The mystical heart of the Elephant 6 Collective, Jeff Mangum makes music with Neutral Milk Hotel that frightens even him. Although the Beatles created the concept of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Mangum's combo has brought them to life.
Although they got off on the wrong foot when they first met in school, Jeff Mangum - the mystical force behind Neutral Milk Hotel - and Robert Schneider - the hyperactive studio wiz from the Apples in Stereo and the man who produced Mangum's hautingly beautiful new album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - have been best friends since childhood in Ruston, LA.
"I remember eyeing Robert in the second grade, because he was the new kid in school," chuckles Mangum. "He looked all fidgety and nervous, so I went up to him with my Wiffle bat to see if he wanted to play ball. But he freaked out and ran away instead, and he started screaming, 'Don't hit me! Don't hit me!'"
By sixth grade, however, the two were on the same wavelength, pre-teen rock fans about to share their first concert experience: Cheap Trick in the basketball arena at Louisiana Tech. "Jeff's mom dropped us off at the Pizza Inn before the show," recalls Schneider. "We were so excited and in such a hurry to get to the concert, and the pizza was really hot, so we dumped ice all over it to cool it off."
Mangum and Schneider soon found themselves pressed up against the Cheap Trick barricade, scrambling after a guitar pick flicked at them by Rick Neilsen. "I got it, though," boasts Schneider gleefully, "and I still have it."
Mangum befriended Will Cullen Hart - who, along with Bill Doss, became the main cogs of the third Ruston "seed" band band, the Olivia Tremor Control - while shirking football practice in the seventh grade. "We'd get crushed daily, " says Mangum. "We were always running around the field in a panic."
Adds Hart, "Jeff leaned over during some drill one day and asked me, 'Do you like Triumph? You wanna go make some noise?'"
The pair soon turned in their uniforms and began devoting their spare time to Maggot, a white-noise band with, as Hart puts it, "no socially redeeming value." Mangum began recording all of his musical endeavors on cassette in high school and could rely on a ready-made audience of three to critique his efforts the next morning. "Some of those early tapes are shit, but that was never the point," Mangum explains. "The four of us existed in our insular world. We were very supportive of each other, and the love we had for each other was always really positive. I'd bang on a lamp, record my mom on an answering machine, play a tuba that I couldn't play, then give the tape a ridiculous title, and they'd go home and listen to it. The next day Will would bring in a tape with his four-year-old brother singing things like, 'I haven't found an effective way to ease my pain,' while he was pushing over a box of bottles."
With such avant-garde beginnings to his musical upbringing, it was inevitable that John Cage would be almost as big an influence on Mangum as the Velvet Underground's John Cale. "It's weird to go back to modern classical stuff from the '40s by people like Cage, Harry Partch, or Pierre Henry and hear those guys going absolutely batshit, putting turntables in the refrigerator," says Mangum. "Their influence on psychedelia 20 years later is pretty obvious to me."
Mangum began using the name Neutral Milk Hotel on homemade cassettes in 1987. Schneider remembers one in particular, Hype City Soundtrack, sounding "kind of Sonic Youth-y and kind of like Black Sabbath." Mangum adds, "I was also doing speeded-up vocals, balls of noise and interviews with my friends. I'd go around asking everybody, 'What does the digestion machine mean to you?' and then I'd make a collage of their answers."
By the time the first Neutral Milk Hotel single, "Everything Is" / "Snow Song," was released in 1994 on Seattle's Cher Doll Records, Mangum had swapped his gruff vocal style for a more natural delivery. "Jeff had a real nice voice," claims Schneider, "but he'd try to disguise it by singing like Michael Stipe. One day when I was recording him, I told him to practice the song without doing that, and that turned out to be the take. I felt like Mr. Tricky Producer."
Nancy Ostrander, Cher Doll's owner, saw something just as appealing in Mangum's songwriting. "It was fuzzy and happy and cathcier than heck," she says. "I like music that is actual songs - the shorter the better - and he got bonus points for 'Snow Song' sounding like the Jesus and Mary Chain."
When it came time to record on On Avery Island, Neutral Milk's 1996 debut album, Mangum knew the sound he was after. "While doing some four-track recording," he says, "I found this acoustic guitar with an incredibly hot, hot pickup, and I got hold of an old, broken distortion pedal. My four-track has this mechanism where you push it into remix, and it feeds the fuzz back into itself a thousand times. I hit it one time accidentally and it blew my head off, and I totally fell in love with it." Thus was born the signature Neutral Milk backing-track tapestry, a VU meter-embedding sonic volcano not recommended for small children or listeners with pacemakers.
