Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (2 page)

I know you’ve come to hear me tell the story of
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
, and I will. Or rather, I’ll allow the people who were there, on stage and in the audience, to tell their stories. But to excise that album from the living vine that is Neutral Milk Hotel and Elephant 6 is impossible.
Aeroplane
could never have existed without a series of previous collaborations, so these projects will be briefly touched upon in the pages that follow. And the record itself was never thought by the players to be the final version of those songs, which had evolved from when Jeff first shared them, and which continued to change out on the road during the long tour of 1998. As for the mystery of Jeff Mangum’s disappearance
from the music scene, it too makes sense when placed in the fuller context of the creative community in which his recordings were made. So indulge me, please, while I set the stage. We’ll have a few cartoons and a short subject before the feature plays. I think you’ll find them every bit as interesting as the show you came to see.

Ruston, a town of about 20,000 souls in north-central Louisiana, is home to Louisiana Tech University, the school where Jeff Mangum and Robert Schneider’s fathers taught. The kids first encountered each other on the grounds of the A. E. Phillips elementary school, an experimental K–8 program on the college campus with strong arts and music curricula and its own planetarium.

As a recent South African émigré self-conscious of his accent and nerdy English-schoolboy clothing, seven-year-old Robert was defensive. So when Jeff came up with a Wiffle-ball bat on the first day of school and asked if he wanted to play, Robert assumed that he was about to get clobbered. Unable to convince Robert that he just wanted to play a game, Jeff finally chased the odd little foreign kid all around the playground, which seemed like the only way Robert was going to play with him. They were pretty much pals from then on.

There are a few great bands whose members first met when they were in metaphorical short pants—these groups seem charged with a weird magic, as if by coming together at such a green stage, their members fused on some elemental level. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard famously attended the same primary school. Bands comprised of brothers demonstrate this unity most profoundly: the Beach Boys and Everlys with their otherworldly harmonies, the Kinks playing Apollonian Ray off Dionysian Dave. Jeff and Robert, while not brothers by birth, were (and remain) extremely close, and this affinity would eventually allow Jeff to make music that he couldn’t quite bring to fruition on his own.

Will Cullen Hart was a grade school friend of Jeff’s, the son of interior designers and himself a talented painter of psychedelic themes. He played in the junior high school noise band Maggot, with Jeff and Ty Storms, and by tenth grade was Robert’s best friend and recording partner.

A few years older, Bill Doss lived in Dubach, a tiny town north of Ruston. He was the son of a horse-ranching machinist and a stay-at-home mom. Robert first encountered Bill in the mid-eighties in Haymaker’s guitar store, where the nascent E6 crowd often loitered and sometimes took guitar lessons. Haymaker’s brought Robert and Bill together more formally when owner Eddie suggested that since they had similar tastes, they should play together. The band they formed, Fat Planet, had a repertoire ranging from
Revolver
to the Velvets to R.E.M., plus some Robert Schneider originals.

Ruston is a quiet, rural town without the diversions of even a small city. Robert says, “It’s super redneck. I would say it was a really nice place to be a little kid, but it’s an
unpleasant place to be a teenager: there’s nothing much to do, and the cultural atmosphere is
terrible
.” Children of professors like Jeff and Robert didn’t really fit in with the townies, but with their grade school right on the LTU campus, it was easy to make the college the center of their world. This was even more the case as they reached their teens and became aware of KLPI-FM, the campus radio station. Will Hart was first to get a DJ spot, and his friends made themselves at home there, too. By 1990, Jeff would rise to the position of music director.

The majority of US college stations in the 1980s were programming a mix of punk, alternative rock and proto-grunge. But for Scott Spillane, who moved from Shreveport in 1989, KLPI still had the feel of a 1970s college station, with a freaky crowd spinning arty album tracks. If Shreveport was a few years behind the national cultural curve, then Ruston lagged a bit behind Shreveport, with the town’s few punks actually hailing from Monroe, thirty miles east along Highway 20. But as Scott watched, the station mutated. A younger crowd moved into the broadcast booth, among them Scott himself, who did a show with John D’Azzo. And then there was Rexx, an actual California-bred skate punk who dated station manager Lisa and whose shows drew on his fantastic collection of small-press singles. The new generation was more interested in K Records and Daniel Johnston than in side-long vinyl freak outs. And they played a game of “stump your pals,” digging through the station archives searching for cool, weird or horrible stuff that no one else knew about, yet. It was fun to paw through the racks at KLPI looking for novelty, but the station’s collection was only the gateway drug into a vast, uncharted land of
bizarre recorded sound that could only be found in thrift store bargain bins. A bunch of quarter-bin record raccoons were born.

