Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

by Cooper, Kim

  For years, Jeff had simply been a cool, creative guy who traveled a lot and made interesting cassettes. On Avery Island changed all that. The album was so good, and so unexpectedly good, that it could be intimidating.

  Jamey Huggins met Jeff and Julian at the Grady Avenue house and again at an Olivia show at the Atomic Café before he ever heard Jeff’s music. When Dan Donahue brought a copy of On Avery Island to the Great Lakes house, the whole band was blown away. Jamey remembers, “We were all freaked out by how brilliant and different it was, but mostly by the realization that what we were hearing was done by this guy down the street who we had just met a few days before. ‘Who is this guy?!’ That’s all I could think. The next time I encountered Jeff Mangum, there was a reverence and nervous excitement that I just could not disguise. He was changed to me as a person. At first he was just this tall, kind of shy guy who lived with my new friend Julian. Then I heard the album.”

  It was just this kind of reverent, awestruck attitude that would become such a burden to Jeff over the next couple of years. Within the tight-knit Athens scene such feelings might be awkward, but surmountable. But out in the larger world, being treated like a celebrity could be spooky and discomfiting. On some level, the person Jeff was was beginning to be subsumed by the image of Jeff Mangum, Rock Star. For a shy person, it must have been excruciating to have to develop a whole new set of tools for interpreting interactions and responding to other people.

  The personality quirks that fed Jeff’s music were the same ones that made it hard for him to deal with being put onto a plinth. Robert Schneider, who’s known him as long as almost anyone, explains that Jeff is “a very tender, incredibly loving person. When he’s nervous it’s just because he feels things so deeply and he’s very honest about it. He does have filters, but sometimes his filters backfire on him, like he’s filtered things that he wouldn’t want to offend anybody else.”

  During early 1997, Lance Bangs was curating events in the back room of Jittery Joe’s, a Washington Street coffee house a few doors up from the 40 Watt. The space, which Lance informally called The Starlit Crypt, hosted spoken word readings, film projections and the occasional free live performance. On March 7, the small room was transformed by the Dixie Blood Moustache women’s art collective into a sculptured, kinetic space strung with sheer, billowing fabrics and soft papier-mâché forms. Strings of Christmas lights flickered behind the cloth, which was incorporated into elaborate costumes, including bustles and capes, which tied the performers into the architecture.

  Among the performers that night was Ravi Fernandes, a costumed toddler whose participation later in the evening would be misunderstood by those who picked up the Live at Jittery Joe’s CD expecting just to hear Jeff Mangum. For the twenty or so people in the audience, many of them members of Dixie Blood Moustache, friends or housemates of Jeff, Ravi was not an obnoxious, crying baby, but another artist collaborating with Jeff in his own style, which just happened to be pre-verbal.

  Jeff’s performance, which Lance documented in a dimly lit video included on the CD, was an important one. It represented the first public, hometown performance of material that would appear in slightly different forms on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. “Two-Headed Boy” and “Oh Comely” are much as would be laid down in Denver, and on “The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three,” Jeff stops to note “this is where Scott plays his trumpet solo; he’s not here, he’ll be here tomorrow,” and later sings “this is the part of the song where I didn’t write any lyrics.”

  Anyone looking to the Jittery Joe’s performance for clues to the meaning and evolution of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea should pay special attention to “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two.” A few months before the album was recorded, Jeff was singing Aeroplane’s final song with slightly, yet significantly, different lyrics. The changes are telling, because they suggest that this song, one of the most beautiful on the record, is part of the Anne Frank cycle. The early “Sister please” becomes the euphonious, but nonsensical “Blister please” on the album. A sense of communion is lost when the pronouns are changed, from the original “God is a place we will wait for the rest of our lives” to a declarative “you will wait for the rest of your life.” One line on Aeroplane is particularly cryptic, its words deliberately omitted from the lyrics Jeff gave album designer Chris Bilheimer. But at Jittery Joe’s, Jeff doesn’t sing “rings of flowers ’round your eyes and I love you / for the rest of your life in your reeeeeeeeeee;” he sings that second line as “Nineteen forty and five” before opening his throat in a wordless cry.

  For Lance Bangs, behind his camera, the Jittery Joe’s performance was revelatory, confirmation that he was right in thinking something extraordinary was happening in Athens. “That was definitely the moment when it seemed apparent that this wasn’t just a good band that was happening—it was like having Van Morrison at his peak of Astral Weeks going on. An entire new poetic language of imagery that wasn’t contrived and didn’t rely on the same sort of whining or confessional singer–songwriter thing that had been happening at that point; here was something new that was emotional and direct.”

  When Jeff sang the lyrics “I love you Jesus Christ / Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do,” Lance found it shocking. There’s a lot of Christianity in the South, but within the weirdo musical subculture represented by the people in that room, such a naked expression of faith was completely unexpected. And compelling. Lance couldn’t wait to see what Jeff would say or do next. “It kinda made it clear that he was writing expressively, but maybe wasn’t overly worried about what other people thought or crafting things to make it easy on his audience. Here was someone who was a bit more fucked up and challenging and visceral.”

  Lance believed the Jittery Joe’s performance was too good to be heard by just a handful of friends. He starting dubbing cassette copies that he’d pass along to the creative types he encountered in his travels. Michael Stipe got a copy; so did Spike Jonze, and various record company people, filmmakers, photographers. “I felt so clearly that this was a John Lennon–caliber person, that people really needed to hear how special this was. People were really blown away and into it. They would ask about it and want to see some of the footage.” All this was before the album came out.

  In late April, Neutral Milk Hotel went out on the road with Olivia Tremor Control to play dates in the South, Northeast and Midwest, with the highlight being their April 26 appearance in Providence, Rhode Island, for the Ptolemaic Providence Perambulation, a benefit for the psychedelic British fanzine Ptolemaic Terrascope. The festival was informally known as Terrastock. Band affiliations were fluid that weekend, with the Olivias joining Neutral Milk onstage for the latter’s Saturday afternoon set, Julian bringing his banjo, accordion and keyboards up on Sunday when OTC played, and Jeremy Barnes filling in on the drum stool for the Supreme Dicks. The set list was typical for the period between Avery and Aeroplane, a mix of older songs (“Garden-head,” “Song Against Sex”) and new (“Oh Comely,” “The Fool”), including evolving material, like the last part of “Oh Comely,” at this stage a separate song called “Goldaline” which was usually appended to the end of one called “Message Sent” (sometimes titled “Through My Tears”).

  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.”

  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea sessions

  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 Robe
rt 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.