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  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

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  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

  Kim Cooper

  2005

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  15 East 26 Street, New York, NY 10010

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2005 by Kim Coooper

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cooper, Kim.

  In the aeroplane over the sea / by Kim Cooper.

  p. cm.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-2437-1

  1. Neutral Milk Hotel (Musical group). In the aeroplane over the sea. 2. Alternative rock music--History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML421.N44C66 2005

  782.42166092′2--dc22

  2005026672

  Acknowledgments

  I am enormously grateful to those who opened up their memories to a stranger seeking to make a narrative from their lives. At every step I found extraordinarily creative people who were kind, thoughtful and touched by the magic of this album. It was a rare experience, and I hope some of its wonder is apparent in these pages. I hope too that it’s not too painful for the subjects to see their pasts on the microscope’s slide.

  Thanks go out to Jeff Mangum, whose approval of this project precipitated many of the interviews within, and whose songs are the reason for them.

  To Craig Ceravolo, my old friend from the curatorial trenches, who brought his Elephant 6 expertise on matters musical and personal, and was a valuable sounding board and assistant. While he is the only member of Great Lakes not mentioned by name in this book, he is present on every page.

  The Happy Happy Birthday to Me kids, Mike Turner, Eric Hernandez and Leslie Dallion-Superstar, for welcoming Craig and me into their home in Athens, facilitating key interviews and cracking us up with terrifying true tales of Florida.

  To Lance Bangs, Jeremy Barnes, Ross Beach, Chris Bilheimer, Laura Carter, Ben Crum, Bill Doss, John Fernandes, Geoff George, Jamey Huggins, Julian Koster, Martyn Leaper, Heather McIntosh, Bryan Poole, William Schaff, Robert Schneider, Scott Spillane, Jason Norvein Wachtelhausen and Briana Whyte for their stories.

  Thank you, Mike Appelstein, Gavin Bachner, Kevin Carhart and Charlie Farmer for sharing NMH rarities. To Matt Taylor for excellent questions about Robert’s use of fuzz. Thanks, Windy Chien, Irwin Chusid, Phil Drucker, Andrew Earles, Martin Hall, Kathy Harr, John Herman, Jim McIntyre, Nancy Ostrander and Fred Stutzman for small kindnesses. To my grandparents, Barbara and Harry, for large ones.

  I am indebted to David Smay and Keith Bearden for their feedback on the manuscript. To Vivien Johnson, whose book on Radio Birdman sets the bar for oral histories of rock bands. To Andrew Hultkrans for recommending me to Continuum, and to David Barker for being such an enthusiastic and gracious editor.

  Thanks most of all to Richard, who is the best partner any writer could have. I’m blessed that he is mine.

  Kim Cooper

  Lincoln Heights

  June 2005

  Editing a fanzine in the 1990s was an open invitation for young bands to send me their music. At first, the flood of albums, cassettes, seven-inches and (ultimately) CDs was a thrill, but I soon grew to dread the postman’s call. There was no way to listen to all of this product, or to form coherent opinions about it. So when something both contemporary and extraordinary was slipped over the transom, it really made a splash. My weary ears knew rare glee on finding If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian, Chicago chamber pop gems the Chamber Strings, the psychedelic Solarflares and frat-rock revivalists Fortune & Maltese in the review pile. Neutral Milk Hotel first impressed (On Avery Island, their 1995 debut full-length) and then astonished (1997’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which is why you’ve cracked this little book’s spine).

  Of all the recordings to emerge from the Athens-via-Denver collective called Elephant 6, Neutral Milk Hotel’s second album is the one that’s worked its way under the most skins. Magnet magazine named it the best album of the past decade, and Creative Loafing devoted a cover story to one fan’s
obsessive quest to understand why band leader Jeff Mangum dropped from sight soon after Aeroplane’s release. The record sells steadily to an audience that finds it through word of mouth.

  Weird, beautiful, absorbing, difficult, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a surrealist text loosely based on the life, suffering and reincarnation of Anne Frank, with guest appearances from a pair of Siamese twins menaced by the cold and carnivores, a two-headed boy bobbing in a jar, anthropomorphic vegetables and a variety of immature erotic horrors.

