Neutral Milk Hotel
Ruston, La., an old railroad town of 20,000 about 35 miles south of the Arkansas border, is something of a puzzle. It is “very redneck,” as the Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider, who endured the rather drastic shock of moving to Ruston from South Africa in the second grade, puts it. It is the seat of a parish that voted three-to-two for George W. Bush in 2004. But it is also the home of Louisiana Tech University, which has one of the stronger art departments in the region and attracts enough creative types to sustain a tiny counterculture amid the surrounding Bible Belt. And it has KLPI, the school’s student-run radio station, which in the mid-eighties saturated the muggy Piney Woods air with signals bearing Black Flag, Daniel Johnston, and the Sex Pistols. And somehow – whether by the vicissitudes of the local water system or the munificent effects of KLPI’s frequency radiating through the expecting mothers of Ruston – it produced Jeff Mangum, Bill Doss, and Will Cullen Hart, all of whom would go on to form the Elephant 6 Collective and make some of the most outlandish, obsessive, gorgeous, and influential pop music of the late twentieth century.
Mangum, the son of a Louisiana Tech economics professor, was a tall, shy, absentminded teenager with a childlike fascination with music. He’d been friends with Schneider – also a university brat – and Hart since grade school.
Robert Schneider I met Jeff on the first day of second grade. He came up to me in recess with a Wiffle Ball bat, and invited me to play. I had just come from South Africa, and I didn’t know what Wiffle Ball was, so I assumed he was going to hit me with the bat. So I turned around and ran, and he chased me all the way around the playground going, “Do you want to play Wiffle Ball?”
In high school the trio, along with Doss, who lived in a small town just north of Ruston and met the rest of the gang at Haymaker’s Guitar Store, became consumed with making and documenting their own music. It was, to hear Schneider tell it, a cocooned life of adolescent whimsy, with innumerable “bands,” all featuring the same players, each with a sillier name than the last, forming and dissolving on a weekly basis. Some were commemorated to tape, at first by a laborious process of jury-rigging a dual-cassette boom box into a primitive multitrack recorder, and later via the proper four-tracks that all four of them purchased and obsessively twiddled with. They traded the tapes amongst themselves; each pop song or noise exploration from one was a challenge to be met and overcome by the others. Mangum played drums in a junior-high noise-punk band called Maggot; he and Cullen recorded psychedelic songs in Cranberry Lifecycle, which begat Synthetic Flying Machine, which begat, after they left Ruston, Olivia Tremor Control. Schneider and Mangum recorded a project under the name Mr. Burton Says Hello; Mangum and Louisiana Tech students Scott Spillane, Ross Beach, and Will Westbrook were in a noise band called Clay Bears. And Mangum had another name for his own four-track songs: Milk. When he learned that another band had already taken the name, he changed it to Neutral Milk Hotel.
It was a self-generated Willy Wonka world of music in the middle of nowhere. “In school I was surrounded by racist, sexist jocks,” Mangum told Puncture magazine in 1998. “From an early age, my friends and I all felt we didn’t belong there. We all kind of saved ourselves from that place. The little world we had there was beautiful.”
Robert Schneider We were making these four-track recordings. What we were trying to make was symphonies, but we did it in such a sloppy and haphazard manner, because we were young, and we didn’t know how to make symphonies. But we felt like we were.
At the same time, Mangum and Hart both played high school football – no mean feat in a town where Louisiana Tech alum Terry Bradshaw played college ball – and Schneider successfully ran, as a goof, for class president. They were sociable enough, Schneider says, to avoid too much trouble. Mangum also attended what he described approvingly to Puncture as a “crazy church camp” in central Louisiana each summer.
Absolutely no thought was given to whether anyone else might be interested in hearing their symphonies, or how to engage the mysterious and confusing levers of the record business.
Robert Schneider We took our recordings seriously. But it was for each other. I don’t think we even considered ourselves musicians. That involved some sort of long hair, or leather pants or something.
If anything, Mangum was slightly more aware than his peers of the realities involved with getting records made, by virtue of his two-year tenure, ending in 1990, as program director of KLPI.
