Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (6 page)

Drawing on years of compositions that were never recorded, or had only appeared on small-run cassettes, Jeff
often took pieces of old songs and integrated them into new ones. Laura Carter would spot bridges written when Jeff was fifteen making their way into songs destined for
Aeroplane
. Even though this was his second formal album, there was such a huge backlog of material that there was no question of a sophomore slump.

The most effortless composition to come out of the Grady Avenue time was “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”—which Jeff’s friends all refer to as “Beautiful Face.” The song was written on an especially happy early spring day, just after the Grady house came together and very soon after Jeff and Laura became a couple. They found themselves out in the back yard, some of them on MDMA, lying on their backs in the sunshine watching the trees moving like big lungs. Suddenly Jeff exclaimed, “I got a song in my head!” and ran inside. Soon they could all hear him singing in the bathroom, the song taking its final shape as they listened.

When asked about Anne Frank’s presence, which permeates the songs on
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
, Laura Carter explains that when Jeff wrote those songs, he’d just discovered Anne’s diary. “It blew him away. He never had read the history of the war that much, and to get such a personal insight into it, by such an excellent writer—it’s just hard not to fall in love with her!”

Maybe the diary had the profound effect that it did on Jeff in part because he wasn’t much of a reader. Robert Schneider recalls it as one of the few books he read at that time in his life; even after finishing it, he carried it around with him for some time.

In Athens, the Neutral Milk Hotel players finally found a place where they could have houses to live in, make noise,
be creatively stimulated and feel like they were part of an
immediate
and not a long distance community. Bryan Poole explains that “basically the whole thing with the Elephant 6 clique was pot luck dinners! Sunday pot luck dinners every week. They would rotate at whose house it was. That was where we could meet and talk and feel like we were all part of a big family. It was friends who just happen to be into music and art, and it was really exciting. There was almost some sort of utopian vision. We just felt something great was happening.
Dusk at Cubist Castle
was about to come out. The Neutral Milk Hotel guys were there and we knew that they were gonna record an album soon. And Elf Power, we were working on
When the Red King Comes
. And we had people like the Great Lakes getting together, coming into town, you had the Kindercore guys that were doing their thing. So many circles overlapping. You knew it was a special, special time. And the pot luck dinners were key to the whole thing.”

An important side effect of the musicians having homes was that they could build on and share their record collections. When asked what Neutral Milk Hotel liked to listen to on the road, Jeremy Barnes said, “We were all really into Alva, the band that [
Aeroplane
uilleann pipes player] Michelle Anderson played in. Jeff turned the rest of us onto the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, which then opened up into the rest of Eastern European folk or traditional music, and then traditional music in general. We all loved Charlie Haden’s
Liberation Music Orchestra
, as well as
Pet Sounds
and
Smile
. And Os Mutantes from Brazil, and the Kinks. Jeff was really into Pierre Henry and Alain Savouret. I was just getting into improvised music. Scott hates musique concrète and jazz in general, sometimes Scott seems to hate all music. Julian
loves They Might Be Giants, which in turn gives me the willies (one of the troublesome things about Julian driving the van on tour is that we must hear They Might Be Giants at full volume).” (Julian interjects that it was only
Lincoln
that he played, and “it’s genius.”) Other influences were the Boredoms, Harry Partch and Robert Wyatt (all special favorites of Jeff’s), John Cage, Sun Ra, Yoko Ono, John Coltrane, Steve Reich and The Secret Museum of Mankind: Ethnic Music Classics series. But the music that was most important to the Elephant 6 collective was the stuff their friends were writing and recording. There was always something new being traded, some breakthrough being made.

Lance Bangs remembered Jeff from when he was drumming in Synthetic Flying Machine and was interested to see him return to Athens as a singer–songwriter. He’d get up on stage and do two or three early Neutral Milk Hotel songs in the middle of an Elf Power set, with the band backing him up. His powerful, resonant voice was immediately impressive, as was the highly personal imagery in his lyrics, with their themes of soil, dirt, digging and hiding. No longer behind a drum kit, the tall, shambling Jeff presented an imposing figure. Even his clothes were distinctive, the cuffs of his trousers decorated with ink-pen drawings of little cartoony figures, his taste in thrift store sweaters running to the psychedelic.

