by Cooper, Kim
So again, the center failed to hold. Jeff would live briefly in Seattle and Los Angeles. Julian’s last go-round with Chocolate USA spat him out home in New York City, with a prized set of reel-to-reel recorders, a parting gift from Bar/None Records. Robert continued his band and studio work in Denver, and Will and Bill went to Athens to focus on Olivia Tremor Control. One rare vinyl artifact to come from the Denver sojourn was OTC’s debut EP, “California Demise,” released on the Elephant 6 label.
But was the Denver time a failure? Julian doesn’t think so. “We’d all gone out there specifically to create something together, but we didn’t know what it was. ’Cause it wasn’t a band! I don’t think it even necessarily centered on music.”
The important thing was that they’d all been together, liked it, and wanted to do it again if they could.
But first, Jeff Mangum was going to have to make a record.
He started with a seven-inch Neutral Milk Hotel single, “Everything Is” b/w “Snow Song Pt. 1” on Nancy Ostrander’s Seattle-based Cher Doll label, then went back through Ruston in search of a band. He met up with Ross Beach, who agreed to join him in New Orleans for a show at the Howlin’ Wolf opening for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Jeff and Ross rehearsed twice, then played their early set to a nearly empty room. In this nascent version of Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeff was drumming and singing; Ross played guitar.
On Avery Island sessions
The first thing to understand about the Neutral Milk Hotel album On Avery Island is that there was no band called Neutral Milk Hotel. No Julian, no Jeremy Barnes, no Scott Spillane with his lunatic horns. On Avery Island is a Neutral Milk Hotel album in the manner of the early Ruston tape releases. Jeff had been using the name Neutral Milk Hotel for his projects since high school, so when he swung back into Denver with the intention of recording the songs he’d been writing on the road, it seemed natural to use the name for the project. The album title referenced a public garden on the Louisiana Gulf Coast where, Jeff once told an interviewer, as a teen he had a spiritual experience involving an ancient statue of the Buddha.
The making of On Avery Island would prove an extraordinary creative experience for Jeff and Robert Schneider, who had only rarely recorded together before. Robert, the harmony prodigy obsessed with high-art Beatlesque production, was about to transform the world of his dearest friend, whose own aesthetic was steeped in lo-fi buzz and a passionate hatred of slickness. It sounds like a recipe for conflict and failure, and under ordinary circumstances might have yielded just that, but despite their differences, Jeff and Robert could work together as few producer/artist pairs ever had.
On this, his first formal production gig, Robert devoted himself to realizing Jeff’s vision, even when Jeff was more sure of what he didn’t want the record to sound like than what he did. By checking his ego at the studio door, Robert offered himself to Jeff as a sort of second self, a sounding board who turned his own creative abilities to the art of another.
Robert explains, “Jeff is my friend, I love him, and I wanted him to feel satisfied with what he did. That’s always the case when I’m producing bands, but with Jeff it was no artistic ambition on my part. I just wanted it to sound like whatever would make him happy.” Often, this meant putting aside the more complex arrangements that Robert favored for a more raw and simple sound, although on other occasions horn sections, harmonies and sound effects were brought in to striking effect.
Robert was as much a band member as the producer: Jeff handled drums and guitar, while Robert played organ and bass, did the horn arrangements on “Song Against Sex,” “Gardenhead” and “Avery Island” and called in trombonist Rick Benjamin to realize them. Lisa Janssen from the band Secret Square played fuzz bass on “You’ve Passed” and “Gardenhead.” Jeff was most comfortable recording on four tracks, a limitation that Robert accepted, so long as they could use a four-track reel-to-reel machine (instead of the cassette version Jeff favored), bouncing some of the tracks briefly over to two-track stereo DAT so they’d have a total of six tracks to work with. Onto these tracks they placed one guitar, the drums and the vocals, leaving three tracks to hold the organ, bass, horn or whatever other sounds Robert felt would enhance the track.
Although Robert’s studio would soon become a destination for bands wanting an updated psychedelic recording environment, about half of On Avery Island was recorded in Robert’s friend Kyle Jones’s house, the same place where the first Apples in Stereo recordings were made. When Kyle recorded in the house, he called it The Sleeping Brotherhood; Robert’s name for it was Pet Sounds.
Kyle had inherited the big, old house from his grandparents. There, Robert could record in the main studio, the kitchen or in the control room, finding the particular sonic qualities he liked in each space. He describes his recording philosophy, “It’s not that I’m against having a good sounding studio, that’s obviously the best scenario, but second best is to just capture the spirit of people in the room. That’s the way I always looked at recording: you’re not just trying to capture the people in the room, you’re trying to create a room, a fantastic kind of dream room that resembles a real room, but that’s populated with much more interesting furniture.”
