Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeff Mangum and Me…

It was this really sweet thing in the early days, when Will (Cullen Hart) and Jeff (Mangum) and Robert (Schneider) would give each other tapes of these songs, and some of these songs are just god awful, terrible. They were just thirteen year old boys yelling. "F*ck your mama," and bashing on the drums as hard as they can. It was just kids having fun, and they would fill up a whole cassette tape with this two-track recording of just dog sh*t, and they put this Elephant 6 logo on it, and would be like, "Hey man, I made you an album!" They're hysterical.
Laura Carter, Elf Power band member and Orange Twin Records founder
The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it’ll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I’m telling. Then I start building little bridges—word bridges—to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end. A continuous stream of words keeps coming out like little blobs, usually in some sort of order. They come at me at random and I have to piece them together. I’ll hear lots of parts, but the songs are like little blurs in my brain. They’re whole entities, but it’s weird—I write them and I sing them and I envision them for what they are, and the recordings never go very far from that, but at the same time when they do become recordings they become like a whole other thing. It takes a little while to get used to the music coming from these speakers instead of inside my head. It’s very exciting to hear that, like when we play live, but it’s very strange.
Jeff Mangum, Pitchfork interview, 1997

I’m very influenced by the circus. A lot of the dreams that I have, I’m in the circus. I have this song called “Ferris Wheel on Fire,” and in the dreams a lot of times I’ll be walking around and there is this Ferris wheel in flames, and I’m on the ground walking through the crowd—a lot of the songs are influenced by my dreams. And where my dreams come from, I have no idea. When I was a kid, the bed used to feel like concrete, and I always had this dream where this bomb was rolling towards me, and everything was moving really incredibly fast, but it would never reach me. And I’d wake up, and my hands would feel totally enormous, and the bed would feel like concrete.
Jeff Mangum, Pitchfork interview, 1997

***In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998) signed by Jeff Mangum, Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes, Scott Spillane***

When I started writing “Ghost,” it's like the 10th track, the song that goes “Ghost, ghost I know you live within me,” because we thought we had a ghost living in the house, living in the bathroom. So I locked the door and started trying to sing to the ghost in the bathroom. But then that was sort of like singing about the ghost that we thought was constantly whistling in the other room that kept waking me up, and then a ghost that may or may not live within myself. And it also ended up being more of a reference to Anne Frank. And a lot of the songs on this record are about Anne Frank.
Right before recording On Avery Island I was walking around in Ruston waiting to go to Denver to record. I don’t consider myself to be a very educated person, ’cause I’ve spent a lot of my life in dreams... And I was walking around wondering, “If I knew the history of the world, would everything make more sense to me or would I just lose my mind?” And I came to the conclusion that I’d probably just lose my mind. The next day I went into a bookstore and walked to the wall in the back, and there was The Diary of Anne Frank. I’d never given it any thought in my entire life. I spent two days reading it and then completely flipped out... I spent about three days crying, and just was completely flipped-out. While I was reading the book, she was alive to me. I pretty much knew what was going to happen.
But that’s the thing: You love people because you know their story. You have sympathy for people even when they do stupid things because you know where they’re coming from, you understand where they’re at in their head. And so here I am as deep as you can go in someone’s head, in some ways deeper than you can go with even someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. And that was something that completely blew my mind. The references to her on the record—like “Ghost” refers to her being born. And I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.
Jeff Mangum writing In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
I’ve cried while listening to the album. I still hear things in it that I missed from previous listens. The thing with this record is that it can’t be heard casually, it has to be an event! You first of all have to listen to the entire thing. The track sequencing alone demands it, if the tide and momentum don’t pull you along. These songs should not be broadcast as singles on a radio show. They are all linked to this prescribed chain and it all flows together. You can put it on in a room full of friends and conversations will just drop. People regularly hold their water to finish listening to this record. People sit in cars in driveways all over the world waiting to cut the engine and go inside until that chair squeaks and Jeff ‘gets up to leave’. This album commands attention but never demands it, you know?
Jamey Huggins, Of Montreal and Great Lakes musician on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

It seems only a dream. Nearly seven years ago, my eldest daughter Kendall and I saw the elusive and enigmatic Jeff Mangum perform with his celebrated band Neutral Milk Hotel at the Klein Auditorium in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In keeping with Jeff’s reputation as the J.D. Salinger of Rock, the concert was barely advertised, there was no signage and we were lucky to score two great seats in the historic, restored Klein. Jeff had recently emerged from a self imposed fifteen year exile, regrouped his band, embarked on a worldwide tour, and had a headlining gig at Coachella, a festival of 90,000 besotted fans in the desert hills of Indio, California. It was quite a distance from Jeff’s initial beginnings in Ruston, Louisiana, a sleepy town of twenty-thousand, home to Louisiana Tech University, alma mater to Terry Bradshaw, an NFL wordsmith of lesser talents and, unfortunately, more renown.