It wasn’t until late 1996, at a party at the Landfill—a communal house at 660 Reese Street where Will Hart and various Olivia Tremor Control members were living—that Athens got a chance to see the full band version of Neutral Milk Hotel. Bryan Poole was mesmerized by Jeremy’s drumming. He played so intensely that drool turned to foam at the
corners of his mouth. “He’s got rabies or something! He had no time to wipe it away, he’s got to keep going. He had a total Keith Moon look about him, but wanting to play like all the free jazz greats. Kind of a punk rock, rock, gypsy all rolled into one.”

Lance, too, was blown away. “I was just like, ‘Oh my
god
, this is
really amazing!
Something’s very special happening here.’ Very chaotic, people jumping around. The audience was pretty much their friends from Ruston. The Olivias also played that night and another band was on the bill, so I think Neutral Milk might have gone on first. Everyone was dancing and jumping up and down. All of a sudden everyone’s just bouncing gleefully. They played in the living room there. It was just phenomenal. And I remember regretting not having a camera there that night when Neutral Milk were playing. Pretty much right after that point I made sure that I got to meet and talk to them a little bit, and then started shooting videotape at all the shows that I was able to. It must have been late 1996 I filmed Jeff with Elf Power, and then started shooting their own shows.”

Through 1997, Lance filmed whatever practice sessions and live shows he could. Sometimes it was Jeff alone, sometimes the core band of Jeff, Julian, Scott and Jeremy, and sometimes they’d be supplemented with horn sections, additional percussion or whatever their friends could bring. Lance saw that Neutral Milk Hotel exhibited a greater sense of theatrics and showmanship than the other bands around town—Jeff really seemed conscious of dynamics and the intensity built by, say, starting “Oh Comely” alone and having the other players come in, then cycling through the pattern anew.

For years, Jeff had simply been a cool, creative guy who traveled a lot and made interesting cassettes.
On Avery Island
changed all that. The album was so good, and so unexpectedly good, that it could be intimidating.

Jamey Huggins met Jeff and Julian at the Grady Avenue house and again at an Olivia show at the Atomic Café before he ever heard Jeff’s music. When Dan Donahue brought a copy of
On Avery Island
to the Great Lakes house, the whole band was blown away. Jamey remembers, “We were all freaked out by how brilliant and different it was, but mostly by the realization that what we were hearing was done by this guy down the street who we had just met a few days before. ‘Who is this guy?!’ That’s all I could think. The next time I encountered Jeff Mangum, there was a reverence and nervous excitement that I just could not disguise. He was changed to me as a person. At first he was just this tall, kind of shy guy who lived with my new friend Julian. Then I heard the album.”

It was just this kind of reverent, awestruck attitude that would become such a burden to Jeff over the next couple of years. Within the tight-knit Athens scene such feelings might be awkward, but surmountable. But out in the larger world, being treated like a celebrity could be spooky and discomfiting. On some level, the person Jeff was was beginning to be subsumed by the image of Jeff Mangum, Rock Star. For a shy person, it must have been excruciating to have to develop a whole new set of tools for interpreting interactions and responding to other people.

The personality quirks that fed Jeff’s music were the same ones that made it hard for him to deal with being put onto a plinth. Robert Schneider, who’s known him as long as
almost anyone, explains that Jeff is “a very tender, incredibly loving person. When he’s nervous it’s just because he feels things so deeply and he’s very honest about it. He does have filters, but sometimes his filters backfire on him, like he’s filtered things that he wouldn’t want to offend anybody else.”

During early 1997, Lance Bangs was curating events in the back room of Jittery Joe’s, a Washington Street coffee house a few doors up from the 40 Watt. The space, which Lance informally called The Starlit Crypt, hosted spoken word readings, film projections and the occasional free live performance. On March 7, the small room was transformed by the Dixie Blood Moustache women’s art collective into a sculptured, kinetic space strung with sheer, billowing fabrics and soft papier-mâché forms. Strings of Christmas lights flickered behind the cloth, which was incorporated into elaborate costumes, including bustles and capes, which tied the performers into the architecture.

