Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (12 page)

BOOK: Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

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Gradually, it became obvious that Neutral Milk Hotel was not going to continue. The players drifted away to work on other projects, but because they were friends first, they all stayed in touch and collaborated on some of the most satisfying,
if under publicized, projects of the Elephant 6 era, like the Flicker Orchestra, which provided live soundtracks to silent film clips.

When asked about why the band stopped playing, Julian Koster laughed, “It’s funny, but no one’s ever asked me if Neutral Milk Hotel broke up, and I wouldn’t know what I’d answer.” But it was a mistake to think that
Aeroplane
was the only thing that mattered in Jeff Mangum’s life, creative or personal, when “there’s so much created before it, there’s so much been created since. There’s no shutting off, there’s no end. Nothing stopped.”

The people who were there realized that the Neutral Milk Hotel era was over, and began to take an accounting of their time in the maelstrom. Laura Carter felt “it was a great, crazy adventure. I got to travel, do things I’ve never done before. All the things that we did together. There were personal struggles, fights for the shower, but that I did that in my life is just a total blessing. There was one point when I looked at Jeff at Bottom of the Hill, I think, and I remember walking across the stage to do my part and realizing, in all of my wildest dreams, it’ll be a landmark in my life. There was definitely a lot of good comradery. None of us were very skilled, and I felt like we all rose to the occasion and worked really hard at trying to become skilled really quickly. It was as if we knew the songs were so good that we had to do them justice, and we felt a great amount of pride and just stepped up to the plate. So when it did really all come together, we just couldn’t have been more happy.”

In the years following
Aeroplane
, Jeff began exploring his spiritual interests, reading Krishnamurti, traveling, spending time in a monastery and, as Laura saw it, becoming a more
calm and centered person. In the summer of 2000, Jeff and his friend Josh McKay attended the Koprivshtitsa Festival in Bulgaria, a twice-a-decade confluence of thousands of traditional musicians playing simultaneously on various stages. The ambient sounds of the players were recorded and later issued as
Orange Twin Field Works, Volume One
. In early 2001, Jeff and Laura took a restorative trip to New Zealand that culminated in a live performance in an Auckland pub with their friend and host Chris Knox. At this show, Jeff played Neutral Milk Hotel songs and spoke frankly about his recent breakdown. In November 2001, Jeff joined Will Cullen Hart and John Fernandes for an East Coast Circulatory System tour, where he drummed and sang, and giggled on the floors of the houses where they crashed, just like old times. Toward the end of 2002, Jeff (under the name Jefferson) hosted a radio show on New Jersey’s legendary free-form station WFMU. On these shows, he played original sound-collage compositions, music by his favorite artists and single notes that seemingly went on forever. After nine late-night shows he slipped away again.

But while Neutral Milk Hotel ceased to exist as a band, their influence continued to be heard in groups like the Decemberists and the Arcade Fire. And their audience grew, too, with an estimated 140,000 copies of
Aeroplane
sold by Merge since 1998, nearly 50,000 of those in the past two years. Without radio play, without a touring band, somehow the word keeps seeping out that this is a special record that deserves to be treasured and shared.

On the Elephant 6 Town Hall internet message board, fans who have their own bands came together to produce a tribute album,
Fanfare for Neutral Milk Hotel
, available for free
download within the online community. Archival websites like Gavin Bachner’s Carrot Flower Kingdom compile bootleg info, visual reference material and discographies. In darker corners of the internet, fans who came to Neutral Milk Hotel too late to experience them in the flesh share thoughts and experiences.

Geoffrey George was in high school in Michigan when he first heard Neutral Milk Hotel, a couple years after they stopped performing. He and some friends were driving aimlessly out to a spooky old nunnery in the woods near Oxford. One of the guys in the car was an older brother, home from college where he worked at the radio station. He put
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
in the CD player and for Geoff, the outside world just melted away. “Right away I knew there was something to it. You could feel this music—from the opening chords of ‘King of Carrot Flowers,’ the music vibrates with a strange thickness and it goes right into your guts. And then there’s Mangum’s voice, sharp and loud, telling stories that are frightening and cold and fascinating. It was like a strange old carnival, but it was also something I had never heard before in my life. We drove up to the nunnery, but I was too transfixed by the music to care. We didn’t speak much, and although we listened to the whole album, I didn’t once ask who the band was. The music had really affected me. For the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I wanted to hear it again. Some months later when we were visiting Matt’s brother in Ann Arbor, I finally asked what that album was and went right to Wazoo Records on State Street and bought it. I’ve since had to buy three separate copies because I’ve listened to it so much. I’ve heard (probably) all of NMH’s recordings, including a lot of
live stuff, but nothing comes close to it. It will forever be one of the albums that changed the way I listened to music. I know that Jeff has probably written some great stuff since the album, but I realize it will probably never see the light of day. In a way, though, I like it like this. This sort of album—or work of art—is special on its own. It’s a onetime thing, and it ends up being more significant with all the mystique that surrounds it. You can tell the album is deeply personal and I don’t think Jeff expected it to gain the attention it has. I think it’s pretty admirable of him to be able to keep quiet about it. Most people would exploit the situation.”