When Mike McGonigal interviewed Neutral Milk Hotel for a
Puncture
magazine cover story (Spring 1998), Jeff spoke of the church camps he attended from age eleven through seventeen, “where everything was very open. We talked about sexuality freely. It wasn’t really hippie, it was just weird. You could spill your guts all over the place. People were leaping and freaking out. It wasn’t so much a God trip as an emotional trip. Even if you were an atheist, if your parents shipped you down there, you could talk about it. You could talk openly about your atheist beliefs and there would be debates; and being an atheist was as beautiful as anything else.” This chaotic, passionate environment would be replicated in creative settings and living arrangements selected by the Ruston kids in the years to come.

The Elephant 6 origin myth has Jeff, Robert, Bill and Will playing in a series of strangely named Ruston bands. The reality is a bit more typical for imaginative, untrained teen musicians—a lot of those bands didn’t exist, or never got past the home recording stages. Robert recalls that in high school, he and Jeff paid Michael Rasbury—a cousin-in-law and occasional bandmate of Bill Doss who had a four-track setup in his bedroom—$30 to document a project called Mr. Burton Says Hello. The name was inspired by George A. Burton III, a poet from Shreveport notorious for having overdosed on acid at a zoo on New Year’s Eve, 1969. Jeff and Robert each wrote two songs, and collaborated on “Mr. Burton Says Hello.”

Robert says of the band’s namesake, “He’s a cool guy,
and he’s a pretty good poet. We used to always hang out with older people. I mean, we would hang out socially at school, at parties, but most of our friends were in college or older. So we wrote a song, ‘Mr. Burton Says Hello.’ It actually must have been insulting to him, ’cause it made him out to be this
crazy
, psychedelic, Aqualung-type character. I feel kind of bad, but at the time I thought it was cool to be all freaky and mentally ill. It probably sucks for him, but I think he appreciated it.”

Mr. Burton Says Hello was a rare early collaboration for Jeff and Robert. Robert recalls that Jeff and Will usually worked together, while Robert worked with both Bill and Will. “We never crossed over that much.” One of Jeff’s high school-era home recording projects was called Milk. When he found out there already was a band with that name, he changed it to Neutral Milk Hotel. Around the same time, he came up with the name Olivia Tremor Control.

DIY fever hit the Rustonians hard in the early 1990s. They would start bands, write songs, record “albums,” dub them onto cassettes, draw cover art and then circulate these little objects within their own small world. For the first few years, they didn’t seek outside approval by sending copies to record labels, indie distributors or fanzines that were willing to review self-released cassettes, and the few copies that did sneak out into the greater world were probably baffling. Jeff’s early tape releases include
Invent Yourself a Shortcake, Beauty and Hype City Soundtrack
. After 1993, the tapes bore a jaunty little hand-drawn logo (by Will Hart) that said “The Elephant 6 Recording Co.”

While some early Elephant 6 bands, like Maggot, existed in only the most rudimentary, bedroom fashion, Jeff and
Will’s Cranberry Lifecycle was the real thing, which their friend and sometime bandmate Ross Beach recalls as their “first collaboration of ‘serious’ songs.” Cranberry Lifecycle would evolve into Synthetic Flying Machine, soaring for a spell in Athens before mutating again into Olivia Tremor Control.

Another long-lived Ruston combo was the Clay Bears, which Ross Beach explains “was originally the name Jeff gave to his hardcore/noise four-track excursions, as opposed to the prettier song-based stuff, which was called ‘Milk.’” Ross, along with Scott Spillane and Will Westbrook, played with Jeff in the live version of the Clay Bears, a notoriously clamorous outfit whose specialties were driving the audience out of the room and band members changing instruments in mid-set. This latter characteristic would resurface to fine effect during Neutral Milk Hotel’s late 90s incarnation.

