Twenty-seven-year old Jeff Mangum smiles easily. The lead singer, principal guitarist, and songwriter for the otherwordly, hallucinatory pop band Neutral Milk Hotel looks like he spends all his time hunched over a guitar or keyboard or mixing console. That's because he does. His hair is mid-length, swept back, doesn't look like it's been washed today or yesterday; his pants have holes in them.
But Mangum - and the entire Athens, GA Elephant Six extended family my wife and I are with for a weekend - is very busy making art of one kind or another, hanging out with friends all the time, telling stories, helping each other. Elephant Six is the name of a group of friends who all grew up together in the backwater college town of Ruston, LA. These people mostly met in high school, discovered that they were all into the same kind of pop and punk sounds and banded together against the jocks and rednecks that surrounded them, until they were old enough to escape.
Today they share resources and play on one another's records. Everyone we meet is in three different bands and has his own home-recording identity. They are happy and young and really nice to us. I half wish that someone would cop an attitude, come up to us and say, "Excuse me, what do you think you're doing here?" Then I wouldn't feel such jealousy toward these artsy twentysomethings. Robert Schneider, one of Jeff's oldest friends, is sort of the patriarch of Elephant Six. A Ruston expat who now lives in Denver, Schneider heads the spectacular fake-Beatles band Apples in Stereo, runs the Elephant Six record label and produces, records and sometimes plays in the various Elephant Six Athens bands. He's been recording them in his own fashion, in various living room setups, for so long that most E6 folks feel uncomfortable recording with anyone else, aside from their own recording studios. A short list of the E6 Athens bands includes the fantasy-obsessed Elf Power; psychedelic-isn't-extreme-enough-word recombinant rock act Olivia Tremor Control; dadaist performance troupe Dixie Blood Moustache; the hyper-pop Gerbils; the Jad Fair meets musique concrete-sounding Music Tapes; and Neutral Milk Hotel, the marching band from slumberland.
The other members of Hotel are drummer and organist Jeremy Barnes, horn player and arranger Scott Spillane and banjoist-accordionnist-singing-saw-player Julian Koster. Their about-to-be-released second full-length, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Merge), easily ranks with the world's most ultra-creative off-kilter pop, from Incredible String Band to Skip Spence to the Television Personalities. Their music is rough around the edges and stuffed to the gills with fuzzed-out bass and crisp acoustic guitars; stirring, high-pitched, warbly crooning that's catchy almost despite itself, sliding from note to note like a slack-key guitar. There's a smattering of trombones, bells, zanzithophone, flugelhorn, bagpipes, sax; that saw, played perfectly in tune; a shortwave radio, tape hiss, white noise; air-pump-driven organs that pulsate throuhout; and 1984 Casiotone keyboards pushed heavily through the red. Neutral Milk Hotel's sound implodes folk-pop with whole worlds of experimental sound.
The delirious songs melt into one another; and they are crammed with hundreds of words. Jeff Mangum's lyrics clutter NMH songs with disturbing images and intense revelations. He's an outsider suburban-mystic type who's managed to plumb genuine depths, but unlike Roky Erickson or Daniel Johnston, he's not bonkers. And as opposed to Jewel, he sings about God and Anne Frank without reducing the subjects to frightfully high school notebook poetry. And resolutely resists the twentysomething lyricist's curse, that irony stuff.
Sample lyrics:
"Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies / While you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park / Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums / The music and medicine you needed for comforting" (from "Oh Comely"). And "And I will take you and leave you alone watching spirals of white sofly flow over your eyelids / And all you did will wait until the point when you let go / And oh sister now that we're grieving our fingers will falter / Our lungs will be leaking all over each other" (from "Two-Headed Boy").
As Jeff and I begin to speak in his living room, this strange lamp contraption - a lightbulb stuck inside a large sculptural head - starts to vibrate slowly and make a high-pitched whine. It totally freaks me out. I ask if we can please move to the kitchen, and Jeff laughs maniacally.
Are you conducting experiments on how many words can be said in one song, in one breath?
(Laughs) Actually, the songs come first, and then the specific idea that I'm expressing reveals itself. And a continuous stream of words keeps coming out like little blobs, usually in some sort or order.
There's a line on Aeroplane that goes, "How strange it is to be anything at all." Is that your philosophy in a nutshell?