Robert Schneider He seemed more experienced in understanding that stuff. He just knew people from labels and stuff like that, and where you could possibly send your DAT tape or cassette or whatever to get the record mastered. But just a little bit. More than anybody else. But the extent of it was that he had a list. He had a handwritten list.
After high school, the Ruston boys scattered to the winds. Schneider went to school in Denver; Mangum briefly attended community college in Ruston before lighting out on a peripatetic cross-country journey, guitar and four-track in tow, that essentially never ended.
Robert Schneider He has a nomadic streak. Maybe he’s seeking different experiences, or some sort of perfect place that isn’t quite there or something. But he’s always moved around.
They all continued to trade tapes through the mail, or swap them whenever Mangum would swing through on his travels.
Robert Schneider I remember there was one moment when I was listening to a Cranberry Lifecycle tape that Will and Jeff had done. I was on a Greyhound bus on the way to summer vacation. I remember looking out the window, and it occurred to me that this was different. This is a style of music that I’m making with my friends.
In 1992, not long after the Ruston diaspora, Mangum, Hart, Schneider, and the rest of the gang began affixing a logo, designed by Hart, to the cassettes they traded among themselves and gave to friends: ELEPHANT 6 RECORDING CO. There was, of course, no company. There was little more than the distinctiveness of the style that Schneider heard – an obsessive fascination with the border between pure pop and pure noise – and a desire to somehow mark it as their own. It was also a self-mocking appropriation of the slightly pompous language of the business world that was so alien to them. Atlantic got to put their logo on records, and the Beatles got their very own Apple label; why shouldn’t Mangum et al. get one too?
Sometime around 1990 or 1991 (it’s best not to try to pin anyone down to dates when dealing with Mangum and his friends), Mangum and Hart both found themselves living in Athens, Ga., which had returned to sleepy Southern tranquility after a brief heyday in the early 1980s as the hippest town in America and home of R.E.M. It was there that they met Julian Koster, who would become a member of Neutral Milk Hotel and release his own records, under the name the Music Tapes, through Merge.
Julian Koster Athens was a place where you could be poor. It wasn’t like the real world. It was like a sleepaway camp.
Koster was born and raised in New York. In high school, he had formed a band called Chocolate USA that signed to Bar/None Records, an independent label that had put out records by They Might Be Giants, Alex Chilton, and Yo La Tengo. Koster’s experience with Bar/None ended badly; he doesn’t like to recall the details.
Julian Koster They had put out some of my favorite records, and I thought they were a part of that magic world of records, and that it was like, if you went into the office, it would be a room full of the world of those songs. I’m completely oblivious to reality.
Mangum was in many ways oblivious, too.
Julian Koster Will and Jeff were much like me, in the sense that none of us could keep jobs. Our attempts at working were always hilarious and absurd and ended in immediate dismissal.
Robert Schneider We were all working at a telemarketing job once in Denver, doing phone surveys. And Jeff wasn’t comfortable with calling people and having to schmooze them, so he would go hours getting zero people to do surveys. So the boss called him in and goes, “You’re going to have to pick this up if we’re going to be able to keep you.” And he goes, “I’m just learning how to do this. Please don’t be like that. I’m a person.” And she says, “Go back to your desk now and get to work.” And Jeff says, “Come on. Please don’t talk to me like that. Can’t you just talk to me like I’m a person?” And she says, “You’re fired and I’m calling security.”
Mangum didn’t stay long in Athens. He headed off to Denver, where he lived in a walk-in closet that he believed to be haunted and in the utility room next door to Schneider’s apartment. He was four-tracking all the while. Around 1993, he moved to the West Coast “for a girl,” Schneider says, living in Los Angeles and then Seattle for a time. Seattle was at the height of its frenzy.
Robert Schneider He hated it. He recorded a whole record on four-track, called Hype City Soundtrack, that was critical of everything going on there. That sort of mainstream business-y culture has always been repulsive to all of us, but to Jeff especially. He’s really sensitive about what’s pure in his music.
There was a brief time, for some in the Elephant 6 world, when the notion of taking the steps necessary to put out an actual record beyond their small circle of tape-traders was fraught with peril.
