Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (5 page)

Julian says, “Everything we needed was there. And we would go into the city and occasionally wander around, but we really were having so much fun playing. We literally were playing all day and all night, recording all night. There were no hours, nothing mattered. When we weren’t making Neutral Milk Hotel music—and it was all starting to be new music, too, the stuff that became
Aeroplane
all came out of that period—we started planning for this tour which was still largely imaginary. I don’t think it existed in any real way, but
we were gonna do this tour!
We also had a recording four-track set up in the basement, four-track set up in the bedrooms, so there was
recording in every room. It was wonderful.”

As a quartet, all the promise of their various collaborations over the years was realized. Julian marvels, “That thing which had always been felt between us, it was almost like this weird physical explosion that had been inside all of us for so many years. It was kind of crazy and exciting and exhausting too. And Jeremy was—I realize he wasn’t a teenager anymore—but just this tornado of a boy; drums were flying against the wall! Just realizing what it was that we were making and how strange it was; I remember being very conscious of what a hilarious combination of things we were.”

As Jeremy sees it, Julian was the person who brought them all together, so it’s no surprise that his grandmother provided a cozy nest in which the fledgling band could find their wings. Also under Julian’s encouragement, the players stretched out from the instruments they thought of as their specialties, and began swapping with each other, in rehearsals and onstage. Jeremy—who currently plays simultaneous accordion and percussion via a complex system of taped-on drumsticks and a furry, bell-draped hat in A Hawk and A Hacksaw—remembers that “before I met these people, I thought that I was only a drummer, that I had to concentrate on my role as a drummer. Then Julian would hand me his Moog or his accordion and tell me to get off the drums for some songs. I was free to do anything.”

Down in the basement on any given day, Scott Spillane could be heard honking on a silver two-valve horn that Robbie Cucchiaro had given him. Scott, who in high school had played both euphonium and baritone horns, and in college the tuba, had decided to focus on the brass instruments as his contribution to Neutral Milk Hotel, in addition to
playing some guitar. Recognizing that
someone
was going to have to replicate Rick Benjamin’s horn parts from
On Avery Island
, he parked himself below stairs and began painstakingly learning the songs. By playing six to eight hours a day, he satisfied himself that he could go out onstage and bring those parts to life. (Scott stresses that Rick Benjamin’s influence on Neutral Milk Hotel’s brassy sound can’t be understated. “He played horns on the first record, and if he hadn’t done that then I would’ve never picked up a horn in a rock and roll setting, ever. No way. He plays the sweetest horn and they got it on tape, and I tried to mock it with a trumpet and had to go on from there. He’s hardcore. He’s a great musician.”)

Finally the day came when they felt ready to take the music and chaos they were learning to harness out of the basement and into a rock club. A month after the album came out, on April 28, 1996, they played a showcase at Brownie’s for the benefit of an interested booking agent, who coincidentally put them on a bill with Olivia Tremor Control. It was a happy omen. At that first true Neutral Milk Hotel gig, playing songs from
On Avery Island
and from what would become
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
, then joining their friends’ band for a wild psychedelic jam, the quartet discovered that the strange maelstrom they inhabited had the power to change lives other than their own. After their set, a friend told them he’d had to go outside and walk around for a long time, because the experience was so emotionally overwhelming.
New York Times
pop critic Neil Strauss also attended, and wrote a glowing review.

On the first of July, Neutral Milk Hotel played the opening date of their debut national tour, with Pee and old
friends the Supreme Dicks at the Kilowatt in San Francisco. (This was a homecoming of sorts for Scott Spillane, who with John D’Azzo had tried to make a go of the Gerbils in San Francisco several years earlier.) Three days later, Jeff played a much-bootlegged solo set at Aquarius Records, the Mission District independent shop that would prove especially supportive of the band. He began his set that day with the unreleased “Oh Comely” and “Ghost,” both of which would turn up on
Aeroplane
.

