Dallas on the east/west. Scott says, “For bands that were touring, it was a good place to set up for the night. They might not get a lot of money, but they would play at our house, or at Fun-O-Mat. The radio station would do promos for the shows. We had Sebadoh, Beat Happening, Pork, Viva Knievel [Kathleen Hanna’s first band]. We’d catch all these bands that were touring all over the place, and of course we would set up the opening bands—whoever was available, which turned out to be the Gerbils!”

There were other Ruston dwellings where creativity flowered. Will Hart lived at the Bond Street House, where many early Elephant 6 recordings were made, and Bill Doss had an apartment on Sparta Street. Then there was the Trenton Street House, a one-bedroom where as many as six people would be crashing at any time.

For Julian Koster, visiting Ruston really meant spending
time in the countryside outside of town. There was a girl called Squashie whose parents had a farm and allowed the Elephant 6 crowd to host small music festivals and roam around their cow pastures. Sometimes they’d lure touring bands out to participate, which is how Hampshire College’s Supreme Dicks happened to play several times in the area. Scott recalls that John Fernandes went to their show in Shreveport and asked them back to Ruston to play poker, thus starting a relationship that would culminate in some Neutral Milk Hotel/Supreme Dicks gigs in 1996.

One time when Julian visited, he found Will and Jeff house-sitting outside of town. They had a four-track there and ended up collaborating on some recordings, with Julian playing the accordion that he’d just acquired through a typical bit of Julian happenstance. “I had been traveling around and ended up staying with this friend’s uncle in Texas. This accordion was on top of this shelf of books. It completely captivated me, and I ended up playing it for a long time. The guy came out as we were going—he was really gruff—‘All right, you can
take
it! Now just go before I change my mind!’ So I ended up with this accordion that just sounded unbelievable. It had the richest low tones.” On this visit, too, Julian watched Will completing the artwork for the first Apples single, and began to sense that Elephant 6 was “the foothold, the word combination that suddenly began to signify this collection of feelings.”

By the time Jeff Mangum and his friends were old enough to start thinking about where they might want to live, Athens, Georgia, was already firmly imprinted on the consciousness of young, hip America as a desirable destination. From outside, it looked like an Eden for nascent musicians, whether they were ethereal traditionalists like R.E.M. or arty party geeks like the B-52’s and Pylon. Plus there was a college, so you could convince your parents that you were doing something with your life. Rent was cheap, part-time jobs plentiful. Rent was so cheap, in fact, that the element of desperation that played such a large part in the experience of musicians in urban centers was nearly entirely lacking—bands could bum around, exploring their influences and developing their own identities with a leisurely Southern cadence. Add to the mix several good record stores, enthusiastic fans and a generally appealing atmosphere of genteel decay and in retrospect it seems natural that Athens would
flare up as it did.

Like scientists wondering if a given planet has the building blocks to generate life, rock historians like to puzzle over why some towns suddenly belch up that elusive quarry, the Scene. It seems random, and it maybe is. Why Minneapolis in ’84, Seattle in ’89, London in ’66 and San Francisco in ’67? Athens in the early 1980s had everything necessary to nourish a scene, and happily, it did. And if by the time the Elephant 6 gang arrived most of that magic magma had bubbled away to feed some other city’s nightlife, that didn’t mean it wasn’t still a very nice place to live and to play.

Athens became the official destination of the E6 crowd when Will Cullen Hart and Jeff Mangum accompanied Robert Schneider on a trip to Shreveport with Cherry Red—a junior high school punk/new wave band featuring Robert on lead vocals—which was booked to play a gig at Water-world (Will and Jeff justified their presence by jumping onstage with kazoos to help out on “Mellow Yellow”). In the car down, the trio made a pact that after high school, they would all move to Athens—a town none of them had visited up to that point. Robert changed his mind and followed his family to Denver after graduation, and many of his friends came out for a short time to try living there, too. But eventually most of the Ruston weirdo community wound up making Athens their home.

During two separate periods, around 1991 and then again circa 1994, Athens would exert a seemingly magnetic pull on the Rustonians. The first time it happened, the force field wavered and sent them all bouncing around the country before they’d had a chance to properly congeal as a creative community. On the second go-round, it held.

Athenian Lance Bangs first became aware of the Ruston contingent when he saw a performance by Synthetic Flying Machine, the three-piece comprised of Will Hart, Bill Doss and Jeff Mangum on drums. This was in Frijoleroes, a burrito joint where bands sometimes played for free. “They were kind of like weird, noisy psychedelic music. It’s my understanding later that they included some early versions of what became Neutral Milk Hotel songs, but nothing that I understood or recognized at the time. It was interesting, because they’d come to Athens from Ruston and had a different thing going on from the darker, guitar-based, angsty thing that was happening with a lot of the bands in town. After Nirvana, people were into the Jesus Lizard or a bunch of bands on Touch & Go or Amphetamine Reptile. So it seemed like this band was weirder and more psychedelic, and yet were young people doing an interesting thing that wasn’t just a retread.”

Lance recalls that there was no awareness among Athens music people of the history of home recording that preceded Will, Bill and Jeff’s arrival in town. There was, however, a sense that Julian Koster was an interesting multi-disciplinary artist—he made sculptures and funny, offbeat videotapes—and musician. So when Julian began collaborating with the Ruston crew, that reflected well on them.