New Yorker Julian Koster, then leading Chocolate USA, a band that recorded on Bar/None, visited Ruston a number of times in the years leading up to his formally joining Neutral Milk Hotel, and was intrigued by the contrast between the rough, unwelcoming town culture and the community of loving, creative kids who nevertheless thrived there.

He found Ruston “really sleepy, sleepier than Athens. I think it was really hard for those guys, because it was a pretty rough place in some respects, the sort of place that wouldn’t necessarily understand people that were very different. There was this really lovely group of kids that they were a part of, and sometimes being young is an empowerment. They’re able to give each other strength and encouragement.”

For Julian, the contrast between the free-spirited
Elephant 6 crowd and his own experiences within the industry was profound. Bar/None was an independent label, but it was still focused on making a profit. Julian was captivated by the belief that music should be made for love alone, and he went into his bedroom to record songs under the name The Music Tapes that he could share with his new friends. The Music Tapes was a solo project that pre-dated his touring band, and one that his friendship with Elephant 6 members encouraged him to revive.

About these early recordings, Julian says, “My bedroom cassette world was the most important thing to me in the world then. It made my existence. It was the most peaceful, satisfying thing I knew, and there were probably hundreds of hours of recordings. They were closest in nature to ‘The 1st Imaginary Symphony.’ The recording I was proudest of was called ‘The American Foam Rubber Co Symphony Orchestra proudly presents The Silly Putty Symphony.’ I was obsessed with making tapes that felt like places, like worlds you could go and visit. I wanted to make records that were like carnival rides, roller coasters. Tape recording was my imaginary world—it was safe. That was a major part of the kindredness between us when Jeff and Will and I met.”

All of this was in contrast to the experiences he had as a touring and recording musician in the early 1990s. “It was a shock to me that the music business was a business, and the people putting out records were business people. They weren’t people who built lives out of the magic I perceived radiating out of all those records that I loved as a kid. I’d already been thrown into that world. I guess it’s knowing there are monsters in certain places. I was able to run back and say, ‘Okay, there are monsters under these bridges, so we
have to either stay here—or if we’re gonna go up there, let’s run as fast as we can!’”

Elf Power’s Laura Carter says, “I think everyone in Ruston had a hard time, and what pulled them out of it
is music
. You hear that essence
in
Neutral Milk—there’s conflict, and there’s shit, and the music somehow is your ticket up out of that. And that’s a good message! It’s saved a lot of kids. It’s something that a lot of people in very desperate places all can relate to, I think, and people not in desperate places, too.”

Laura blames Robert Schneider for ratcheting up the level of competition among the friends. “These tapes are hilarious, but horrible! It’s Will freaking out, vulgar; they’re like thirteen and fourteen. And then Robert kinda blossomed and brought them
his
songs, and they were all, like, ‘Shit! This guy’s good!’ Robert being this natural, immediately his songs had multiple parts and breakdowns. It was way too advanced for those guys. He inspired them.”

Bill Doss concurs. “I have always been in friendly competition with Robert. He’ll send me a batch of songs that’ll be so catchy and innovative that I’ll have to sit down straightaway and try to show him up by writing something better. Of course, I never have been able to best him, but it has spawned many of what I consider my best songs.”

As for that mysterious Elephant 6 logo? Julian Koster once called it “a family crest for a group of friends.” Laura Carter identifies it as being “more like a visual identification” than a formal record label. To this day, people write to Laura in her capacity as the owner of Orange Twin Records asking if she’ll consider releasing their music on Elephant 6. There’s only one problem: “It’s not a
real label!
” Starting in
1993, Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney ran an Elephant 6 record label in Denver, releasing early works by Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, Marbles, Minders, Music Tapes, Beulah, Secret Square and Von Hemmling, mainly on vinyl. But by 1999, the project was put on indefinite hold. To Laura, E6 represents inspiration for other groups of musicians to form similar support systems in their own towns, to start their own record labels or whatever they need to bring their own dreams to fruition. Trying to join Elephant 6 at this late date is like trying to take a short cut to something anyone can have if they want it badly enough.