Among the performers that night was Ravi Fernandes, a costumed toddler whose participation later in the evening would be misunderstood by those who picked up the
Live at Jittery Joe’s
CD expecting just to hear Jeff Mangum. For the twenty or so people in the audience, many of them members of Dixie Blood Moustache, friends or housemates of Jeff, Ravi was not an obnoxious, crying baby, but another artist collaborating with Jeff in his own style, which just happened to be pre-verbal.

Jeff’s performance, which Lance documented in a dimly lit video included on the CD, was an important one. It represented the first public, hometown performance of material that would appear in slightly different forms on
In the
Aeroplane Over the Sea
. “Two-Headed Boy” and “Oh Comely” are much as would be laid down in Denver, and on “The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three,” Jeff stops to note “this is where Scott plays his trumpet solo; he’s not here, he’ll be here tomorrow,” and later sings “this is the part of the song where I didn’t write any lyrics.”

Anyone looking to the Jittery Joe’s performance for clues to the meaning and evolution of
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
should pay special attention to “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two.” A few months before the album was recorded, Jeff was singing
Aeroplane
’s final song with slightly, yet significantly, different lyrics. The changes are telling, because they suggest that this song, one of the most beautiful on the record, is part of the Anne Frank cycle. The early “Sister please” becomes the euphonious, but nonsensical “Blister please” on the album. A sense of communion is lost when the pronouns are changed, from the original “God is a place we will wait for the rest of our lives” to a declarative “you will wait for the rest of your life.” One line on
Aeroplane
is particularly cryptic, its words deliberately omitted from the lyrics Jeff gave album designer Chris Bilheimer. But at Jittery Joe’s, Jeff doesn’t sing “rings of flowers ’round your eyes and I love you / for the rest of your life in your reeeeeeeeeee;” he sings that second line as “Nineteen forty and five” before opening his throat in a wordless cry.

For Lance Bangs, behind his camera, the Jittery Joe’s performance was revelatory, confirmation that he was right in thinking something extraordinary was happening in Athens. “That was definitely the moment when it seemed apparent that this wasn’t just a good band that was happening—it was like having Van Morrison at his peak of
Astral Weeks
going
on. An entire new poetic language of imagery that wasn’t contrived and didn’t rely on the same sort of whining or confessional singer–songwriter thing that had been happening at that point; here was something new that was emotional and direct.”

When Jeff sang the lyrics “I love you Jesus Christ / Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do,” Lance found it shocking. There’s a lot of Christianity in the South, but within the weirdo musical subculture represented by the people in that room, such a naked expression of faith was completely unexpected. And compelling. Lance couldn’t wait to see what Jeff would say or do next. “It kinda made it clear that he was writing expressively, but maybe wasn’t overly worried about what other people thought or crafting things to make it easy on his audience. Here was someone who was a bit more fucked up and challenging and visceral.”

Lance believed the Jittery Joe’s performance was too good to be heard by just a handful of friends. He starting dubbing cassette copies that he’d pass along to the creative types he encountered in his travels. Michael Stipe got a copy; so did Spike Jonze, and various record company people, filmmakers, photographers. “I felt so clearly that this was a John Lennon–caliber person, that people really needed to hear how special this was. People were really blown away and into it. They would ask about it and want to see some of the footage.” All this was before the album came out.

In late April, Neutral Milk Hotel went out on the road with Olivia Tremor Control to play dates in the South, Northeast and Midwest, with the highlight being their April 26 appearance in Providence, Rhode Island, for the Ptolemaic Providence Perambulation, a benefit for the psychedelic
British fanzine
Ptolemaic Terrascope
. The festival was informally known as Terrastock. Band affiliations were fluid that weekend, with the Olivias joining Neutral Milk onstage for the latter’s Saturday afternoon set, Julian bringing his banjo, accordion and keyboards up on Sunday when OTC played, and Jeremy Barnes filling in on the drum stool for the Supreme Dicks. The set list was typical for the period between
Avery
and
Aeroplane
, a mix of older songs (“Garden-head,” “Song Against Sex”) and new (“Oh Comely,” “The Fool”), including evolving material, like the last part of “Oh Comely,” at this stage a separate song called “Goldaline” which was usually appended to the end of one called “Message Sent” (sometimes titled “Through My Tears”).