Julian Koster says, “I think we’d all been drawn to Athens. I found it incredibly beautiful, at that time especially. There was almost nothing here. The sense of motion that permeated most places didn’t seem to exist here. It felt as if it were a sleepover camp.” Julian and a friend had arrived in Athens in the early 90s, knowing no one. At first they slept in their car, but were almost immediately invited into the
home of some musicians they met. Julian couldn’t get over the way people didn’t lock their houses and how welcoming they were to strangers. And he loved the little downtown basement club called the Downstairs—ostensibly a restaurant, although the only cooking apparatus was a toaster oven—with its pile of records that anyone could play.

Soon he hooked up with Jeff and Will, who he recognized as soul-friends, and with whom he stayed in touch even as they all scattered to other parts of the country. Julian was pulled away by his band commitments, but even so, once Jeff and Will were gone there wasn’t much reason for him to stay in Athens. But the bond between the trio remained strong. Julian says, “We were part of each others’ imaginations by that point. I could be alone somewhere, but they were always there with me. They were waiting to be inspired by me and I was waiting to be inspired by them. They were really, really special friendships that didn’t have much to do with geography or even being around each other.”

On one of Julian’s band’s tour stops in Athens, they turned up bass-less, their bass player having quit a few days earlier. Bill Doss joined the band on the spot, and the links between Julian and Elephant 6 grew stronger. Eventually the performative musical chair act would fill the ranks of Olivia Tremor Control (where longtime Koster collaborators Eric Harris and Peter Erchick would find a permanent home) and Neutral Milk Hotel.

Apparently, Athens wasn’t going to be magic for the Elephant 6 gang like it had been for the bands in the early 80s. They knew they wanted to live together and make music and art—but where? No one had any money to speak of, which might seem limiting, but then again, not a one of them was tied to a place, a person, a job, a course of study. To a man, Elephant 6 was more butterfly than pachyderm.

The only stationary member of the collective was the most independent one, Robert Schneider. He was still living in Denver, accumulating the equipment that would become Pet Sounds recording studio and starting his band, the Apples (later Apples in Stereo). Julian Koster remembers that Will Hart and Jeff were living in Denver too, and that they put out a call for all their friends to
just come
, to stop talking about doing things together and to actually start doing them. It was summer, and Bill Doss was visiting Julian in New York. They got the message and drove nonstop to
Colorado, with no idea of what they’d do when they got there, where they’d live or what would happen next.

Julian inherited the walk-in closet where Jeff had been living (and which Jeff claimed was haunted), and later took possession of Jeff’s moldy boiler room outside Robert’s apartment. While the players were finally in proximity to one another, and Robert could record in his apartment, there was nowhere they could play. Broke, they lived off stale popcorn from someone’s theater job.

Jeff didn’t stay long in Denver, taking off for the West Coast, but in some permutation Ruston was present in Colorado for about a year. Julian ended up collaborating with Will and Bill on some of the Olivia Tremor Control arrangements that ended up on
Dusk at Cubist Castle
, then bringing Will and Bill into Chocolate USA for one last national tour that had the trio appearing on the same bills as members of both bands. When that tour alit in Los Angeles, Julian was shocked to find the audience full of hipsters, hipsters who seemed to be enjoying themselves. “That was maybe the beginning of understanding that somehow, this thing was gonna be embraced by people like that—which happened, and was really surreal. It was alien to us. We’re
not cool!
I’m a poster boy for not being cool. So to have people like that be all nice to you, it’s like,
what’s happening?
”

So again, the center failed to hold. Jeff would live briefly in Seattle and Los Angeles. Julian’s last go-round with Chocolate USA spat him out home in New York City, with a prized set of reel-to-reel recorders, a parting gift from Bar/None Records. Robert continued his band and studio work in Denver, and Will and Bill went to Athens to focus on Olivia Tremor Control. One rare vinyl artifact to come
from the Denver sojourn was OTC’s debut EP, “California Demise,” released on the Elephant 6 label.

But was the Denver time a failure? Julian doesn’t think so. “We’d all gone out there specifically to create something together, but we didn’t know what it was. ’Cause it wasn’t
a band!
I don’t think it even necessarily centered on music.”

The important thing was that they’d all been together, liked it, and wanted to do it again if they could.

But first, Jeff Mangum was going to have to make a record.

He started with a seven-inch Neutral Milk Hotel single, “Everything Is” b/w “Snow Song Pt. 1” on Nancy Ostrander’s Seattle-based Cher Doll label, then went back through Ruston in search of a band. He met up with Ross Beach, who agreed to join him in New Orleans for a show at the Howlin’ Wolf opening for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Jeff and Ross rehearsed twice, then played their early set to a nearly empty room. In this nascent version of Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeff was drumming and singing; Ross played guitar.

The first thing to understand about the Neutral Milk Hotel album
On Avery Island
is that there was no band called Neutral Milk Hotel. No Julian, no Jeremy Barnes, no Scott Spillane with his lunatic horns.
On Avery Island
is a Neutral Milk Hotel album in the manner of the early Ruston tape releases. Jeff had been using the name Neutral Milk Hotel for his projects since high school, so when he swung back into Denver with the intention of recording the songs he’d been writing on the road, it seemed natural to use the name for the project. The album title referenced a public garden on the Louisiana Gulf Coast where, Jeff once told an interviewer, as a teen he had a spiritual experience involving an ancient statue of the Buddha.