by Cooper, Kim
Chris had agreed to help Jeff with the design prior to hearing the record. Once he did, he was “absolutely blown away by it. I thought ‘holy crap, this is the best record in ten years!’” While this made him excited about the project, it also stirred up unexpected emotional responses. For example, during the design process, he and Jeff initially worked up a different back cover based around the lower portion of the vintage postcard, showing the woman bather’s feet trailing off into the water. Chris was very attached to the image, but Jeff decided he didn’t want to use it. Chris: “I remember almost wanting to start crying. And I was driving home, thinking, ‘I really need to back off and not be so emotionally involved. It’s not my record!’ I learned a really good lesson about designing. And ultimately I think he made a good decision.”
Although In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is not the most famous record Chris Bilheimer worked on, nor the best selling, it remains the design he’s most proud of, and it occupies a prominent place in his portfolio, where music industry people regularly exclaim over it. Once he was bemused to find someone selling a “really crappy, kinda high schooly pencil sketch of the cover” on eBay, with a description claiming it was the original layout; he emailed eBay and got the auction pulled.
Even after the art was completed and the album released, Chris maintained a relationship with Neutral Milk Hotel, often seeing them play at house parties and formal gigs around Athens. Chris recalls, “There’s three times in a row where I saw them live and I started crying. It was something you really couldn’t put your finger on. The music was really beautiful, and the lyrics might have been obtuse and not something you could directly relate to, but there was something in Jeff’s voice, just the sound of his voice, that encapsulated so many different feelings at the same time. It was just incredibly moving. I think the goal of most art is to transcend your medium or your surroundings—and that just happened at every show, for me, anyway.”
The Neutral Milk Hotel Aeroplane takes off
Up on stage, the players tapped into a trancelike—but hardly calm—state where the unexpected was the norm. Performances turned frighteningly physical, bodies and instruments flying, blood bring drawn without anyone realizing they’d been hurt. Ben Crum says, “They are easily the best live band I ever saw. There was a powerful energy to their show that I really haven’t seen anywhere else. It was definitely dangerous. There often seemed to be a very real chance that someone, probably Julian, would get hurt. Jeff was always doing things like picking him up and throwing him into the drums.”
Julian soon discovered that their onstage behavior was frightening people in the audience. Fans wanted to talk with them after shows, but they’d hesitate, as if they were approaching dangerous, possibly demented people. This perception was a major impediment, since the band was hoping most nights to find an agreeable floor on which to crash. Sometimes it was only after Jeff, Jeremy, Julian and Scott settled in at a fan’s house that they discovered their host was petrified of them. They found this disconcerting and troubling, and wondered how to handle the situation.
Still, it’s hardly surprising that the sight of Julian playing piano with his nose, Scott with his fabulous cantilevered beard jumping around like an inflamed Viking, Jeremy flipping out behind the drum kit, Jeff falling into that drum kit when he wasn’t howling words so intensely beautiful that they made jaded hipsters feel things they didn’t necessarily want to feel, that all of this barely contained chaos would startle and worry people who came to it freshly.
There were nearly six months between the completion of the Aeroplane recordings and its February 1998 release. Merge planned a tour to begin on February 14 in Birmingham, starting out sharing stages with Superchunk and finishing with Of Montreal and the High Llamas. The band spent the time before the album’s release gearing up for the tour. Their sets, which had averaged around 45 minutes, would need to be expanded to a maximum of 90 minutes for the road dates. Friends like John Fernandes and Will Westbrook were brought into the touring band and taught the horn parts, culminating in a marathon rehearsal session in a freezing practice space on the edge of town during the first week of February.
It was hard enough expecting a newly expanded band to play the songs from Aeroplane and those older Neutral Milk Hotel songs that had survived in the live show into 1998, but Jeff set additional hurdles for the players. Up until the week they left Athens, they were still trying to figure out how to incorporate an ambitious, horn heavy improvisational cover of Charlie Haden’s “Song For Che” into the set. This would only infrequently be played, supplanting an original improvisational piece based on the colors of the rainbow that had sometimes found its way into the live performances in 1997.
Ben Crum, asked about the improvisational and collaborative aspects of the band, says, “Jeff guided it, but everyone had some freedom. Those guys didn’t need much direction, though. Their instincts were good, and they knew how to complement the songs and stay out of the way of the songs and their direct route of communication to the listener.” Jeremy Barnes concurs, “Jeff wrote the songs and we experimented as a band to come up with arrangements. Jeff was very open to our opinions and receptive to our ideas. We were much more collaborative than a lot of bands I can think of, where one leader does everything, and passes jobs along to others. I think Jeff had confidence in his musicians, so he could lead without necessarily telling us what to do. There were no weak links in the band, and everyone really admired each other’s musical abilities.”
Lance Bangs, who attended those final Aeroplane practice sessions, noticed how gentle and encouraging Jeff was with the other musicians, telling them that he loved them and that everything was going to be okay. “And he wasn’t any kind of a taskmaster—never turning and glaring at anybody—it was never like that. Clearly, there was a love of his circle of friends that made it important for him to build this community and bring them along with him. And at any point that he’d wanted to, he could have gone out on his own and not had to split the money twelve different ways. It wasn’t about that: it was about building this community of like-minded people and supporting their eccentricities. That was really inspiring, and kinda reestablished my faith in what the best part of music can be, building this protective enclave of misfits and lost kids. That really meant a lot to me, and added to my sense that it was really important to document this.”
