by Cooper, Kim
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.
Back to Athens, which this time is just right
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 ki
ck-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.
Drawing on years of compositions that were never recorded, or had only appeared on small-run cassettes, Jeff often took pieces of old songs and integrated them into new ones. Laura Carter would spot bridges written when Jeff was fifteen making their way into songs destined for Aeroplane. Even though this was his second formal album, there was such a huge backlog of material that there was no question of a sophomore slump.
The most effortless composition to come out of the Grady Avenue time was “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”—which Jeff’s friends all refer to as “Beautiful Face.” The song was written on an especially happy early spring day, just after the Grady house came together and very soon after Jeff and Laura became a couple. They found themselves out in the back yard, some of them on MDMA, lying on their backs in the sunshine watching the trees moving like big lungs. Suddenly Jeff exclaimed, “I got a song in my head!” and ran inside. Soon they could all hear him singing in the bathroom, the song taking its final shape as they listened.
When asked about Anne Frank’s presence, which permeates the songs on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Laura Carter explains that when Jeff wrote those songs, he’d just discovered Anne’s diary. “It blew him away. He never had read the history of the war that much, and to get such a personal insight into it, by such an excellent writer—it’s just hard not to fall in love with her!”
Maybe the diary had the profound effect that it did on Jeff in part because he wasn’t much of a reader. Robert Schneider recalls it as one of the few books he read at that time in his life; even after finishing it, he carried it around with him for some time.
In Athens, the Neutral Milk Hotel players finally found a place where they could have houses to live in, make noise, be creatively stimulated and feel like they were part of an immediate and not a long distance community. Bryan Poole explains that “basically the whole thing with the Elephant 6 clique was pot luck dinners! Sunday pot luck dinners every week. They would rotate at whose house it was. That was where we could meet and talk and feel like we were all part of a big family. It was friends who just happen to be into music and art, and it was really exciting. There was almost some sort of utopian vision. We just felt something great was happening. Dusk at Cubist Castle was about to come out. The Neutral Milk Hotel guys were there and we knew that they were gonna record an album soon. And Elf Power, we were working on When the Red King Comes. And we had people like the Great Lakes getting together, coming into town, you had the Kindercore guys that were doing their thing. So many circles overlapping. You knew it was a special, special time. And the pot luck dinners were key to the whole thing.”
An important side effect of the musicians having homes was that they could build on and share their record collections. When asked what Neutral Milk Hotel liked to listen to on the road, Jeremy Barnes said, “We were all really into Alva, the band that [Aeroplane uilleann pipes player] Michelle Anderson played in. Jeff turned the rest of us onto the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, which then opened up into the rest of Eastern European folk or traditional music, and then traditional music in general. We all loved Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, as well as Pet Sounds and Smile. And Os Mutantes from Brazil, and the Kinks. Jeff was really into Pierre Henry and Alain Savouret. I was just getting into improvised music. Scott hates musique concrète and jazz in general, sometimes Scott seems to hate all music. Julian loves They Might Be Giants, which in turn gives me the willies (one of the troublesome things about Julian driving the van on tour is that we must hear They Might Be Giants at full volume).” (Julian interjects that it was only Lincoln that he played, and “it’s genius.”) Other influences were the Boredoms, Harry Partch and Robert Wyatt (all special favorites of Jeff’s), John Cage, Sun Ra, Yoko Ono, John Coltrane, Steve Reich and The Secret Museum of Mankind: Ethnic Music Classics series. But the music that was most important to the Elephant 6 collective was the stuff their friends were writing and recording. There was always something new being traded, some breakthrough being made.
Lance Bangs remembered Jeff from when he was drumming in Synthetic Flying Machine and was interested to see him return to Athens as a singer–songwriter. He’d get up on stage and do two or three early Neutral Milk Hotel songs in the middle of an Elf Power set, with the band backing him up. His powerful, resonant voice was immediately impressive, as was the highly personal imagery in his lyrics, with their themes of soil, dirt, digging and hiding. No longer behind a drum kit, the tall, shambling J
eff presented an imposing figure. Even his clothes were distinctive, the cuffs of his trousers decorated with ink-pen drawings of little cartoony figures, his taste in thrift store sweaters running to the psychedelic.
It wasn’t until late 1996, at a party at the Landfill—a communal house at 660 Reese Street where Will Hart and various Olivia Tremor Control members were living—that Athens got a chance to see the full band version of Neutral Milk Hotel. Bryan Poole was mesmerized by Jeremy’s drumming. He played so intensely that drool turned to foam at the corners of his mouth. “He’s got rabies or something! He had no time to wipe it away, he’s got to keep going. He had a total Keith Moon look about him, but wanting to play like all the free jazz greats. Kind of a punk rock, rock, gypsy all rolled into one.”
Lance, too, was blown away. “I was just like, ‘Oh my god, this is really amazing! Something’s very special happening here.’ Very chaotic, people jumping around. The audience was pretty much their friends from Ruston. The Olivias also played that night and another band was on the bill, so I think Neutral Milk might have gone on first. Everyone was dancing and jumping up and down. All of a sudden everyone’s just bouncing gleefully. They played in the living room there. It was just phenomenal. And I remember regretting not having a camera there that night when Neutral Milk were playing. Pretty much right after that point I made sure that I got to meet and talk to them a little bit, and then started shooting videotape at all the shows that I was able to. It must have been late 1996 I filmed Jeff with Elf Power, and then started shooting their own shows.”
Through 1997, Lance filmed whatever practice sessions and live shows he could. Sometimes it was Jeff alone, sometimes the core band of Jeff, Julian, Scott and Jeremy, and sometimes they’d be supplemented with horn sections, additional percussion or whatever their friends could bring. Lance saw that Neutral Milk Hotel exhibited a greater sense of theatrics and showmanship than the other bands around town—Jeff really seemed conscious of dynamics and the intensity built by, say, starting “Oh Comely” alone and having the other players come in, then cycling through the pattern anew.