That week, the band went out to the western edge of the city to visit the Musée Mechanique, Ed Zelinsky’s fabulous collection of vintage penny arcade machines depicting hoochie-coochie dancers, execution scenes, magicians, insanely detailed fairground dioramas and Laughing Sal, a gigantic chortling robot whose booming tones haunt every San Francisco child’s dreams. (It appears that one of the band members brought a recording device into the Musée, then used the sound somewhere on
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
, explaining the notation “A Penny Arcade in California” that appears in the track listing on the poster included with the “Holland, 1945” single.)

After that first visit, Jeff and his friends never missed a chance to stop at the Musée Mechanique when they were in the Bay Area. The collection has since relocated to Fisherman’s Wharf, but in the late 90s it occupied a singularly spooky perch just below the Cliff House in an old, dim and mildewed space that served the arcane holdings well. On one such visit, the band members spied a most curious child. As Scott tells it, “We’re walking around looking at all this stuff, playing little things, and I turn around and there’s this little girl—I swear to god, she’s like ten years old—
spitting
fucking image
of Anne Frank! Like you would not believe. I’m like, [whispers] ‘Jeff!’ and we were both just watching. Is that a ghost? We were totally spaced out by that point. She was with her family. It was just kinda weird, being in
that
place and seeing that little girl.”

From San Francisco they swung up to Seattle, then joined label mates Butterglory in Chicago for a quick circuit around Ohio, New York City (where Stephin Merritt was also on the bill) and the Northeast, finishing up in Saint Louis on July 25. On August 1, they returned to New York for a show at the Knitting Factory with the Supreme Dicks, and on September 6 played a Merge Records showcase at the Westbeth Theatre with Guv’ner, Lambchop, Portastatic and Spent.

One of the major benefits of going out on the road was the thrifting. Julian recalls, “Jeff and I shared a common thing for thrift stores. I’m obsessed. Most of the time, I find records that are not from any world or context that I recognize, and they’re beautiful. I know that Jeff completely shares that.” Some of Julian’s favorite thrift scores are
Ukrainian Christmas Songs
on Folkways (“probably my favorite record in the world”) and a Hawaiian recording,
Ray Kinney and his Choral Islanders.
When asked who his favorite contemporary bands were during the
Aeroplane
years, Julian demurs, “it’s more fun to discover things. And there’s such an unbelievable mountain of things that you can dig through, and so many wonderful things have already happened and are out there waiting to be discovered.”

That October, Jeff went out on tour with Olivia Tremor Control, playing solo sets along the Atlantic seaboard, with the final show bringing them home to Athens. On October
5, he made a solo appearance in New York’s Other Music store, where he previewed “Oh Comely,” “Ghost,” “King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3” and the then untitled “Holland, 1945.” In all, it was a civilized tour schedule that served to alert fans and the media to the band’s existence without exhausting anyone.

And out in the papers,
On Avery Island
scored a respectable #35 in the
Village Voice
’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll for 1996 and received a smattering of enthused reviews by writers who were captivated by Jeff’s independence and lofi vision. The album sold about 5,000 copies, which was very good for a band on their level.

The tour told the tale—Neutral Milk Hotel was real, and there was no way the players were going to go back where they had started. None of them really had a proper home to go back to, anyway (Julian and Robbie had been evicted from that nearly free apartment in the Village). There was that old dream about living in Athens. And Will Hart was there. They decided to give it another chance.

It was good timing. Athens was booming with an influx of creative, interesting people. Bryan Poole (aka The Late B.P. Helium) marvels how “everybody sort of coalesced at the same time. Jeff and Will and Bill and a bunch of other people who had maybe come and gone from Athens in the early nineties. Everybody came back at the same time and knew that an exciting thing was happening. Athens is a special place. I think a lot of people were looking for an Athens. They just knew. If you talked to people, like the Olivia guys, ‘yeah, it’s going really good here, things are happening’; Will,
telling everybody, ‘it’s great.’ We all came back and we were all good friends.”

When Scott Spillane arrived, he immediately lobbied friends like John D’Azzo to join him, insisting, “We can do great things here!” When he got to town, there were already several dozen people he knew from Ruston, and with passionate boosters like Scott around, more were on the way.