Like most communities in the South, football is revered as the dominant male sport and a magnet for participation. Jeff didn't share this reverence. While trying out in junior high, his efforts were as uninspired as the lackluster attempts by his eventual music cohort Will Cullen Hart, "Neither one of us found it very interesting. We were the ones lagging behind," Will remembered. They did share a love of music, so they quit and jammed together. Initially, Will played guitar while Jeff played drums, a portent of his later extremely percussive approach on guitar. Soon, they were joined by Robert Schneider (who formed Apples In Stereo and created Pet Sounds Studios in Denver) and Bill Doss (who co-founded the Olivia Tremor Control with Will Hart). Certainly, there was an abundance of talent in Ruston, or as Will put it, "There was a group of us that gelled together because we didn't want to be in Whitesnake." Amen, one Whitesnake is definitely more than enough!

While still in high school, Jeff and his friends would haunt the college radio station at Louisiana Tech. Will Hart explained, "We were like, 'Look, we don't have that many friends. Can we maybe come up here and do a show?' " Once there, the embarrassment of riches which indie college radio afforded transfixed them. "We'd spend hours and hours just going through the records and pulling things out and going, 'God, this looks great! I want to hear this," Bill Doss recalled. They also began to share homemade tapes of original music amongst themselves, absorbing the influences of the Beach Boys, the Zombies, Syd Barrett and other psychedelic pop, a far cry from grunge which was the prevalent music genre at the time. On the tapes, they wrote "Elephant 6," which Will explained: "To me, it was a spirit thing especially, listen to the music inside yourself and don't give up. It's real. A lot of people saw it as a logo or a catchphrase, and it was that, maybe, but it's more than that..." And Jeff Mangum certainly agreed, "When we started the Elephant 6 thing, we had a very utopian vision that we could overcome anything through music. The music wasn't just there for entertainment. We were trying to create some sort of change. We had a desire to transform our lives and the listeners' lives." Thus was the Elephant 6 Recording Company, a collective of like minded sonic explorers, friends helping friends on their projects, with no President or Board of Directors.

Dropping out of Louisiana Tech after one year, Jeff moved in the early 1990s to Athens, Georgia, a rich music environment and a thriving scene led by the B-52s and R.E.M., one of the biggest rock bands at the time. Like his friends, Jeff was restless and eager to escape the confines of his hometown, and he continued to nurture his relationships with Will Hart, Bill Doss and Robert Schneider. As Jeff explained in 1997, “We sort of record for each other and write songs for each other. And like anytime that I’m in here recording, I’ll be going places that I don’t understand, and I’ll know that my friend Will’s gonna listen to it. I’ll give him a tape and he’ll really dig it. So that gives me a certain kind of gratification, to put something on a tape and walk down the street and hand it to him... There’s about twenty-five people that all came here from Ruston that live here now. It’s really funny; we all gravitated towards each other. We’ve just always played together our whole lives, but we’re not this closed club or something. There are people showing up all the time and they go, ‘Well I sort of bow this thing and it makes a squeaky sound!’ And then we go ‘Waaaa! Cool, man! Come squeak on this thing over here!’ If anyone wants to play, they just have to show up and want to play."

***On Avery Island (1996) signed by Jeff Mangum, Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes, Scott Spillane***

In 1994, Jeff moved to Denver to record On Avery Island, his first album under the moniker Neutral Milk Hotel, at Pet Sounds Studio, produced by Robert Schneider, his childhood friend. Schneider and Mangum played virtually all the instruments, a cacophonous mix of guitars, air organs, xylophones, fuzz bass, tapes, trombone, and sundry Indonesian instruments thrown in for good measure. When released, the album elicited some good reviews and Jeff returned to Athens to create a band so they could play the songs properly and tour. He enlisted Jeremy Barnes on drums, multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster on banjo, guitars, Lowrey Wandering Genie organ, and singing saw, and Scott Spillane on trombone and trumpet. According to Laura Carter, Mangum's girlfriend at the time and later a founder of Orange Twin Records and a member of Elf Power, “None of us were professional musicians on any level, except Jeremy. Scotty learned to play the trumpet so fast and beautifully with no teacher, no experience, no nothing, just because he understood the goal and everybody believed in it.”

