Jeff Mangum recorded his debut album while living in a 6 by 6-foot walk-in closet. He also does not own a phone, which makes him difficult to track down. But he is one of the reasons that rock music, almost in spite of itself, continued to matter in 1996.
Mangum is one of the group of friends who grew up in Ruston, LA, formed the artists collective Elephant 6, and in the last few years released a series of albums and singles as the bands Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, and the Apples in Stereo (who perform January 28 at the Empty Bottle).
"We grew up together very sheltered," says Mangum, who no longer lives in a closet but hangs out with members of the Olivia Tremor Control in Athens, GA. "There was no local club to play in or see bands. Music was this weird otherwordly thing; it was almost magical and obviously still is for us. I don't think we'll ever get old and jaded about it."
Mangum's enthusiasm runs counter to the apathy rippling through the musical mainstream. Public perceptions about the health of rock music are shaped by a handful of sources - MTV, major-market commercial radio stations, a few national magazines, and the Siskel and Ebert of pop criticism, Beavis and Butt-head. The best these tastemakers could come up with in 1996 was a menu that looked like Tuesday leftovers: Nirvana soundalikes, Beatles imitators, Alice Cooper wannabes, Kiss nostalgia, Hootie and the Blowfish. And the public yawned - economically, it was sluggish going for the record business with sales leveling off for the first time in years.
But innovation continues and freshness abounds, though under the radar of the above-mentioned tastemakers. As Marshall Jefferson, one of the architects of Chicago house music, once said, "I don't know what the next big thing will be, but I'm sure it's happening right now in some kid's basement."
It's another way of saying that there will always be an underground to replace the one that just got paved over by the corporate bulldozer. Rock renews itself not on a stadium stage with a massive sound system but in a living room with some closet Cobain strumming a guitar and singing his songs in an unsteady voice into a four-track tape recorder.
The best rock music of the '90s has been all about such private revolutions, the innovation that comes from isolation: the Flaming Lips concoting their acid-laced reveries from their compound in Oklahoma City; Guided By Voices writing their private history of rock on weekend breaks from teaching in Dayton, Ohio; the Grifters grafting Southern roadhouse grit onto dissonant guitars in a flower shop in Memphis.
These bands, along with countless other even less celebrated voices in recent years, from Lida Husik to Richard Davies, fashioned entire worlds on records that escaped mainstream attention, but pointed to rock's continuing ability to raise the hairs on the back on the unsuspecting listener's neck.
In '96, the sonic thrills were provided by records that sold only a few thousand copies apiece: Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island (Merge), the Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle (Flydaddy), and the Apples in Stereo's Fun Trick Noisemaker and Science Faire (both SpinArt).
The core members of these bands - Neutral Milk Hotel's Mangum, the Apples' Robert Schneider and the Olivia's Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart - were boyhood friends in Louisiana, and though they are now scattered from Colorado to Georgia and record for different labels, they have maintained their bond.
"We were people who had the same musical ideals and goals who also happened to be friends," says Schneider, who runs the Elephant 6 label and recording studio in Denver. "We started the label (in 1993) to put out the music we made because we figured maybe there were people out there hurting to hear good songwriting the way we were."
Though the Elephant 6 bands sound nothing alike, they put a premium on melodies, homemade immediacy, and kitchen-sink production on four- and eight-track tape machines. "I've never even seen the inside of a real recording studio," says Schneider, the Elephant 6 engineering guru.
"There is a whole aspect of freedom to recording at home that you don't get in a studio," Mangum says. "The possibilities are infinite and there is no reason not to explore them. So you wander into these dark areas, and there is a distant possibilty you could fall flat on your face, but that's the point. You don't have to worry about anything. You pick up your guitar and play something, then lay down a drum track, start overdubbing, slow up the tape, speed it up, play it backward, put on a trumpet. There are no limits."
The sacred texts for the collective's sound are rooted in the '60s: Mark Lewisohn's "The Beatles Recording Sessions," the psychedelic masterworks of the early, Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd, and Brian Wilson's more elaborate Beach Boys' creations, particulary Pet Sounds - a work so near and dear to Schneider that he adopted its as the name of his living room-cum-recording studio.
"We have all this vintage gear, this out-of-date analog equipment on which we create our 'pet sounds,'" Schneider says. "It would be hard for another band or another engineer to come in here and make a record, because the whole operation is so incredibly amateurish."
Yet out of these modest circumstances have come three dizzyingly ambitious works that reinvent the hoariest of '60s cliches: the concept album.
The Apples' Science Faire is a hodgepodge of early singles, but their addictive Fun Trick Noisemaker coheres as a mood album, evoking memories of childhood and summertime with its lush pop tunes. The Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle is arguably the most ambitious of the Elephant 6 releases, a 75-minute journey that blends Beatles-like arrangements with futuristic electronic experiments and includes a 10-part suite dubbed "Green Typewriters" and a bonus CD of instrumental effects, incorporating the sounds of barking dogs and waterfalls within its wash of ambient atmosphere.
The best of the bunch is Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island, named after a location off the coast of Louisiana tha Mangum says contains a giant Buddha encassed in glass.
"It made a huge impression upon me as a kid, and I guess there's a spiritual aspect because of it," he says. "The album is a story but it doesn't have a beginning, a middle, or an end. It's more like a little film in my head."
The Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle is similarly subtitled Music from the Unrealized Film Script, and the liner notes ask listeners to "send cassette taped details describing your favorite, most interesting dreams (real or otherwise) for a future project."
In the best sense, the Elephant 6 bands create a soundtrack for these movies of the mind. They suggest that even in its fifth decade, rock still can be a source of mystery and wonder.
"There's a reason why people listen to music," Mangum says. "There's a reason why if you're bored you just may take $12 and spent it on a record. I do that a lot. I bring a record home and it connects with me like nothing else. In my ideal situation, somebody will do that with my record."