Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (7 page)

On May 3, they played in Minneapolis at the Seventh Street Entry, finally giving Jason Norvein Wachtelhausen a chance to see the band that had wormed its way into his and his friends’ consciousness. Jason lived in a loft with a bunch of people, one of whom had “Song Against Sex” on a mix tape. They became collectively obsessed with the song, and would play it like a sort of theme song whenever they were going out. Someone finally bought
On Avery Island
and they loved that, too. Jason remembers, “we spent so much time talking about those guys and wondering about them. Like, what could some guys who could create music like this—this real and untouched by pretension and seemingly unaffected by any desire to succeed as musicians—be like? And we sort of formed this image of the band and all kind of agreed on what they must look like. We’d never seen a picture of them. It all sounds so much like something teenage girls would have done in the fifties and sixties now that I look back on it. I mean, I’m a black guy covered in tattoos
and, all stereotypes aside, it’s even hard for me to imagine myself sitting around with my friends fantasizing about what some dudes in a rock group look like.”

When Jason, who ended up being the only member of his Neutral Milk Hotel fan club to attend, got down to the gig, he saw some scruffy looking characters hanging around outside and thought, “‘Wow, if this band has even made these dirty fuckers get their shit together enough to come see the show, they are really reaching out to the masses.’ And then it turned out that the dirty fuckers were the band. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. These guys were so far from what we had imagined the band would be like and that just made them like five hundred times cooler.”

The Dog Museum was the name under which Jason and his colleagues traveled, a gang loosely allied with a record store in Vermont, interested in literature, humor and language games. They became regular fixtures at Neutral Milk Hotel live appearances all over the US and friends with the Elephant 6 crowd. The next time he saw the band, Jason felt compelled to give Scott his unfinished copy of Amos Tutuola’s
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, which triggered an inter-group book exchange ritual that would see copies of Haruki Murakami’s
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
, René Daumal’s
Mount Analogue
, Voltaire’s
Candide
and various pataphysical texts by Alfred Jarry traded between the camps at future gigs.

Looking back, Jason suggests that the key to Neutral Milk Hotel’s specialness was their refusal, or inability, to fit into a standard rock band mold. “I think the reason they touched so many so deeply was because you always knew they were right there with you. They were so fundamentally
human that they avoided any pedestals we might have been otherwise inclined to put them on. They had the potential to be total rock gods, but blew us all away by being, in the end, just some guys—which wound up being the most inspirational thing in the world.”

By spring 1997, Jeff had written the entire new album. The musicians knew the songs from playing them, but as the recording date grew nearer, Jeff gave them demos, too. The only song not included was the still untitled “Holland, 1945,” which he would finally play for the band in Robert’s studio in Denver.

Jeremy remembers how the songs “sat in my head for months before the recording. I would ride my bike around Chicago and listen in my mind—especially to ‘Ghost.’” During the spring rehearsals, Jeff seemed incredibly excited about what was happening. “He would crank the stereo up and bang along on broken cymbals, and shout. Inevitably he and Scott would end up wrestling to the floor and hurting each other. I think we all had a feeling about the songs, and the sound of the band.”

Since recording
On Avery Island
, Robert Schneider had moved his recording equipment from Kyle Jones’s house into a more versatile space, his friend and Apples bandmate Jim McIntyre’s residence. This was an old storefront fish market and processing plant at 1170 Elati Street, near the corner of 12th Avenue and Speer Boulevard, converted into a studio and living space. It was boarded up in front and looked like an abandoned building, which was good camouflage for a recording studio. It has since been demolished.

Robert paid half the rent in exchange for access to every room save Jim’s bedroom; in turn, Jim could use the studio when Robert wasn’t. They built a control booth with a Mackie 8°Bus Console next to the tiny living room/studio, which with its high ceiling and plaster on every surface sounded terrible, but Robert honed his engineering skills figuring out how to use its limitations. The space was decorated with paintings by Steve Keene, and inhabited by Jim’s
four old indoor cats, who visiting musicians had to be sure not to let outside. Steve’s paintings, which were created for an Apples in Stereo video, were wall-sized tapestries, including one illustrating his imaginary version of what a recording studio might look like, with numerous tape machines hooked up to a spaghetti snarl of switches, dials, pipes and ducts better suited to an air conditioning system than any earthly studio setup.