Julian Koster We were extremely suspicious, because we were conscious of the fact that a lot of people who had made really wonderful things stopped making wonderful things, and that it seemed to have something to do with their interacting with the real world. But I also remember being in a convenience store with Jeff, and he was looking at a magazine with some band on the cover. And Jeff pointed at it and said, “We could do that.” And we all kind of laughed when he said it. But it was clear that he meant it.
Mangum was the first of the Elephant 6 folks to overcome his suspicions. In Seattle, he got in touch with Nancy Ostrander, who had a tiny label called Cher Doll. In 1994, she put out the first Neutral Milk Hotel 7-inch: “Everything Is” b/w “Snow Song Pt. 1.” The songs were raw and nearly swallowed by tape hiss, but “Everything Is” was a two-chord slow burner with a cool, detached vocal style that recalled Beck and self-consciously psychedelic lyrics (“Everything is beautiful here / It’s spinning circles ‘round my ears”).
Somehow a copy of “Everything Is” made its way to Mac. He liked it, but not enough to pursue Mangum on his own.
Tom Scharpling Mac and I were talking about that Neutral Milk Hotel single. And Mac’s like, “Yeah you should put something out by that guy.” And I said, “Maybe. I don’t know.” I kind of wish I did now because I’d have money. From any scrap of having put that out, I could buy a boat from that.
Schneider was also becoming less apprehensive about trying to make a living off his music, and released an Apples in Stereo 7-inch under the Elephant 6 Recording Co. name shortly after the Cher Doll release (1994 saw a short-lived attempt by Schneider to turn Elephant 6 into a real label, selling 7-inches and cassettes via catalog; it didn’t take). Jeff was playing bass in the Apples at the time, so Neutral Milk Hotel and Apples in Stereo embarked on a West Coast tour that summer. They played a music festival in Olympia, Wash., and shows in Seattle and San Francisco before heading down to L.A. to hang out for two weeks. The Apples 7-inch had gotten some attention from Warner Bros.
Koster with Neutral Milk Hotel, Portland, Oregon, April 1998.
Robert Schneider I think they heard hit potential. At that time there was this alternative pop thing happening, so a band like us could’ve had a song like a Fountains of Wayne thing.
Schneider eventually decided on indie label spinART, but the Warner Bros. A&R rep had recommended that he talk to a lawyer – Brian McPherson. McPherson had been working with Merge off and on – the no-contracts policy cut down on their need for legal advice – for two years at that point. McPherson, who was friends with Shrimper Records founder Dennis Callaci, had approached Superchunk as a fan after a 1992 show in Pomona, Calif., and it was McPherson who had set up the dinner with Rosemary Carroll – his boss at the time – where she advised Superchunk not to sign with her husband.
Robert Schneider He’s a punk-rock lawyer. He was living out of his car at the same time he had Beck as a client. He had his files in the passenger seat.
Brian McPherson I had this compilation that had “Everything Is” on it, and I’d been playing it to death. And I’d been trying to find out who Jeff Mangum was. So the Apples come into the office because they’re going to sign with spinART, and they had this guy with them who had a Shrimper T-shirt on. So I said, “Who are you and where did you get that shirt?” And he says, “My name’s Jeff Mangum.” I said, “I’ll take one of those please. I’m your lawyer now, too. Because I think you’re great.”
The following February, Mangum decamped to Denver, where Schneider had been building a studio, to make his first full-length. He was in love with the sound of his four-track, and highly suspicious of professional studio technology. But he wanted On Avery Island to sound more somber and substantial than his tapes did; Schneider decided to ease him into the studio by using a four-track reel-to-reel machine, rather than a more sophisticated eight-track he’d recently purchased, so that Mangum could still say that the record was “produced by Robert Schnieder [sic] on 4-track” in the liner notes. The two of them recorded Avery Island every day, all day, for four months.
They worked obsessively, with Mangum playing almost all the instruments and Schneider producing and playing some bass and keyboards. Mangum would record and erase guitar parts over and over again until they sounded right, constantly searching for melodies and parts that sounded special to him. One of the most fussed-over tracks, which took days to finish, was an eleven-minute drone created by slowing down a sample of a banjo riff over and over again until it was an unrecognizable, contorted shriek.
Robert Schneider Jeff wanted to make something really meaningful. A classic that would blow people’s minds. That even if nobody hears it, it’s going to be a classic.