The recruitment of Scott Spillane was unusual. Though they were old Ruston friends and had played together in Clay Bears, a previous band, Jeff crossed paths with Spillaine in 1996 in Austin, Texas at Gumby's Pizza where Scotty was slinging dough during the night shift. Spillane recounted, "At two o'clock in the morning, all the drunks order pizza, and I was the only one in the store, so I was like, 'Come back here and help me throw this dough.' I just taught him how to put the sauce on the pizza. After about forty-five minutes of that, it calmed down, and we went outside to smoke a cigarette and he said, 'Man, this job sucks. You should come with me to New York.' " Gumby’s culinary loss was music’s gain as Spillane quit, took a bus to New York and squatted at Julian Koster's apartment in the city, "There were five of us, a dog, a cat living there in one room, about the size of a van." During the week, their squalor abated when they practiced at Koster's grandmother's home on Long Island. Their chops sufficiently strengthened, they toured, opening for acts as celebrated as Superchunk and as wondrously obscure as Supreme Dicks, still incredulous that their 1994 release Working Man's Dick didn't bring more acclaim.

In 1997, Spillane got a call to rejoin Magnum and his Elephant 6 cohorts in Denver to record Neutral Milk Hotel's masterwork, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, "He said he'd feed me and buy me cigarettes for however long it took. So we ate rice and tofu with barbeque sauce on it every day for a month. We didn't do anything else then, except play a video game or two." While the band members shared their many musical talents, Jeff wrote nearly all the songs, which were an homage to the tragic life of Anne Frank. But it wasn't that simple or direct. The imagery of the lyrics was so graphic, varied and wild that they seemed the rantings of a stark, raving madman. Or a genius. Or both.

"In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"

And one day we will die

And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea

But for now we are young

Let us lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see

Love to be

In the arms of all I'm keeping here with me

"Ghost"

Ghost, ghost, I know you were within me, feel you as you fly

In thunder clouds above the city, into one that I loved

With all that was left within me till we tore in two

Now wings and rings and there's so many waiting here for you

And she was born in a bottle rocket, 1929

With wings that ringed around a socket right between her spine

All drenched in milk in holy water pouring from the sky

I know that she will live forever, she won't ever die

"The King Of Carrot Flowers Part 3"

Up and over we go through the wave and undertow

I will float until I learn to swim

Inside my mother in a garbage bin

Until I find myself again, again

Up and over we go with mouths open wide and spitting still

I will spit until I learn to speak

Up through the doorway as the sideboards creek

With them ever proclaiming me, me

"Two Headed Boy Part 2"

And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle

God is a place where where some holy spectacle lies

When we break, we'll wait for our miracle

God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

Two-headed boy, she is all you could need

She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires

And return to sheets safe and clean

But don't hate her when she gets up to leave

The instrumentation and melodies were as challenging as the lyrics. Producer Robert Schneider disclosed, "He has a strong sense of what's cool, and for him, cool is very weird, like out of left field, like something you've never heard before on a record... I would generate a lot of ideas and record a lot of stuff, and most of the time, Jeff would veto it. He would always have feelings. Like one night, he dreamed about Tibetan monks chanting. The next day, he said, 'I want to have something that sounds like the way that felt.' " Jeff's bandmates were more than equal to the task: Julian Koster contributed a singing saw, basically an industrial saw that bends and, when manipulated with a bow, creates an eerie and ethereal sound, as hauntingly beautiful and ghostly as a Theremin, Laura Carter played a zanzithophone, a digital horn made by Casio in the mid 1980s which evoked bagpipes and other synthesized sounds, and Robert Schneider worked with Sott Spillane and Rick Benjamin on the horn sections. Julian Koster noted, "The tension of Scott being heartfelt, explosive, and Robert trying to superimpose arrangement and control, made for something nice." And driving the band with his nasal whine was Jeff Mangum, braying his surreal, dadaist lyrics with a force and potency that was otherworldly.

***Everything Is (1995 EP, 2011 reissue) cover artwork by Will Cullen Hart***

For their initial production run, Merge Records ordered 5,500 CDs and 1,600 vinyi, a prudent order given the limited success of On Avery Island. However, demand far outstripped supply and the record has sold more than 500,000 copies in the ensuing decades and continues to sell upwards of 25,000 copies each year. It has become one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved records in indie rock and many bands - Beirut, Bright Eyes and The Decemberists among others - have cited Neutral MilkHotel as a seminal influence for their uncommon instrument choices and elliptical songwriting. In fact, Grammy winner and arena rockers Arcade Fire acknowledged that they signed with Merge Records because it was Neutral Milk Hotel’s label.