  Mangum sings his dreamlike narratives with a dreamer’s intensity, his creaky voice occasionally breaking as he struggles to complete each dense couplet. The music is like nothing else in the 90s indie underground: a psychedelic brass band, its members self-taught yet scarily adept, forging polychromatic washes of mood and tribute. The songs stick to one narrow key, the images repeat and circle back, and to listen is to be absorbed into a singular, heartrending vision.

  Raw myth and archetype entwine, both within the grooves and in the backstory. Anne Frank’s final document, a private diary scratched out against the threat of death, is paired with Aeroplane, Mangum’s last sustained piece of art to date, produced by a supportive collective during America’s last great boom time, immediately acclaimed by the international crit-oisie, yet apparently leading to a creative end as dead as Anne’s. Characters die only to be remade by alchemical confluences of sexual magic; are suicided, stab their families, become monstrous, are lost, swim on waves of love.

  Jamey Huggins, a member of Great Lakes and Of Montreal, was both a friend to the players and a huge fan of the band. He describes In the Aeroplane Over the Sea the way a religious man speaks of his favorite bit of the liturgy. “I’ve cried while listening to the album. I still hear things in it that I missed from previous listens. The thing with this record is that it can’t be heard casually—it has to be an event! You, first of all, have to listen to the entire thing. The track sequencing alone demands it, if the tide and momentum don’t pull you along. These songs should not be broadcast as singles on a radio show. They are all linked to this prescribed chain and it all flows together. You can put it on in a room full of friends and conversations will just drop. People regularly hold their water to finish listening to this record. People sit in cars in driveways all over the world waiting to cut the engine and go inside until that chair squeaks and Jeff ‘gets up to leave.’ This album commands attention, but never demands it, you know?”

  I know you’ve come to hear me tell the story of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and I will. Or rather, I’ll allow the people who were there, on stage and in the audience, to tell their stories. But to excise that album from the living vine that is Neutral Milk Hotel and Elephant 6 is impossible. Aeroplane could never have existed without a series of previous collaborations, so these projects will be briefly touched upon in the pages that follow. And the record itself was never thought by the players to be the final version of those songs, which had evolved from when Jeff first shared them, and which continued to change out on the road during the long tour of 1998. As for the mystery of Jeff Mangum’s disappearance from the music scene, it too makes sense when placed in the fuller context of the creative community in which his recordings were made. So indulge me, please, while I set the stage. We’ll have a few cartoons and a short subject before the feature plays. I think you’ll find them every bit as interesting as the show you came to see.

  Ruston, where they are young and begin to find their way

  Ruston, a town of about 20,000 souls in north-central Louisiana, is home to Louisiana Tech University, the school where Jeff Mangum and Robert Schneider’s fathers taught. The kids first encountered each other on the grounds of the A. E. Phillips elementary school, an experimental K–8 program on the college campus with strong arts and music curricula and its own planetarium.

  As a recent South African émigré self-conscious of his accent and nerdy English-schoolboy clothing, seven-year-old Robert was defensive. So when Jeff came up with a Wiffle-ball bat on the first day of school and asked if he wanted to play, Robert assumed that he was about to get clobbered. Unable to convince Robert that he just wanted to play a game, Jeff finally chased the odd little foreign kid all around the playground, which seemed like the only way Robert was going to play with him. They were pretty much pals from then on.

  There are a few great bands whose members first met when they were in metaphorical short pants—these groups seem charged with a weird magic, as if by coming together at such a green stage, their members fused on some elemental level. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard famously attended the same primary school. Bands comprised of brothers demonstrate this unity most profoundly: the Beach Boys and Everlys with their otherworldly harmonies, the Kinks playing Apollonian Ray off Dionysian Dave. Jeff and Robert, while not brothers by birth, were (and remain) extremely close, and this affinity would eventually allow Jeff to make music that he couldn’t quite bring to fruition on his own.

  Will Cullen Hart was a grade school friend of Jeff’s, the son of interior designers and himself a talented painter of psychedelic themes. He played in the junior high school noise band Maggot, with Jeff and Ty Storms, and by tenth grade was Robert’s best friend and recording partner.