On Avery Island is a propulsive grab bag of eras and styles; there are trombones, but there is weird radio squall, too, and oversaturated acoustic guitars. It’s a pop record that hearkens back to American music before the electronic age – to ragtime and circus-tent revivals – even as it revels in the chaotic noise of overtaxed circuitry. The juxtapositions are jarring and moving. There is carnival music over electronic noise over melodies that could have been written by Neil Diamond over distressing and dark lyrics about body organs and drug overdoses – “Your teeth believe / that teeth are for tearing / tear into me / the scent of your sweating / smells good to me” – sung with the tragic pop sensibility and vocal power of Roy Orbison.
Julian Koster Everything before that had been completely chaotic and homemade, like this little thing that you do. But Avery Island felt like a real record.
Mac Brian sent us a copy. It had a handmade paper cover. And who knows how many generations from the original this tape was. I was just, like, “Whoa!” There were trombones, all kinds of crazy stuff. It was crazy-sounding, but so cool. It was one of those things where I was like, “Is it really good? Or is it just so weird that it’s striking?”
Matt Suggs Butterglory played a house party in Ruston in probably ‘93 or ‘94. And Jeff had opened for us as Neutral Milk Hotel. And I remember Mac calling me maybe a year afterward like, “You know this Neutral Milk Hotel?” Mac would do that from time to time. Kind of like put feelers out. I was like, “Yeah, we played with that guy. He was good.” Mac said, “Well, you know, Laura and I are thinking about doing something with him.”
Robert Schneider I remember the day that Jeff told me Merge was putting it out. He was really excited about it. He worshiped Superchunk. Mac and Laura were to him like Lennon and McCartney are to me.
Merge released On Avery Island in March of 1996. The grand irony that one of the most strange, unambitious, and uncommercial pop musicians of the current era found his way to Merge through a Hollywood music lawyer is not lost on McPherson.
Brian McPherson How hilarious is that? That’s such a traditional music-business way of music finding its way to the label. Through a lawyer.
Just like Suggs and Vander Wall, Mangum found himself in a position of trying to put together a band after the fact in order to tour. He invited Koster to play bass, the singing saw, accordion, and any number of other odd instruments. Koster knew of a ferocious and unhinged drummer at DePaul University he’d seen while touring with Chocolate USA, so he and Mangum took separate trains to Chicago – Mangum from Denver; Koster from New York – to meet Jeremy Barnes, an eighteen-year-old whose parents were none too pleased to learn that he was going to drop out to play in a band. Lastly, Mangum swung through Austin, Texas, to visit his old Clay Bears bandmate from the Ruston days, Scott Spillane. Mangum found him at two a.m. at the Gumby’s Pizza where Spillane worked. He was living in his van at the time. It was the post-bartime rush, so Mangum went behind the counter to help make some pizzas before telling Spillane, “This job sucks. You should come with me to New York.”
Mangum, Koster, Spillane, and Barnes were the foursome that came to define Neutral Milk Hotel. They holed up in the basement of Koster’s grandmother’s house in Queens to put together a set. Even though Koster had toured with Chocolate USA, and Mangum had done some touring with the Apples, they were largely clueless as to the logistics of mounting a tour on their own as a virtually unknown band with no resources. Mac and Laura put them in touch with Jim Romeo, who set up a show at Brownies, in New York’s East Village, to see what they were like.
The Neutral Milk Hotel that debuted that night was a beautiful shambles: Fast, loud, and giddy, with instruments being swapped constantly and impromptu wrestling matches and tickle fights erupting between, and during, songs.
Jim Romeo I felt like the roof was going to cave in. The building was structurally sound, but I just had this feeling it was going to happen. They just had this weird, out-of-control energy. I had to leave after their set. I was so blown away by them that I just had to go outside.
Robert Schneider That band was never, in any way, what you would call tight or polished. They were like, if you took a carnival, and you played it on an AM radio, and then you stuck it in a bucket with a microphone and recorded it, and then took that recording and played it on a Victrola, and then rolled it down the stairs, and there’s someone there to catch it – that’s a Neutral Milk Hotel show.
They toured during the summer of 1996 with Butterglory.