All this success and notoriety didn’t help Jeff though. The worldwide tour was wearying and Jeff became more disconsolate and withdrawn. After their last gig at the Underworld in Camden, England on October 12, 1998, Jeff decided to retreat and stop performing. He even declined hometown heroes R.E.M's request to open for them on their upcoming world tour in 1999, which would have widened the Neutral Milk Hotelaudience considerably.The weight and burden of being a savior and a savant was too much. As Bill Doss told The Guardian in 2011, "Jeff's a very private person and kids were freaking out over him, following him around, these little packs of kids staring at him. It weirded him out in a way, and he just sort of backed off."

Poster signed by Jeff, Mangum, Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes, Scott Spillane

Laura Carter agreed, "When Neutral Milk Hotel started to get so popular, Jeff started to back away from the whole thing. A lot of people that were approaching us at shows started to have a cultish behavior, and for me that was scary, because we're just people. We were excited to have this really develop into something wonderful, So at first, there was just total excitement, then as it kept snowballing, there was a little bit of fear... In some ways, I think that Jeff is a genius who knew the mystery of dropping out. Like Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt who waited another ten years to make an album. That is cooler than seeing a band grind into the ground playing the same songs and traveling around the country. Part of me thinks that the attitude of the fans was overwhelming. People were like, 'I was going to kill myself and you saved my life.' That's a hard act to live up to, and if your next album sucks, what are they going to do? Go kill themselves?"

The fans weren’t the only ones who were merciless in their pursuit. Journalists also wanted to dredge up information, including details about his parents’ messy divorce. This was not what Jeff intended as he responded to one particularly persistent writer, “I’m not an idea. I am a person who obviously wants to be left alone. If my music has meant anything to you, then you’ll respect that. Since it’s my life and my story, I think I should have a little say as to when it’s told. I haven’t been given that right.”

As Jeff also elaborated in 2002, "I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after. So when so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw so many of my friends in pain, I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I just couldn't sing my way out of all this suffering. I realized that I wanted to take a deeper life in order to become kind of a truly healing force in people's everyday lives." And then he disappeared...

***Ferris Wheel On Fire (2011 reissue)***

So it was with complete shock that Neutral Milk Hotel regrouped and played a gig in our backyard on September 7, 2014 at the Klein Auditorium in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Erin was busy with our two younger kids, so I brought my oldest daughter Kendall, who was not quite seventeen at the time. She was very excited to see Neutral Milk Hotel, having grown up with their enthralling music. I wanted to make sure that I got a couple of records signed before the show as I was nervous that Jeff might disappear after the show. He had that ability. I happened to know the head of security (thanks Bernie!) so Kendall and I hung out near the backstage entrance to the Klein. One by one, the band members stopped to chat with Kendall and I, and signed the vinyl. Julian Koster and Scott Spillane couldn't have been any nicer, Julian even added a stick man self portrait. Jeremy Barnes was with his wife, the talented violinist Heather Trost, who was sitting in with the band. I told Jeremy that I was a big fan of A Hawk and A Hacksaw, his current band, and that I was sorry I didn't have any vinyl, just a couple of CDs. He was very gracious as was Heather.

Jeff Mangum came last. He looked like a Duck Dynasty cast off, long hair, even longer beard, funky, colorful sweater probably picked from a Salvation Army dumpster dive, and what looked like a Cuban military hat screwed on tight. He signed the records which Kendall gave him. I was respectful and said quietly, ‘We are so thrilled to see you tonight. Thank you so much for your music.’ “Thank you,” he replied and left, averting any eye contact. Kendall and I were thrilled with our brief encounter and went inside to watch the show.

The show did not disappoint. Though Jeff had been in seclusion, his vocals were strong and intact after a nearly fifteen year stage absence. He opened with a solo acoustic version of "I Will Bury You In Time," and then, the rest of the band joined and lit into a driving “Holland, 1945,” a stunning performance. Jeff sang and played guitar with such passion, fury and abandon, it felt like he was singing for his life, which he probably was. The crowd knew all the words and mouthed along, no small feat, especially given the lyrical excesses of Jeff’s nine minute opus “Oh Comely.” The encore was "Two Headed Boy, Part 2," the last song on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, a fitting end to a remarkable show. To be sure, Jeff and his friends in all their ragged gloriousness were “truly a healing force in people's everyday lives, singing away so much suffering.”

I feel blessed to have shared this amazing concert experience with my daughter. Occasionally, even now, these many years later, I'll pinch myself and ask her, 'Did we really see Neutral Milk Hotel at the Klein?' Kendall assures me that we did. I still think it was only a dream.