Schneider and Mangum perfected the Neutral Milk sound on the second LP, Aeroplane, recorded last year at Schneider's Elephant 6 Studios in Denver. "Jeff came to me with the songs for the album, in basic arrangements featuring two guitars, drums and doubled vocals," says Schneider, "and then it was up to me to find the sound he wanted. But I've known him for so long I know what he's after. He wanted me to flesh out the material, so we spent a lot of time on tape manipulation. A third of my ideas Jeff would reject instantly, another third we'd record and then they'd get thrown out the window. And the last third became the album."
Mangum's principal concern was that Aeroplane, cut on 16-track, might seem too hi-fi. Realizing the sound achieved on the Apples' 1995 debut album, Fun Trick Noisemaker, could be a little too slick for Mangum's taste, Schneider insists he was content to be the midwife for Aeroplane. "It's Jeff vision," he says. "My philosophy is: If it's interesting, let's leave it in."
"When I sing these songs, this filmstrip winds around in my brain," says Mangum. "And it's all I can see."
If Aeroplane seems more organic than Avery Island, the reason is simple. It was recorded by a real band, although Julian Koster - the man responsible for playing the singing saw, bowed banjo, and accordion - is quick to point out the transitory nature of this particular combo. "With all the different dreams we're busy pursuing - I get to make up sounds for Jeff's stuff, for Will and Bill's stuff and with Jeremy [Barnes] for the Music Tapes - it seems more like the jazz scene of the '50s and '60s: people trading around different personnel. It's been great living three musical lives like that. And I really feel lucky when I get to hear Jeff wailing away on a new song in the bathroom - songs that are floating around and haunting, all from my friend's imagination." Koster himself is responsible for one of the eeriest pieces of the puzzle from Aeroplane, the spine-tingling musical saw accompaniment to the album's title track. It's like a theremin with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel.
Mangum found the last two members of his semi-permanent outfit in time to test market the new album's material on tour last year. "Julian knew this great drummer from Chicago, a kid named Jeremy Barnes," explains Mangum. "Julian has this weird way of bringing people together - a little magic dust and things start to fall in place. So he and I took the train from Denver so I could play with Jeremy. He was going to school at DePaul at the time, and five minutes after we started playing with him I freaked out and told Julian, 'We're going to have to ask him to drop out of school. He totally rocks.'"
While visiting his mom in Austin, Texas, Mangum discovered Scott Spillane, and old pal from Ruston, working in a pizza parlor. "He was living in his van outside Gumby's pizzeria and he was miserable," says Mangum. "He told me, 'Man, I get this flour up my nose and I start bleeding everywhere. And I can't sing anymore.' I felt I had to rescue him. Then it dawned on me. 'You wanna come to New York with us?' I asked him. I didn't even know he played the trumpet and trombone until we all got out to Julian's grandmother's house on Long Island and started rehearsing in her basement."
"They're a great band," assesses Schneider. "They've got a fantastic drummer, a whacked-out multi-instrumentalist, a really stubborn horn player. And then you've got Jeff, this brilliant poet savant. And you throw them in the studio with an obsessive, yet demanding producer, and you get a really interesting album."
Even more than its unique mix of brass arrangements - running the gamut from baroque flourishes to mariachi blasts to Salvation Army dirges - Aeroplane's crowning achievement is the mood forged by Mangum's lyrics. It's the work of a man influenced as much by William S. Burroughs or James Joyce as by the Edwardian illustrations of flying couches and talking seahorses in L. Frank Baum's sequels to The Wizard of Oz or the more frightening aspects of the pre-Disney Pinnochio.
"Some of the songs really scared me when I first wrote them," admits Mangum. "They were so intense I wasn't sure I even wanted them on the album until I got to Denver. I let my subconscious take over. When I moved to Athens, it was the first time in five years I'd been completely settled down. I was so used to being on people's couches and writing songs in other people's bathrooms. It was a real struggle to try to include the more beautiful aspects of life. I find being here to be a very beautiful thing, and I wanted as much beauty as possible to come across."
Hart, for one, thinks Mangum has succeeded. "I watched a lot of the songs on this album happen," he says. "I love Jeff's imagery and the emotion he's able to draw up and then shoot back out. He's always storing up interesting things, and later you'll hear them in his songs. They're full of little images that create a larger picture. It's sort of like a pointillist painting: unhappy little stories - problems and turmoil that everybody has - but the large picture they make says, 'Don't worry. We're gonna be all right.'"