Matt Suggs Neutral Milk Hotel opening for Butterglory. It just kills me. Today, people are like Butter who? But I watched them on the first night of the tour, and they were fucking unbelievably amazing. And I remember turning to Debby and saying, “Fuck. You’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve got to follow this shit every night of this tour?”
Mangum & co. were as confused and disorganized and lovable offstage as they were when they were performing, and every tour was a cascade of just-in-time arrivals, mislaid bags full of cash, and vain attempts to find places to crash.
Matt Suggs They had this Bad News Bears quality. They never had any information or anything. “Uh, where are we playing tomorrow night?” It’s a wonder that they even made it to the gigs. Most bands who tour have a method of loading the van where everything just kind of fits. And with them, it always looked like a three-year-old had packed the fucking thing. They’d open the door and here would come a cymbal rolling out, and they’d go chasing it.
Mangum’s love of Wiffle Ball didn’t end in the second grade. They would play games at truck stops and club parking lots on the road. In Cleveland, Suggs says, they got so wrapped up in one game that they showed up late to the club.
Julian Koster The thing that we were going to the club to do was being warmed up, or kept alive, more by what was happening during that Wiffle Ball game than it would by a soundcheck.
On Avery Island sold roughly 5,000 copies. It caught the attention of some reviewers, ranking 35 in the Village Voice’s 1996 critics’ poll. In 1996, with a little money coming in from touring and from Merge, Mangum settled down for a while in Athens, where the Elephant 6 Collective had landed and taken hold. The fact that profit-sharing statements were coming in from Merge was “mind-boggling” to Koster; by that point many of the Elephant 6 folks had worked with all manner of labels, major and indie, and almost universally found the experiences to be excessively complicated and financially underwhelming.
Julian Koster Merge was the only one that did it in a way that was honest and real. I don’t think we saw a penny from anyone else. That’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s an exaggeration that expresses a truth. When checks started coming from Merge, it was a miracle.
In Ruston in 1995, a few days before taking a bus to Denver to record Avery Island, Mangum had come across a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank in a used bookstore. He read it in two days, and cried for three days afterward. He later told Puncture that the experience was like coming to know Frank better than he could know someone in the flesh, only to see her “thrown away like a piece of trash.” He began having insistent dreams every night in which he used a time machine to go back and save her life. The dreams found their way into Mangum’s songs, and in July 1997 he headed back to Schneider’s place in Denver to record them.
Making In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was, like Avery Island, a venture into uncharted territory for Mangum and Schneider. Where the challenge of Avery Island was to maneuver Mangum’s four-track sensibility in to something approaching a “real” studio, the challenge of Aeroplane was to capture both the performances of an actual, existing band and the artificial, spooky noises that washed over the music when Mangum heard it in his head. The sessions lasted three months and were characteristically chaotic. Mangum brought out Koster, Spillane, and Barnes, paying their expenses while they stayed, and a steady stream of visiting musicians were dropping by at Mangum’s invitation to add parts. Schneider clashed at first with the rest of the band, who already had a deep attachment to Mangum’s songs and regarded with suspicion some of the seemingly traditional recording techniques he was bringing to bear.
San Francisco, April 1998. From left: Robbie Cucchario, Will Westbrook (at bottom), D’Azzo, Scott Spillane, Koster.
Robert Schneider We were very, very intense about making a great record. We were on this mission to defeat popular music. It was really our enemy. And we felt strongly about it.
During the recording, Mac called Schneider to ask how things were going. “Did you like On Avery Island?” Schneider asked.
“Yes,” Mac said.
“THEN YOU’RE GONNA FUCKING LOVE THIS ONE!!!” Schneider screamed into the phone.