Some days Jeff would surprise Robert by bringing in inspirations hatched in half-sleep, like the aural hallucination of monks droning that he described for Robert, wondering if they could replicate it on tape. Robert: “And we did! There’s a long piece at the end of On Avery Island, the very, very long piece with the drone that ends with the gamelan piece. It’s probably one of the favorite things that I’ve ever worked on.” This song, “Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye,” featured a drone Robert created from looping tape delays of a skipping banjo record Jeff selected and an orchestra of Denver musicians, among them Merisa Bissinger, Hilarie Sidney, Dane Terry, Lisa Janssen and Aaron Reedy, playing Indonesian instruments.
Jeff’s certainty of what he didn’t want the album to sound like didn’t always kick in until after a track was nearly complete, which meant that many things recorded for On Avery Island ended up being erased. Sometimes Robert would argue for a mix or an arrangement, “Okay. I worked really hard all day doing that and it’s great.” But ultimately, he knew his job was to realize Jeff’s vision, and it if didn’t sound right to Jeff, then it simply was not Neutral Milk Hotel music. “At first it was frustrating, but I came to enjoy it. That’s how I learned to produce, doing that record, because I totally had to let go of what I thought it should be like.” Robert likens his role as producer-collaborator to that of Tibetan monks who paint elaborate mandalas in colored sand, then blow them away, loving the beauty while accepting its impermanence.
The connection between Jeff and Robert was deeper and more personal than just artist/producer. Their long history of friendship and understanding of each others’ peccadilloes and emotional needs allowed Robert to create a safe working space where Jeff could become more fully himself. “We were very closely connected at the time—and we still are, but we have our own lives now. He was my dear friend, and in a sense I was trying to soothe him and make him feel confident. And trying to do something great for him, as opposed to just trying to do something great for the sake of art. When I think about the records, I don’t know if there are any records that were ever made like that.”
Well, of course there is a long history of producers trying to make something great for the artist, just rarely in a traditional studio environment. Robert’s work with Jeff seems closer to those brave cultural chroniclers who dragged heavy tape or wire recorders around to make field recordings in jungles, swamps and (if we briefly allow ourselves a peak into Jeff Mangum’s future) Bulgarian music festivals.
Once the recordings were finished, Jeff made copies for his friends. Julian Koster remembers first hearing it while driving an enormously long station wagon through roads bordered by corn and wheat. “I was really amazed by how different it was from anything that I’d ever heard come out of him. The things that
he had shared with me were so chaotic—it was a wonderful chaos, a crazy sort of freedom. It was just such an amazing, surreal thing Jeff had expressed through an album—almost like an album, a big leather-bound thing full of photographs. It was this really bizarre new chapter. I know that it was really scary for him—as it is for everybody—sharing things with the outside world, when the things that you’re sharing are almost the whole of your insides, the thing without which there’d be no purpose to you. Just to let it go out into the world is a tremendous thing. I think he’d tried several different approaches at trying to share that. So it was neat and interesting that he’d figured that out and finally settled on this. To me it wasn’t definitive. There were all these cassettes, all these moments; all this music that was Jeff’s music, so this thing was just a thing to me. It goes without saying that I loved it. It was Jeff; I love Jeff.”
In Queens there was a queen named Marie, and in her castle all things were possible
On Avery Island was different from the tape releases that had preceded it. Not only was it a more complex piece of work, with arrangements that couldn’t be convincingly replicated by Jeff alone with an acoustic guitar, but it was being issued on a real record label, and Merge (the Chapel Hill indie owned by members of Superchunk) had the expectation that Jeff would promote it with tours and interviews. Neutral Milk Hotel already sounded like a band name. Why not use On Avery Island’s release as an excuse to finally collaborate with his friends?
There had been talk about Jeff, who everyone says is a fine drummer, backing Julian Koster up on some recordings, but Julian found that he was tired of interacting with the record industry and focused on solo Music Tapes recordings. Nevertheless, he and Jeff sometimes sent tapes and letters back and forth, working out ideas. Eventually, Julian joined the Neutral Milk Hotel project. They started talking about going out on the road. Obviously, Jeff should be the frontman; who could be the drummer?
That was the question in the air when Julian got a letter from a young kid he’d met in Albuquerque a few years earlier. Jeremy Barnes was only in high school when their bands played together, but, Julian explains, “He was one of the most amazing drummers I’d ever seen. Jeremy had written me this really wonderful letter, basically saying he was being led into a far different life than I think Jeremy Barnes was supposed to live. He was going to school, and I think there were expectations for him. And there was a lot bursting out of him that needed to be realized. I think he was sensing that his destiny lay elsewhere. Somehow, Jeff and I got on a train and went to Chicago to see Jeremy!”