As Jeff and company took those new songs out more frequently, the Athens music community became aware that something really special had been born. On October 14, Jeff got up onstage at the 40 Watt, in a slot opening for the Tall Dwarfs’ Chris Knox, and slew the room. Lance Bangs says, “There was a sense of all of us kinda realizing how special it was and making a point of not missing the shows, and not talking, not being as flippant as you might be if it was just some other band that happened to be playing where it wasn’t as crucial to catch every note.”
Neutral Milk Hotel would be on the road more than one day in four during 1998. February through April saw them canvass Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Minnesota. May was two nights in London, June three Florida dates, July a weeklong East Coast/Canadian tour sharing stages with Of Montreal, Elf Power, Papas Fritas and Marshmallow Coast (aka their Denver friend Andy Gonzalez). Then from August through October the band played Sweden, Norway, France, England, Brussels, Holland, Germany, Scotland and Ireland.
Although she played with Neutral Milk Hotel at nearly every show, Laura Carter’s most significant role on the tour was that of mix-board translator, a position she’d first held for Olivia Tremor Control. For the first part of a Neutral Milk Hotel set, she’d sit with the soundman, physically handling the board and advising him of what to expect. “‘Okay, next song, Julian’s gonna throw that accordio
n on the ground and he’s gonna pick up the banjo—the pickup’s barely hangin’ on, so if it starts to squeal, that’s what it is!’ It was more like talking them through what was about to happen, because so much was happening onstage that without someone helping, it was a wail or squeal and the soundman would look at twenty instruments onstage and not know what to dive for.” Once the soundman was acclimated, Laura would jump onstage to play the songs on which she was featured, which were conveniently clustered near the end of the set. While ordinarily a club soundman might have been insulted to have a strange girl come up and tell him how to handle a band’s mix, Laura’s personable blend of humility and diplomacy managed to soothe hurt feelings before they erupted into attitude. She learned a lot and kept the sound from devolving into chaos on many a night.
But on some level, chaos was a friend to the band. Anyway, it was inevitable with so many disparate players, equipment that wasn’t always in the finest repair, complex arrangements and complex personalities. Laura reflects, “It was always falling apart. Half the time, somebody would give Scotty a joint before the show and he’d get up there to nail that big trumpet part and blank out—or nothing would come out of the hole. There’s always this struggle, but somehow I think when it came together, it was even more triumphant. Maybe the audience reacted even more to it, because it fails and gets a little bit stronger and by the third time you nail it and everyone’s like, ‘Yeah!’ I think it made the audience pull harder for us, too, or engage more than if we had been perfect.”
Neutral Milk Hotel traveled in two vans: a roomy rental van for the musicians, an old one for equipment. The expanded road band often included members of the Gerbils, Of Montreal and Elf Power, who also played their own sets. It became an ongoing comedy trying to keep a bunch of sleepy, distractible souls from wandering off during pit stops. In an attempt to shame the worst offenders into behaving themselves, the group came up with the nickname “Farkey,” which described someone who might be hypnotized by the offerings in a convenience store, wander out the back door and be nowhere to be found when it was time to get back in the van. But with Neutral Milk Hotel quickly gaining a reputation as a band that never made it to gigs on time, it was pointless to single anyone out. They were a band of Farkeys. And when their numbers were swollen with guest horn sections, zanzithophonists and assorted others, well, as Bryan Poole sighs, eight years later but still sounding exasperated, “The more people you have, the greater the Farkeydom.”
On February 7, the band headlined the final night of the Florida Popfest in Tallahassee in an Athens-packed line up that included The Music Tapes (featuring Static the television), Elf Power, Of Montreal and the Gerbils. Despite not taking the stage until 2 AM and the new album not even being in stores yet, they played to a full room of ecstatic fans. It was a propitious beginning to the next phase in the band’s existence.
In April, Lance Bangs joined the Aeroplane tour for the West Coast dates, traveling with Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and the Gerbils from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, but not returning with them to San Francisco for the important April 18 Terrastock II gig, where they’d appear with several dozen like minded combos, including Elf Power, Olivia Tremor Control and the reunited Silver Apples.
The initial stop in San Francisco was over Easter weekend, with shows at Bottom of the Hill on Saturday and Sunday, and Monday off. Unlike other bands Lance had traveled with, the Elephant 6 crowd wasn’t happy just doing radio station promos and hanging out in bars. They worshipped at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in its old location on Divisadero, went thrift and record shopping, visited the Musée Mechanique and looked for the best burritos. They were, he thought, “like great, smart, exploratory tourists, seeing the best of the weird sides of the country.” At one of those Bottom of the Hill shows, after a collision with Julian that took out the drums and a wall of monitors, Jeff tore his finger open, a terrible-looking wound for which he didn’t seek medical attention. It didn’t seem to inhibit his playing.