Aeroplane is bathed in fuzz. Not rock fuzz, or punk fuzz, but a sort of gentle disintegration of tones and notes around their edges that attempts to capture the surging and shambolic spirit of the band’s performances. Lyrically, it is an astonishing and continuous fever-dream; songs blend into one another and cascade from an inchoate sonic soup to folk to pre-electric punk. It is shot through with images and moments from the life and death of Frank mingled with bits from Mangum’s own life, reimagined as a Hieronymus Bosch tableau. There are two-headed boys trapped in glass jars who can be saved by stereo speakers and fed tomatoes and radio wires, there are brothers who erupt into flames, there are semenstained mountaintops, there are ecstatic testaments to Mangum’s love for Jesus Christ. There is a visceral and graphic sense of loss coupled with a child-like wonderment: “You left with your head filled with flames / you watched as your brains / fell out through your teeth / push the pieces in place / make your smile sweet to see / don’t you take this away / I’m still wanting my face on your cheek.” And somehow it all leads back to a tender and sad imagining of Frank’s death and, as Mangum sees it, rebirth. Nothing like it had ever been made before.
“A lot of the songs on Aeroplane freaked me out,” Mangum told Puncture. “It took other people to make me comfortable with them, and to see it was OK to sing about this stuff.… I would ask a friend, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’”
Mac and Laura first got ahold of Aeroplane while on the road with Superchunk, and played it in the van. Mac and Laura did FUCKING LOVE IT, as Schneider had promised. Wurster and Wilbur were puzzled.
Jim Wilbur I was like, “Are you out of your mind? This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever heard in my life!” But I had a blind spot. I don’t think that way anymore. It just took a while.
Jon Wurster Yeah, Jim and I just rolled our eyes. It’s not my thing. And that song is like, “Jesus Christ I love you!” Whatever. Greatest album ever recorded. According to Magnet.
The initial critical response to Aeroplane saw a similar divide. Rolling Stone gave it three out of five stars and called it “scant and drab, with flat-footed rhythms and chord changes strictly out of the beginner’s folk songbook.” Pitchfork, which was at the time a relatively fledgling Chicago-based Web site devoted to chronicling the comings and goings of indie-rock stars, gave it 8.7 out of ten stars in a rather cursory 144-word review that commended its “credible job of blending Sgt. Pepper with early ‘90s lo-fi.”
Elsewhere, the response was more ecstatic. In Salon, Caterina Fake wrote, simply: “Listening to this album is like watching someone fly.”
Merge pressed 5,500 copies of Aeroplane, expecting sales to be in line with Avery Island. (A 1997 fax from Merge to Touch and Go authorizing reproduction of the master lists Jeff Mangum’s phone number as “disconnected at the moment.”) Initially, they were right. But slowly, over a period of months, the record gathered momentum. Had Aeroplane come out five years later, Neutral Milk Hotel would surely have been a “blog band”: the beneficiary of an instant, white-hot outpouring of online enthusiasm from a core of fans who loved the record immediately. But 1998 was still the Web 1.0 era, and fans of the album had to actually talk to people to convey what was special about it. People had to hear it at parties and ask, “What the hell is that?”
Ed Roche It took a long time. I think it was about two months after it happened that all the great reviews were starting to pile up, and the record was selling better than we thought. And then towards the end of the year, we started getting notices that like every writer in the country was going to put it in their Top Ten list.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea begins with an acoustic guitar strumming a few simple chord changes and ends not quite forty minutes later, in the hushed silence of the recording studio, when the guitar strings squeak as Jeff Mangum stands up, bops the soundbox while setting the guitar down, and walks away. Four heavy, muted steps through the studio, then silence. If you listen to the album on vinyl, the next thing you’ll hear is the rhythmic static of the needle stuck in the run-out groove, calling you back to the world.
The world without the King of Carrot Flowers. Without the Two-Headed Boy. Without the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
And without Anne Frank.
This isn’t just an album. It’s a mythology and a dream, full of anachronisms and transmigrations and violations of the laws of nature. “Your dark brother wrapped in white,” the narrator of “Holland, 1945” sings, “says it was good to be alive / but now he rides a comet’s flame / and won’t be coming back again.” The given world of historical record brushes up obliquely against the imagined world of whimsy, set to a street-corner carnival score that is baroque, fuzzy, layered, looping. It is a world unto itself, as beautiful and strange as the cover art featuring the tambourine-headed woman, the flying Victrola, and the ascending stilt-legged horn players.