Instead of a yard, the studio faced out onto a big parking lot where Jeff would stand and practice his songs, enjoying the echoes that bounced off the building. Across the alley was the Musician’s Union, so the sounds of jazz ensembles and horn sections would sometimes bounce back

Robert’s work on
Aeroplane
overlapped with his production of a record for his friends Martyn Leaper and Rebecca Cole, otherwise known as the Minders. The couple lived in a small apartment behind Pet Sounds Studio, and were intrinsically entwined with the Neutral Milk Hotel circus. Work on
Hooray for Tuesday
(SpinArt, 1998) had begun before the Neutral Milk Hotel crew came to town, was put aside during the
Aeroplane
sessions and picked up again after Jeff and crew left town. This album was the culmination of all Robert’s ambitions as a producer and engineer, and inevitably informed his other work. “It was a labor of love for me. I really wanted to make that record perfect, the perfect psychedelic pop,
Revolver
kind of record, from 1966.”
Hooray for Tuesday
wasn’t the only other project in the air: Jim McIntyre was completing his debut Von Hemmling single, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” in his bedroom, and whenever his parts weren’t needed for Neutral Milk Hotel recording Julian Koster was at Andy Gonzalez’s house, recording the
Music Tapes’ “Television Tells Us” and “Aliens.” When Julian was at Pet Sounds, Andy borrowed Julian’s Fostex to record the first Marshmallow Coast record.

Being away from Athens didn’t curb Jeff’s sleep disorder. The close proximity to friends he didn’t always see seemed to exacerbate things. Robert Schneider got used to waking up to a full report of strange nighttime activities from his then wife Hilarie. She would describe conversations that Jeff and Robert, both sound asleep, had conducted through the walls, or nocturnal visits from a sleepwalking, confused Jeff wrapped up in his bed sheet and seeking comfort from his friends. Sometimes Jeff would be having a nightmare and Robert would talk him down, without ever waking up himself.

As with
On Avery Island
, the album began before the rest of the band arrived in Denver, with just Jeff and Robert recording together, laying down some of the simpler, acoustic songs that were actually sparser than what they’d done on the first record. Robert recalls that the opening track, “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One,” was one of the first things they recorded, with Jim and Robert doubling Jeff’s vocals and Robert singing harmony and playing air organ. Jeff’s guitar parts were also doubled to thicken the sound. By late summer 1997, the full consort of players was in place, bringing with them a papier-mâché human head totem that sat on the control board. They even played a couple of Neutral Milk Hotel shows in town, including an August 30 appearance with the Minders and Robert’s project the Marbles at the Across the Street Café, an appearance notable for Jeff’s leaving the payphone off the hook so Laura, still in Athens, could listen to the show.

The arrival of the Athens crew energized their friends in
Denver, which was then the furthest outpost of the Elephant 6 community and a very different scene from what was happening in Georgia. Martyn Leaper recalls feeling that “these guys were onto something, and they were in a community that was very integrated and artistic and really alive. We were a lot more splintered, living in a big city of almost two million people, and honestly apart from the Apples, us and a couple of other bands, there wasn’t really a cohesiveness. When those guys showed up, they even
looked
sort of foreign. It was like a bit of a carnival or a circus, and it very much inspired us. There was a lot going on, it went on for quite a bit, and it was a lot of experimentation. They transplanted that from Athens, and it was very exciting.”

At Pet Sounds, Robert mainly recorded Neutral Milk Hotel in the band room, control room and living room. When working in the studio, he’d spread band members around the house, but keep Jeff close to the control room where they could plug his acoustic guitar straight into the four-track machine if necessary. Although Robert really hates the sound of an acoustic guitar plugged straight into the deck, Jeff was so fond of it that on the
Avery
sessions Robert had just accepted it, occasionally miking the strings to add depth to the recording. On the rare occasions that Robert tried using an electric guitar on these sessions, he immediately recognized that it just didn’t sound like Jeff Mangum music, and he wiped the tracks in favor of the acoustic take.