As public awareness of Aeroplane rose during the early part of 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel found themselves on the crest of a wave of popularity, facing ever larger and more passionate audiences. And the merch sales, always the touring band’s lifeline between living fat or living skinny, increased as well. Laura Carter recalls, “But the money, that happened so fast. We’d always been where we were making $200 a night, and then just, like, suddenly, bam! bam! bam! bam! We were making more money off merch than off shows. We had Elephant 6 T-shirts, which we called ‘the cash cow,’ and we had the same NMH shirt that we’re still selling, the maggots one. We would shut down the merch section during the show, and then just run back there after the last song.”
This increased revenue triggered one of the most extreme instances of Farkeydom that would befall the band, the legendary Scott Spillane Pizza Hut Incident. The date was probably April 25, 1998, and Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and the Gerbils were traveling between Minneapolis and Chicago to play a show at Lounge Ax. Laura Carter and Jeff were riding by themselves in the equipment van. Everyone stopped at a Pizza Hut for lunch, then got back on the highway. A couple hours into the trip, Jeff and Laura saw the other van make an abrupt U-turn. Laura says, “This is before the days of cell phones, and we’re just like, ‘What the fuck? We’re gonna miss the show!’ So we just keep driving with the equipment—if nothing else, we’ll get it all set up for everybody.”
Scott Spillane picks up the story. “That was scary! Two hours down the road when we realized we left the money in Pizza Hut. Funny thing was after driving back, we got there just as the shift changed. So we come in and everybody’s different. ‘Have you guys seen a black bag?’ ‘No.’ Fuck! What do we do—they’re ripping us off!! Freaking out. And I look back in the booth and I don’t see anything. I’m thinking, how can we accuse these people of stealing?”
Laura: “He left somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars in cash, in a backpack, under the table.”
Scott: “I dunno, it was quite a few thousand dollars. Probably three or four thousand bucks. But it was a black bag and it was actually sitting on the floor in the shadows, luckily. It was still there.”
Laura: “So lucky. And they made the show. After that we instantly went to the bank and we’d get money orders and mail them back to ourselves.”
The next night, they played the Blue Angel Café in Chattanooga, the last show of the tour before going home to Athens. That’s where Bryan Poole witnessed the most devotional act of Neutral Milk Hotel fanship he ever saw, a girl who drove from Arkansas to give Jeff her grandmother’s rosary, talked with Jeff for a little while and had to head home without even seeing the show.
The Farkeys were in force again come July 29, when Neutral Milk Hotel was booked to headline at Toronto’s venerable Horseshoe Tavern. Bryan Poole reflects, “We’d always do these tours, Elf Power and Neutral Milk and Gerbils, I don’t know how many people that is in total, twelve to fifteen people. Nobody can make a group decision, there’s no consensus on what to do or where to go. It becomes a real problem. Neutral Milk Hotel was notorious for showing late to gigs, barely getting to gigs, more than a few times. We totally misgauged how long it was gonna take to get there, and then couldn’t find our way out of Montreal. ‘Ah, we’re still like 250 km away, we’re not making sound check…. It’s 10 o’clock, we’re still not there.’ Elf Power’s supposed to open the show. Ended up not getting to this club until midnight. Sold-out club. The owners were freaking out. We finally get there and they’re like super excited, wild-eyed, waving us into the back alleyway, running to get the stuff on stage. There’s people just packed, standing there, no equipment onstage—you can imagine, these people are there for a couple hours, staring at a stage with nothing on it. So Neutral Milk Hotel just went and played, and then Elf Power played afterwards. But the thing is, those were the best shows. They barnstormed the stage and the next day, the Toronto paper gave this outstanding review of how great it wa
s. The live shows were always just really chaotic.”
Athens, and after
The band had just a week off the road before leaving for Europe in early August, beginning that part of the tour with huge festival gigs in Sweden. And finally in mid-October they came home to Athens. Jeff was noticeably worse for wear. Lance Bangs recalls a series of illnesses that left the singer sniffly, sweaty and seemingly exhausted. Where once any stop in Athens was an excuse to play an opening slot for Elf Power or a house party, now Jeff consciously turned down opportunities to perform. The whole band was still in town, but on some strange level it was as if Neutral Milk Hotel didn’t exist anymore. Without anyone saying anything, the momentum of their surprisingly successful career seemed to dissipate, and the people who cared about the music and about the players watched warily to see what would happen next.
On December 5, there was an early birthday party for Chris Bilheimer at the old school building on Meigs Street where a bunch of artists lived. Elf Power played, and then Jeff got up to sing. The audience was made up of friends, bandmates, people he could trust. He opened the set with a new song, one that he introduced as being unfinished, apologizing in advance for “the really sick parts.” It was called “Little Birds,” a stark, cyclical dream about a menaced child who feels himself being filled up with tiny feathered fliers who pour out of the bathtub tap and enter his body, protecting him from his murderous father. At the introduction, his friends laughed. The laughing stopped as the darkness of the narrative took hold. Jeff’s voice was reedy and relentless as he whipped out the frightening, confessional lyrics.
Did you know the burning hell it took your baby brother?