A lyric from “Oh Comely” declares the album’s prevailing spirit: “silly music is magical meaningful.” The familiar mundane sneaks in – a dysfunctional family, a trailer park, a simple horn solo – but the major key is a fantasia of invention, restitution, and multilayered sound. The Two-Headed Boy comes to life, puts on his Sunday shoes, and dances around the room to accordion keys. Fathers make fetuses with flesh-licking ladies while holy water pours from the sky. The instruments involved include the flugelhorn, the euphonium, the zanzithophone and something called the wandering genie.
All of it is held together elliptically by “Anna’s ghost” – Anne Frank. The narrator of “Holland, 1945” again: “The only girl I’ve ever loved / was born with roses in her eyes / but then they buried her alive one evening 1945 / with just her sister at her side / and only weeks before the guns / all came and rained on everyone.” The real world elbows its way inside the fantasia. But what history makes inevitable, Mangum transmutes into a gem: “Now she’s a little boy in Spain / playing pianos filled with flames / on empty rings around the sun.”
Still, it can’t be so, not even here. On “Oh Comely,” when the warbling saws and whirling white noise that define the album soberly yield to a fuguelike hum, an acoustic guitar, and Mangum’s uninflected voice, whimsy gives way to reality. It’s the quietest moment, the most chilling, the most heart-rending: “I know they buried her body with others / her sister and mother and 500 families… I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine.” For all the radical transmutation – the artistry – of the world of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, there is, at its heart, a plaint, a naked submission to an unjust world, to sympathy’s sad limitations.
In the album’s final line, Mangum sings – about Anne? – “She is all you could need… but don’t hate her when she gets up to leave.” Then he himself does precisely that: he gets up and leaves. If Anne Frank haunts the world of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Magnum’s four heavy steps out of the studio haunt the album. He is gone, and may never return. But no one should hate him for it, or so much as ask for more. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is all you need.
The master release form for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
Corey Rusk I don’t think anyone would have guessed that it was going to turn into the touchstone that it is. There was a period of time in that record’s life where every year it was doing more than the previous year. It just spread and just became this cult record of massive proportions.
To date, Aeroplane has sold 254,000 copies. Magnet did, as Wurster pointed out, name it the best album recorded between 1993 and 2003. In 2003, Pitchfork ranked it the fourth best record of the 1990s, calling it “indelible and heartbreaking.” Two years later, when Aeroplane was reissued in the U.K., Pitchfork took the opportunity to review it a second time, giving it a perfect 10. Spin would eventually name it one of the top 100 records since 1985. When Rolling Stone published a new edition of its album guide in 2004, Aeroplane had been upgraded to four stars.
Neutral Milk Hotel embarked on a grueling tour schedule for Aeroplane, opening for Superchunk in the spring of 1998 before summer and fall headlining tours of the states and Europe.
Laura They were riveting. At that point, it was rare that I’d watch an opening band’s whole set every night. But with them, I wanted to see it every night. It was so raw, emotionally.
By the summer of 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel was selling out the Bowery Ballroom in New York. Fans reacted to the record intensely and personally – one young woman drove from Arkansas to see Mangum in Tennessee so she could give him her grandmother’s rosary before heading home without even seeing the show – which put Mangum in an awkward position.
Robert Schneider He would never turn his back on somebody. But it’s kind of like a private thing. Even though you made it for people to listen to, you didn’t make it for that many people. And so I guess people accosting him – he’s very modest, and very shy.
He grew weary of explaining his songs in interviews, and came to regard the creeping advances of the music industry with an almost visceral fear. Capitol, Epic, and other labels went after the band. McPherson would get the offers, but he wouldn’t even bring them to Mangum. He already knew the answer.
Julian Koster Everything was snowballing. We were aware of that.
Magazines were calling, asking for photo shoots. Promoters were asking them to tour Japan. Labels were buying them dinner. The idyllic life of hanging out and playing songs and laughing while cymbals rolled down the sidewalk was suddenly taking on an adult, professional patina. Since Ruston, the only thing Magnum cared about was making music; now there were parts of making music – the adulation, the press, the money – that he felt he needed to protect himself from.
Julian Koster There is a big world out there, that’s very powerful and can be very crushing if you’re on the wrong side of it. You can’t tread under the foot of a thousand-ton animal, you know? You have to be aware of it.