In the time between
Avery
and
Aeroplane
, Robert applied himself to the problem of finding a way to record Jeff’s guitar acoustically, into a mic rather than straight into the board, that both he and Jeff would be happy with. So while occasionally
Jeff would resort to the line-in approach, or use it in tandem with ambient recording, on most tracks Robert captured the sound of the guitar strings through one of his treasured Neumann U 87 microphones. Robert says, “He didn’t like the way electric guitar sounded—he thought it sounded too standard, like everybody’s record. And he didn’t like the way a straight acoustic sounded, because it was too shiny and tinkly. He liked an acoustic plugged in because he kinda found it fuzzy and raw, like an electric guitar, but it had a strummy quality to it, too. And he was used to writing on the acoustic guitar. And so I had developed an acoustic guitar sound on my own that he was really happy with by the second record, and I think it’s really good.”

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
is one of the fuzziest records ever made, and yet it is completely lacking in over-the-counter fuzz effects. Every bit of distortion was handcrafted to satisfy the demanding ears of Jeff and Robert. Robert explains, “In general, when I record, I tend to max out the equipment. I push the compressors really hard. I like to push the mics. Jeff really liked everything to be coated in a layer of fuzz. I worked very hard to get the fuzz sound—and it was different than the first record—it was a lot better. The fuzz sound is a lot more warm than it is on the first record, and it’s a lot more thick and it permeates the record more. Both of Jeff’s records are very fuzzy compared to other stuff I’ve done. That was a production choice I made, because that was what Jeff wanted to hear. So, regardless of whatever else we were doing, I made everything a little fuzzy just to make it palatable to him. It wasn’t even his vision, because he wasn’t aware of it, it was just his preference. It was what would make the track get used. Any time he didn’t
like something, I would end up putting it through fuzz and play it back to him before he would reject it or keep it. A lot of times he’d end up rejecting it anyway, but I would always put it through a fuzz first.

“We didn’t use fuzztones at all. There are no Big Muffs or distortion pedals or anything like that. I had a few different pieces of equipment at the time. I had a Bellari RP-220 tube mic pre-amp that would distort back on everything. I put the microphone close to Jeff’s guitar. An acoustic guitar has a rattle to it. For me, what’s appealing about acoustic guitar is the way it buzzes. I would position the mic in such a way that it would catch some of that. So right off the acoustic guitar, you’re getting some distortion-like sound—it’s off the strings. Then we put it through the mic pre-amp, and it would be distorted—not terrifically distorted, just a little distorted, so it just sounded overloaded. Then I put it through the mixing board and distorted the mic pre-amp on the console too, then pushed the tape very hard. There were a lot of different sources of distortion, but it was all studio distortion, there was no effect distortion. And also that distortion included horns. Almost all the instruments were sounds that were carried through the air—squeezeboxes, a bagpipe, saws, drums, acoustic guitar. And there was fuzz bass, there was a banjo through the fuzz pedal.

“Every time I used a microphone, I distorted it. So there was some distortion on almost every single instrument. And microphone distortion is different from line-in distortion—line-in distortion sounds punchy, microphone distortion sounds round and thick—and that’s why the Neutral Milk record has that feeling. Microphone distortion is an artificial device you can use in the studio as a production and engineering
choice, to simulate the energetic sound that you’re trying to get. It’s there, the people are playing it—how do you catch it on tape? You do certain artificial things to capture it. One of them is distorting the microphones. It was partially theoretical for me at the time, because I tend to operate a lot on theory, and it was partially just feel. I was just going by what I thought felt right, because I was learning how to engineer. I don’t mean to always focus on things I did, because it was just a small part of it, but it’s the part that I remember the most and that I was closest to. The sound of those things being distorted, and capturing it that way, is something that I developed immediately upon starting to record that record, that sounded like that record to me. The whole time we were recording, there was a certain sound that I was always trying to get, even though I didn’t know how to get it. So that’s the fuzz.”