  A few years older, Bill Doss lived in Dubach, a tiny town north of Ruston. He was the son of a horse-ranching machinist and a stay-at-home mom. Robert first encountered Bill in the mid-eighties in Haymaker’s guitar store, where the nascent E6 crowd often loitered and sometimes took guitar lessons. Haymaker’s brought Robert and Bill together more formally when owner Eddie suggested that since they had similar tastes, they should play together. The band they formed, Fat Planet, had a repertoire ranging from Revolver to the Velvets to R.E.M., plus some Robert Schneider originals.

  Ruston is a quiet, rural town without the diversions of even a small city. Robert says, “It’s super redneck. I would say it was a really nice place to be a little kid, but it’s an unpleasant place to be a teenager: there’s nothing much to do, and the cultural atmosphere is terrible.” Children of professors like Jeff and Robert didn’t really fit in with the townies, but with their grade school right on the LTU campus, it was easy to make the college the center of their world. This was even more the case as they reached their teens and became aware of KLPI-FM, the campus radio station. Will Hart was first to get a DJ spot, and his friends made themselves at home there, too. By 1990, Jeff would rise to the position of music director.

  The majority of US college stations in the 1980s were programming a mix of punk, alternative rock and proto-grunge. But for Scott Spillane, who moved from Shreveport in 1989, KLPI still had the feel of a 1970s college station, with a freaky crowd spinning arty album tracks. If Shreveport was a few years behind the national cultural curve, then Ruston lagged a bit behind Shreveport, with the town’s few punks actually hailing from Monroe, thirty miles east along Highway 20. But as Scott watched, the station mutated. A younger crowd moved into the broadcast booth, among them Scott himself, who did a show with John D’Azzo. And then there was Rexx, an actual California-bred skate punk who dated station manager Lisa and whose shows drew on his fantastic collection of small-press singles. The new generation was more interested in K Records and Daniel Johnston than in side-long vinyl freak outs. And they played a game of “stump your pals,” digging through the station archives searching for cool, weird or horrible stuff that no one else knew about, yet. It was fun to paw through the racks at KLPI looking for novelty, but the station’s collection was only the gateway drug into a vast, uncharted land of bizarre recorded sound that could only be found in thrift store bargain bins. A bunch of quarter-bin record raccoons were born.

  When Mike McGonigal interviewed Neutral Milk Hotel for a Puncture magazine cover story (Spring 1998), Jeff spoke of the church camps he attended from age eleven through seventeen, “where everything was very open. We talked about sexuality freely. It wasn’t really hippie, it was just weird. You could spill your guts all over the place. Peop
le were leaping and freaking out. It wasn’t so much a God trip as an emotional trip. Even if you were an atheist, if your parents shipped you down there, you could talk about it. You could talk openly about your atheist beliefs and there would be debates; and being an atheist was as beautiful as anything else.” This chaotic, passionate environment would be replicated in creative settings and living arrangements selected by the Ruston kids in the years to come.

  The Elephant 6 origin myth has Jeff, Robert, Bill and Will playing in a series of strangely named Ruston bands. The reality is a bit more typical for imaginative, untrained teen musicians—a lot of those bands didn’t exist, or never got past the home recording stages. Robert recalls that in high school, he and Jeff paid Michael Rasbury—a cousin-in-law and occasional bandmate of Bill Doss who had a four-track setup in his bedroom—$30 to document a project called Mr. Burton Says Hello. The name was inspired by George A. Burton III, a poet from Shreveport notorious for having overdosed on acid at a zoo on New Year’s Eve, 1969. Jeff and Robert each wrote two songs, and collaborated on “Mr. Burton Says Hello.”

  Robert says of the band’s namesake, “He’s a cool guy, and he’s a pretty good poet. We used to always hang out with older people. I mean, we would hang out socially at school, at parties, but most of our friends were in college or older. So we wrote a song, ‘Mr. Burton Says Hello.’ It actually must have been insulting to him, ’cause it made him out to be this crazy, psychedelic, Aqualung-type character. I feel kind of bad, but at the time I thought it was cool to be all freaky and mentally ill. It probably sucks for him, but I think he appreciated it.”

  Mr. Burton Says Hello was a rare early collaboration for Jeff and Robert. Robert recalls that Jeff and Will usually worked together, while Robert worked with both Bill and Will. “We never crossed over that much.” One of Jeff’s high school-era home recording projects was called Milk. When he found out there already was a band with that name, he changed it to Neutral Milk Hotel. Around the same time, he came up with the name Olivia Tremor Control.