To Mangum, there was something sinister about the attention. At an early Neutral Milk Hotel show in an art space on the West Coast, local kids had made flyers using a kitschy, ‘60s photograph of girls wearing bikinis on the beach.
Robert Schneider It was like a Beach Boys thing. But Jeff got furious, and ripped them down. He thought they were marketing us like Warrant, or something. But it was just a retro, fun poster. He would rather have just had something scrawled with a Sharpie. He’s just really sensitive to anything that’s cheesy or glossy or commercial in any way.
In the winter of 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel did a grueling tour of Europe. Mangum suffered a nasty string of colds. Their last show was in London in October, and the band flew back to Athens. He played a solo set at a friend’s birth day party in Athens in December. And that was, essentially, it. There was no press release. No dramatic meeting with the band. At first, it was just the normal break to exhale that you take after a year of touring. Everyone expected that another record was forthcoming. But it wasn’t.
Mac and Laura never inquired about another record, even though it surely would have sold an enormous amount. There was no contract that said Mangum owed them one, so they kept in contact with him and waited. Jim Romeo, Neutral Milk Hotel’s booking agent, would periodically forward Mangum e-mails with offers of shows, most of which were ignored. Occasionally Mangum would write back: “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.” The clearest indication that Mangum wasn’t interested in continuing came in 1999, when R.E.M. asked Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, and Elf Power, an Elephant 6 band led by Mangum’s ex-girlfriend Laura Carter, to open for them in Atlanta. Olivia Tremor Control and Elf Power both said yes immediately. Romeo called Mangum repeatedly, leaving messages, but couldn’t reach him for days. When Mangum finally picked up the phone, he turned down the offer. Neutral Milk Hotel hadn’t played in a year, Mangum told Romeo, and if they were going to reconvene after a long break, he wanted to do it in front of their fans, not in a giant amphitheater.
As recently as 2000, Schneider says, Mangum had talked about making another Neutral Milk Hotel record. But nothing came of it. In 2001, Mangum did release a record, through Carter’s Orange Twin label, of field recordings he’d made during a trip the year before to a folk music festival in Bulgaria. Needless to say, it perplexed some of his fans. Mangum eventually left Athens for New York, where he briefly DJ’d an overnight radio show on independent freeform radio station WFMU, under the name Jefferson. His overnight disappearance, especially given the fact that he could, if he wanted, play a tour of sold-out shows, has lent Mangum a reputation as the J. D. Salinger of indie rock.
Brian McPherson When the guy sneezes it’s on the front page of Pitchfork. It’s freaky to me. Would you leave the guy alone? Maybe he would make a record if you didn’t stalk him for years.
Mac I think that he’ll do something. I don’t know if it will be Neutral Milk Hotel, or if it’ll just be noise collages. He’s an interesting person who clearly loves music, and is obsessed with it, in a way, but at the same time doesn’t feel the need to participate in the music business. There are lots of people waiting to buy his record and see him play. Most people would be like, “Awesome!” But I think some people would react the other way – too much pressure.
In 2003, a writer for the Atlanta weekly alternative newspaper Creative Loafing, for a story on the band’s dissolution, called Mangum’s father and asked him what he thought of his son’s songs, some of which would seem to indicate a violent and unpleasant upbringing (“And mom would stick a fork right into daddy’s shoulder / And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor”). The younger Mangum hadn’t responded to the reporter’s e-mails, but after his father was contacted, he wrote: “I wish you the best in everything you do. But please do not contact my family. I think [my dad] was caught off guard by you, and maybe a little intrigued at first, but now he is left wondering how a perfect stranger could know about his painful past. I don’t wish to revisit the past either.
“I’m not an idea,” Mangum continued. “I’m a person, who obviously wants to be left alone. If my music has meant anything to you, you’ll respect that.”
Mangum likewise declined to participate in an interview for this book, but he sent Mac the following e-mail by way of explanation: “I don’t really have any desire to try and recapture the past, so any history of Neutral Milk Hotel is very strange for me to try and write about. But I would like to give you this: Merge is by far the perfect home for our music, a label that couldn’t be more honest and true to its vision. It gladdens me to see that it’s the human labels like Merge who are fully alive in this moment, while the giants of the music industry are all eating shit. May it forever be so.”