The Elephant 6 collective settled themselves into a series of communal Athens houses. Jeff’s base was 156 Grady Avenue, an old wood-frame house on a lovely street lined with big trees. Officially, the house was split into two apartments—an old law on the Athens books forbids more than two unrelated people from sharing a dwelling—but the residents only engaged the padlocks closing off the two halves when the Fire Marshall visited. One room was covered in aluminum foil (that’s one of the walls, picked out with stars, on the back of
On Avery Island
).

Jeff shared the Grady Avenue house with Julian Koster, Robbie Cucchiaro, Laura Carter and Bryan Poole. As might be expected, it was a very loud place to live. Bryan lived between Jeff and Julian’s rooms. “I had Jeff pacing the room with his acoustic guitar, belting out at the top of his lungs, working through the songs. It was a really intense thing. And then I’ve got Julian on the other side, who’s bouncing a kick-ball for percussion, and stomping his foot, and recording the same song fifty times! Every day! After I moved out, Will Hart moved in for like two weeks and he couldn’t take it.”

One unwelcome guest at Grady Avenue was broadcast television. When Bryan moved in and set his TV set up in the living room, Jeff clued him in: “I don’t know, Julian has kind of a thing about televisions. We might have to put a
blanket over it.” So there was no television watching to distract the housemates from their own creative endeavors. (Ironically, Julian later bought Bryan’s TV and made it a member of his band The Music Tapes, under the stage name Static.)

As if afraid or unwilling to slow down, Jeff fueled his creativity with cigarettes and endless cups of coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, staying awake until dawn working and reworking the songs that would end up on
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
. When he did sleep, strange things happened. Jeff was subject to night terrors, waking dreams and sleepwalking, and occasionally would bring his housemates along for the ride. Laura remembers one night when “he thought that all these monks were coming in the house, and there were buckets of water, and he was trying to move these buckets out of the way because the monks were gonna spill them all over the floor. He’s jumping around, telling me, ‘The monks are here! You gotta get out of the house!’ I was sound asleep and I woke up. ‘Get out the window!’ And I got out the window! And I’m standing outside in my underwear in suburbia. And then I realized, god, he’s just dreaming, I better get back in there.”

Jeff’s favorite place to sing was in the bathroom—fortunately, the house had two—and nearly everyone who visited has stories of hearing Jeff’s booming voice and amplified acoustic strum from behind the closed door. Fellow songwriters marveled that he rarely seemed to write lyrics down, instead working out songs by singing them again and again until the words fell into a repeatable pattern. Ben Crum, from the Athens band Great Lakes, quotes his friend Louis Schefano, who Jeff once told that he almost felt like he
didn’t write the songs that ended up on
Aeroplane
at all, “but that he had just channeled them from somewhere.”

In addition to the (relatively) conventional songs he was writing, or channeling, Jeff devoted considerable time to making tape loops inspired by musique concrète composers like Pierre Henry. Ultimately, he chose not to release these recordings, although some of these would be played on Jeff’s show on WFMU that aired in 2002.

As a songwriter, Bryan was fascinated by Jeff’s creative process. “I could tell when he would be pacing around the room that those songs would be so personal. They came from a space inside of him that he wasn’t even sure where it was coming from. He says he has these pieces, these film strips. A lot of the time I think he pieces together these things in his head that he sees.” Sometimes the music from the next room sounded so magical, Bryan idly thought about putting in a tape and hitting play—but it would so clearly be a violation of Jeff’s trust that he never acted on the idea.

Bryan was also curious to hear what the genius next door was listening to. He discovered that Jeff had a great, eclectic record collection. Pierre Henry was a constant, and Jeff liked to play and sing along to Neil Young’s song “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” probably the only mainstream music Bryan ever heard from his room. He’d play weird old Folkways ethnographic records, free jazz on Impulse, electronic music. And
everyone
in Jeff’s circle seemed to adore the Minutemen, that jazzy San Pedro punk trio who were as close as brothers, with an intense connection that must have seemed familiar to the Elephant 6 collective.