Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

by Cooper, Kim

  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.

  One important Ruston hot spot was the Monroe House, so named not because its residents were from nearby Monroe, but for its location at 411 South Monroe Street—just across from the Fun-O-Mat, a combination bar, nightclub and laundromat. The five-bedroom house had once housed a fraternity, but the University severed its relationship with the chapter, and the frat boys gradually dispersed. Scott Spillane, who lived there, recalls it as an inexpensive crash pad where someone would always be passed out on the couch and the mornings were filled with the sound of guitar solos and drum practice.

  Ross Beach lived in the Monroe House in the summer of 1993, when the housemates threw five all-night parties, each drawing about 150 people (not counting the inevitable visit from the Ruston police). Olivia Tremor Control—then comprised of Will, Bill and Jeff, drumming with metal coat hangers, presumably because he couldn’t afford drumsticks—was the unofficial house band, sharing informal bills with a variety of Ruston and Monroe groups. Ross remembers that Jeff “usually played a solo acoustic set during which the entire loud raucous party would become a hush, with people sitting down on the floor to take in his performance. Anytime he took the stage, it was immediately compelling.” Jeff almost lived in the Monroe House, but moved out after just one night in fall 1993 because the signal from KLPI was bleeding into his Fostex X-26 four-track, making it impossible to record there.

  Local bands could play at Monroe House parties, but the residents also had a deal with the Fun-O-Mat (later called the Dry Dock, after the owners took the washers out), so when bigger bands stopped off in Ruston they could get their friends’ bands on the bill as the opening act. And bigger bands did stop off in Ruston, which was uniquely placed halfway between Memphis and New Orleans on the north/south circuit, and
between Jackson and Dallas on the east/west. Scott says, “For bands that were touring, it was a good place to set up for the night. They might not get a lot of money, but they would play at our house, or at Fun-O-Mat. The radio station would do promos for the shows. We had Sebadoh, Beat Happening, Pork, Viva Knievel [Kathleen Hanna’s first band]. We’d catch all these bands that were touring all over the place, and of course we would set up the opening bands—whoever was available, which turned out to be the Gerbils!”

  There were other Ruston dwellings where creativity flowered. Will Hart lived at the Bond Street House, where many early Elephant 6 recordings were made, and Bill Doss had an apartment on Sparta Street. Then there was the Trenton Street House, a one-bedroom where as many as six people would be crashing at any time.

  For Julian Koster, visiting Ruston really meant spending time in the countryside outside of town. There was a girl called Squashie whose parents had a farm and allowed the Elephant 6 crowd to host small music festivals and roam around their cow pastures. Sometimes they’d lure touring bands out to participate, which is how Hampshire College’s Supreme Dicks happened to play several times in the area. Scott recalls that John Fernandes went to their show in Shreveport and asked them back to Ruston to play poker, thus starting a relationship that would culminate in some Neutral Milk Hotel/Supreme Dicks gigs in 1996.

  One time when Julian visited, he found Will and Jeff house-sitting outside of town. They had a four-track there and ended up collaborating on some recordings, with Julian playing the accordion that he’d just acquired through a typical bit of Julian happenstance. “I had been traveling around and ended up staying with this friend’s uncle in Texas. This accordion was on top of this shelf of books. It completely captivated me, and I ended up playing it for a long time. The guy came out as we were going—he was really gruff—‘All right, you can take it! Now just go before I change my mind!’ So I ended up with this accordion that just sounded unbelievable. It had the richest low tones.” On this visit, too, Julian watched Will completing the artwork for the first Apples single, and began to sense that Elephant 6 was “the foothold, the word combination that suddenly began to signify this collection of feelings.”

  Athens, which almost but doesn’t quite make it

  By the time Jeff Mangum and his friends were old enough to start thinking about where they might want to live, Athens, Georgia, was already firmly imprinted on the consciousness of young, hip America as a desirable destination. From outside, it looked like an Eden for nascent musicians, whether they were ethereal traditionalists like R.E.M. or arty party geeks like the B-52’s and Pylon. Plus there was a college, so you could convince your parents that you were doing something with your life. Rent was cheap, part-time jobs plentiful. Rent was so cheap, in fact, that the element of desperation that played such a large part in the experience of musicians in urban centers was nearly entirely lacking—bands could bum around, exploring their influences and developing their own identities with a leisurely Southern cadence. Add to the mix several good record stores, enthusiastic fans and a generally appealing atmosphere of genteel decay and in retrospect it seems natural that Athens would flare up as it did.

  Like scientists wondering if a given planet has the building blocks to generate life, rock historians like to puzzle over why some towns suddenly belch up that elusive quarry, the Scene. It seems random, and it maybe is. Why Minneapolis in ’84, Seattle in ’89, London in ’66 and San Francisco in ’67? Athens in the early 1980s had everything necessary to nourish a scene, and happily, it did. And if by the time the Elephant 6 gang arrived most of that magic magma had bubbled away to feed some other city’s nightlife, that didn’t mean it wasn’t still a very nice place to live and to play.