On
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
, Jeff Mangum sings of wanting to save Anne Frank in some sort of time machine. When Jeff vanished, his voice suddenly silenced—much as Anne’s had been by death—similar desires rose in the hearts of his fans. Late one night in 2002, a young woman named Briana Whyte visited a Neutral Milk Hotel fansite called sadtomato and made a poignant post to the message board.

i want to build a hermitage in the woods for jeff mangum. he could communicate his wisdom to the world by way of a long tube that extends from a hole in the roof to a basement vent, whereby the sounds will be transcribed and broadcasted via am radio. people could live in tents about a mile away from his place, awaiting the completion of his masterpiece. when it is unveiled, the tentdwellers will spontaneously combust in holy terror, and the forest fires shall be a sign to the international community that neutral milk hotel, or something more inconceivably beautiful, has returned.

Later she read the
Creative Loafing
article in which her self-described rant was excerpted and felt foolish for having posted it. Jeff sounded so weary of people hounding him to release music again. Briana decided she was quite satisfied to have
Aeroplane
, and didn’t really need anything else from the man who had made it.

William Schaff, a visual artist from Providence, RI, was so inspired by “Holland, 1945” that he made a limited edition book of drawings and collage that fuses Jeff’s song with Anne Frank’s story and Schaff’s own emotional response to her death. In “I Am Listening to Here Where You Are,” Anne is represented with roses where her eyes should be, and when reincarnated as a boy still wears that lovely grin. Schaff himself appears as a conduit for the sorrows of the century, vomiting up the dead as do-gooders parrot “never again” slogans in front of a stack of televisions blaring post–Nazi atrocities. It’s a moving, intriguing interpretation of the material.

Jeff is alive, he’s sane and he’s well. He sometimes plays on his friends’ records, but he isn’t making Neutral Milk Hotel music, at least not for public consumption. It’s his life, and he’s living it.

The music that he made with his friends glows with a special light. The songs are beautiful and fascinating, the playing unpredictable and soulful, the production sympathetic and effective…but that’s not why so many people care about Neutral Milk Hotel and hold
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
close to their hearts. The band and their music are manifestations of the rarest kind of love, a love that rescued a bunch of smart, emotional misfit kids stuck in redneck towns and hard-nosed cities, plunked them down in a series
of warm and welcoming homes, trusted them to be themselves without fear of being mocked, let them all blossom.
Aeroplane
was Jeff’s flower, watered and sheltered and fed by his dear friends.

Julian Koster, whose life was immeasurably enriched by the souls he found in Ruston, has a message for young musicians and artists who are trying to find their way. It seems like he’s talking to his teenage self when he says, emphatically and sweetly, “I think what Elephant 6 meant for us is very simple: there’s something pure and infinite in you, that
wants
to come out of you, and can come out of no other person on the planet. That’s what you’ve got to share, and that’s as real and important as the fact that you’re alive. We were able, at a really young age, to somehow protect each other so we could feel that. The world at large, careerism, money, magazines, your parents, the people at the rock club in your town, other kids, nothing is going to give you that message, necessarily. In fact, most things are going to lead you away from it, sadly, because humanity is really confused at the moment. But you wouldn’t exist if the universe didn’t need you. And any time I encounter something beautiful that came out of a human somewhere, that’s them, that’s their own soul. That’s just pure, whatever its physicality is, if the person can play piano, if they can’t play piano, if they’re tone deaf, whatever it is, if it’s pure, it hits you like a sledgehammer. It fills up your own soul, it makes you want to cry, it makes you glad you’re alive, it lets
you
come out of
you
. And that’s what we need: we desperately need
you
.”