I usually wake up every morning really freaked out that I'm in my body. Like usually whatever dream I'm having has something to do with being totally freaked out that I'm in my body and I usually wake up with a shock. And then I relax, forget about it and go have a cup of coffee. It's also about all the crazy sleepwalking dreams that I have. I have like all kinds of crazy hallucinations and it's pretty strange.
You mean when you're asleep . . .
Well, I open my eyes and I see things. I've seen like spirits moving through the walls. I've seen a vortex coming through the wall. I've seen amorphous litle balls of light bouncing all around in the front yard through the window. I've seen giant bugs on the floor. I was in a hotel room in Amarillo, TX, and all I remember is standing on the bed and seeing the whole wall in front of me filled with lights that were popping like popcorn out of the wall. . . Do you think some of the lyrics on this record are gonna make people get weirded out?
In "underground" music, you'll find people will be kind of freaked by your religious songs more than the truly upsetting lines about domestic violence in "The King of Carrot Flowers Part One," or the whole world's indifference to genocide, the subtext to the Anne Frank songs.
The thing about me singing about Christ, I'm not saying, "I love you Christianity." I'm not saying, "I love all the fucked-up terrible shit that people have done in the name of God." And I'm not preaching belief in Christ . . .
We played a show with Vic Chesnutt a few weeks ago in Athens and he sat on the stage and played for 30 ninutes without stopping and he sang all these songs about how like action and reaction are the closest things to truth in the universe, how he's had all these out-of-body experiences but they weren't supernatural. I though it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. I feel like I'm just one simple person trying to express this stuff, nothing more.
I'm curious about how you incorporate musical sounds and instruments from other cultures without ever coming across as world-beat honky.
In my little world of music, I'm just sort of following blindly.
What covers do you do?
We covered "Song for Che" by Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. That's the only one. . . My musical philosophy is something that I understand without "knowing." And I'm always amazed when I read interviews with people and they know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it and what they're doing it for and can go off for like a page. I'm amazed that they've spent so much time analyzing what they're doing to such a degree. Everything I've done has just been pure intuition.
How about inspirations, the short list? Beatles?
No. I mean their music is great, but it's the Minutemen for me. They were one the greatest bands ever, along with Soft Machine. I got into the Minutemen right after D. Boon died. I remember hearing "Paranoid Chant," when I was 14, on the radio and thinking, "This is the craziest, fucking most extreme scream I've heard in my life." And it scared the shit out of me. A lot of the music that I started discovering when I was 14 like really scared me, but I loved it. I bought Double Nickels On The Dime thinking it would all be paranoid chants. I put it on and I'd actually been really getting into the Meters at the time. Double Nickels just blew my head off and became the soundtrack to those four years of my life. They were so in love with being a band and being together and singing what they were singing. It came across so beautifully; I still put it on and it is really magical to me. I remember I saw 'em on TV and they were saying how everyone should be in a band, every house should have a band, every neighborhood.
I'm really into musique-concrete composers like Luc Ferrari and in particular Pierre Henry - they're really great. I'm just in love with the whole idea of being able to capture sound at all. The ways those guys can be masters of pure sound, make it so musical and interesting, it blows my mind. To be able to take like a firecracker exploding and segue it into a door slamming so perfectly, I marvel at how they do it. That and jazz - music I don't understand at all but which is so much fun to listen to - I enjoy the whole mystery of what they're doing.
And Cage is one of my heroes, too, because he let himself go and let his personality have nothing to do with music. He was just sort of like the vessel that allowed it to occur, but he had no control over what was going to happen. He's like one of the only composers who can come as close as you can get to listening to your own music and have it be completely a surprise to you.
How much of an influence are the sounds of the circus?
I'm very influenced by the circus. A lot of the dreams that I have, I'm in the circus. A lot of the songs are influenced by my dreams. A lot of the songs on Aeroplane really freaked me out, and it took other people to make me comfortable with them, to see that it was okay to sing about a lot of this stuff, not to shut them inside. 'Cause it was just too intense. I would ask a friend, "What the fuck am I doing?" I took me a while to figure out that the songs were positive, that they were okay, not just these fucked-up nightmares that I was throwing up.
Will there be a video for this record?
Do you watch MTV? I'm not being preachy, like "MTV bad, me good." But it scares the shit out of me. If you never watch TV and you just live inside your own head, then you turn it on, you think, "The world is like that?"