  Athens became the official destination of the E6 crowd when Will Cullen Hart and Jeff Mangum accompanied Robert Schneider on a trip to Shreveport with Cherry Red—a junior high school punk/new wave band featuring Robert on lead vocals—which was booked to play a gig at Water-world (Will and Jeff justified their presence by jumping onstage with kazoos to help out on “Mellow Yellow”). In the car down, the trio made a pact that after high school, they would all move to Athens—a town none of them had visited up to that point. Robert changed his mind and followed his family to Denver after graduation, and many of his friends came out for a short time to try living there, too. But eventually most of the Ruston weirdo community wound up making Athens their home.

  During two separate periods, around 1991 and then again circa 1994, Athens would exert a seemingly magnetic pull on the Rustonians. The first time it happened, the force field wavered and sent them all bouncing around the country before they’d had a chance to properly congeal as a creative community. On the second go-round, it held.

  Athenian Lance Bangs first became aware of the Ruston contingent when he saw a performance by Synthetic Flying Machine, the three-piece comprised of Will Hart, Bill Doss and Jeff Mangum on drums. This was in Frijoleroes, a burrito joint where bands sometimes played for free. “They were kind of like weird, noisy psychedelic music. It’s my understanding later that they included some early versions of what became Neutral Milk Hotel songs, but nothing that I understood or recognized at the time. It was interesting, because they’d come to Athens from Ruston and had a different thing going on from the darker, guitar-based, angsty thing that was happening with a lot of the bands in town. After Nirvana, people were into the Jesus Lizard or a bunch of bands on Touch & Go or Amphetamine Reptile. So it seemed like this band was weirder and more psychedelic, and yet were young people doing an interesting thing that wasn’t just a retread.”

  Lance recalls that there was no awareness among Athens music people of the history of home recording that preceded Will, Bill and Jeff’s arrival in town. There was, however, a sense that Julian Koster was an interesting multi-disciplinary artist—he made sculptures and funny, offbeat videotapes—and musician. So when Julian began collaborating with the Ruston crew, that reflected well on them.

  Julian Koster says, “I think we’d all been drawn to Athens. I found it incredibly beautiful, at that time especially. There was almost nothing here. The sense of motion that permeated most places didn’t seem to exist here. It felt as if it were a sleepover camp.” Julian and a friend had arrived in Athens in the early 90s, knowing no one. At first they slept in their car, but were almost immediately invited into the home of some musicians they met. Julian couldn’t get over the way people didn’t lock their houses and how welcoming they were to strangers. And he loved the little downtown basement club called the Downstairs—ostensibly a restaurant, although the only cooking apparatus was a toaster oven—with its pile of records that anyone could play.

  Soon he hooked up with Jeff and Will, who he recognized as soul-friends, and with whom he stayed in touch even as they all scattered to other parts of the country. Julian was pulled away by his band commitments, but even so, once Jeff and Will were gone there wasn’t much reason for him to stay in Athens. But the bond between the trio remained strong. Julian says, “We were part of each others’ imaginations by that point. I could be alone somewhere, but they were always there with me. They were waiting to be inspired by me and I was waiting to be inspired by them. They were really, really special friendships that didn’t have much to do with geography or even being around each other.”

  On one of Julian’s band’s tour stops in Athens, they turned up bass-less, their bass player having quit a few days earlier. Bill Doss joined the band on the spot, and the links between Julian and Elephant 6 grew stronger. Eventually the performative musical chair act would fill the ranks of Olivia Tremor Control (where longtime Koster collaborators Eric Harris and Peter Erchick would find a permanent home) and Neutral Milk Hotel.

  Of Denver, which is a nice place to visit

  Apparently, Athens wasn’t going to be magic for the Elephant 6 gang like it had been for the bands in the early 80s. They knew they wanted to live together and make music and art—but where? No one had any money to
speak of, which might seem limiting, but then again, not a one of them was tied to a place, a person, a job, a course of study. To a man, Elephant 6 was more butterfly than pachyderm.

  The only stationary member of the collective was the most independent one, Robert Schneider. He was still living in Denver, accumulating the equipment that would become Pet Sounds recording studio and starting his band, the Apples (later Apples in Stereo). Julian Koster remembers that Will Hart and Jeff were living in Denver too, and that they put out a call for all their friends to just come, to stop talking about doing things together and to actually start doing them. It was summer, and Bill Doss was visiting Julian in New York. They got the message and drove nonstop to Colorado, with no idea of what they’d do when they got there, where they’d live or what would happen next.

  Julian inherited the walk-in closet where Jeff had been living (and which Jeff claimed was haunted), and later took possession of Jeff’s moldy boiler room outside Robert’s apartment. While the players were finally in proximity to one another, and Robert could record in his apartment, there was nowhere they could play. Broke, they lived off stale popcorn from someone’s theater job.

  Jeff didn’t stay long in Denver, taking off for the West Coast, but in some permutation Ruston was present in Colorado for about a year. Julian ended up collaborating with Will and Bill on some of the Olivia Tremor Control arrangements that ended up on Dusk at Cubist Castle, then bringing Will and Bill into Chocolate USA for one last national tour that had the trio appearing on the same bills as members of both bands. When that tour alit in Los Angeles, Julian was shocked to find the audience full of hipsters, hipsters who seemed to be enjoying themselves. “That was maybe the beginning of understanding that somehow, this thing was gonna be embraced by people like that—which happened, and was really surreal. It was alien to us. We’re not cool! I’m a poster boy for not being cool. So to have people like that be all nice to you, it’s like, what’s happening?”