Jeremy recalls the circumstances as being quite convoluted, with Julian coming all the way from New York to arrange the first meeting between Jeremy and Jeff, who was coming from Denver. Jeff and Julian were so poor that their train tickets exhausted their resources. When they got to Chicago, they scrounged up a little more cash to rent a studio for an hour. The “audition” consisted of the trio playing “Gardenhead,” after which Jeff and Julian went outside and talked. Jeremy was intrigued by Jeff’s songs, and while somewhat intimidated, he had a good feeling about things. For Julian, it was immediately obvious that Jeremy was the missing piece of the band puzzle, but they weren’t sure how the band would manifest itself. So it was a little later that they formally asked Jeremy to drop out of DePaul University, move to New York and join Neutral Milk Hotel.
New York can be a tough place for young artists, but Julian had two great spaces at his disposal. First there was the tiny, rent-controlled apartment on Christopher Street between Bleecker and West 4th, which he shared with his friend Robbie Cucchiaro and a menagerie of stray animals, crisscrossing tape loops and visiting musicians. And then there was a fairy wonderland on the border of Nassau and Queens, 986 North 7th Street, better known as Grandma’s House.
Julian’s maternal grandmother Marie St. Angelo Caso is a warm, loving presence in his life, and her home is the place he always comes back to. A bright, eccentric woman who raised her two daughters alone after her husband died young, she never questioned her grandson for wanting to be a musician. Julian says, “she always accepted me and my friends in a really fundamental, functional way, because during the great Depression, she saw that people who put money in the stock market lost everything. But she remembers distinctly the men would come play accordions in the courtyards between the houses, and people would throw coins down to them. She remembered her whole life, that those people were always able to go and make people happy and eat!”
A favorite story illustrating Marie’s unconventional attitude involves a parent–teacher conference called when Julian’s aunt was in elementary school. The guidance counselor asked what Marie felt would be an appropriate career path for her little girl. She thought about it for a little while and said, “Well, she likes animals a great deal, and she likes to dance—maybe she should be a Circus Queen?”
Small wonder then that when the call went out for the members of the new, touring version of Neutral Milk Hotel to coalesce, Grandma’s House was their destination. For Julian it was just a train ride in from the city. Jeremy came from Chicago. Jeff left Denver and looped through Texas, where he found the final core member in the form of Scott Spillane, the perennial cool older guy from Ruston. Scott was working at Gumby’s Pizza in Austin and living out front in his van. Jeff’s visit coincided with the 2 AM drunk rush, so Scott put Jeff to work saucing pizzas. Later, as they sat exhausted, with their nasal passages stinging from the flour they’d inhaled, Jeff said, “Man, this job sucks!” Scott didn’t disagree. “Why don’t you come with me to New York and play guitar or something?” Scott handed in his two weeks notice the next day.
Jeff was the first to arrive in New York. With him there, Julian and Robbie’s tiny apartment became a hive of creative energy. Julian recalls that someone “would be recording anytime anyone wasn’t there. Jeff and I would share spots. We’d record overlapping; we’d record together: he’d have the evenings; I’d have the mornings. And we got really into tape loops because we had tape machines for the first time, so there were tape loops strung all over the apartment, enormous tape loops that would go across the entire room. You’d come in and there’d be pencils and cups and the tape would be stringing along.”
Scott’s bus arrived in New York early enough in the morning that his first sight of the city was of a satanic red glow behind the skyline. Dropped at Port Authority, surrounded by the scariest sorts of thugs, he had half an hour to feel desolate before an ecstatic Jeff appeared, calling him brother and dispensing heartfelt hugs. The two caught a cab to the temporary residence Jeff had arranged, a spot on the floor of his girlfriend Colby Katz’s dorm room. After a few months sneaking in and out of the elevators, they moved into Julian and Robbie’s place, increasing the already high count of warm-blooded creatures by two. It helped that one of the building’s residents frequently took long trips and had entrusted his neighbors—who included Dan Oxenberg of the Supreme Dicks and singer–songwriter Azalia Snail—with a key. When it got to be too much in the close confines of the Koster–Cucchiaro pad, Jeff or Scott would sometimes slip off to the vacant apartment for some blissful solitude.
Soon everyone relocated to Grandma’s House, and from then on it hardly mattered that the group was physically living in the New York metro area—they could have been anywhere. The house was filled with the collections of a lifelong pack rat who couldn’t stand to throw anything potentially useful away. Grandma herself lived in one tiny room, and was so hard of hearing that it didn’t matter how much noise Julian’s friends made. Sometimes she would collaborate with Julian on little films, or he would come up to her room and play softly to her. Her garden grew enough food to fuel all-night practice sessions and marathon Wiffle ball tournaments in the street and the supermarket parking lot.
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 al
l 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.”
