"Have you heard anything about it being possible that all the computers in the world will shut down in the year 2000?" asks Jeff Mangum, in a quiet, almost conspiratorial tone. "I've been hearing that lately, but me and all my friends live in our own little worlds, so we never know about these things. Weird, huh?"
On a rainy night at the Black Cat in Washington, DC, the members of Neutral Milk Hotel are finishing up their soundcheck when bandleader Mangum suggests working up a version of "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One." Considering that it's possibly the most poppin' fresh song on the group's latest disc, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Merge), it's surprising that the band doesn't already have it nailed. But Mangum wants to give it a try. A bit awkwardly, he turns his mike stand, tugs at his wool sweater and faces his bandmates. "Let's just play it," he says matter of factly.
From behind his kit, a tousled Jeremy Barnes raises a drumstick. "Uh, Jeff?" he asks. "How are we gonna end it?"
Mangum smiles. "Shit like that, I don't know," he says. Then he turns to multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster. "Julian, what should go in there? Accordiuon?"
"Let's try it," says Koster, strapping a squeezebox over his Dr. Seuss sweatshirt.
With that, the ensemble eases into the song. All strummy and wheezy, it rumbles, picks up momentum and takes off with Mangum's soaring vocal, but near the end, it goes raggedy and sputters to a halt that hushes the fellows onstage. Their silence soon gives way to clearing throats and a few sheepish smiles. Guitarist and horn player Scott Spillane shakes his head. Mangum offers a few words of encouragement and pats him on the behind.
Then Koster brigtens. "Hey, we forgot about this!" he says, darting behind a keyboard by the drum riser. "Let's try it again."
Mangum smiles, strums his guitar, and the barely controlled chaos swells around him once again.
This impromptu rehearsal encapsulates the essence of Neutral Milk Hotel's appeal. In the few short years since the release of its debut, On Avery Island, the Athens, Georgia-based group has evolved beyond indie rock parameters into terra incognita where psychedelia, progressive music, punk rock, and poetry meet - thanks to healthy doses of gleeful experimentation and unusual song structures.
With guitars, bass and drums augmented by a coterie of horns, singing saws, organs, and pipes, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea sounds like the Minutemen fronted by John Philip Sousa during the British Invasion. It's a retro-drenched march to the millennium, completely out of step with commercial - or even non-commercial - trends.
It's also the product of a larger community, a fuzz-pop collective dubbed Elephant 6 by its participants. Conceived by childhood friends and characterized by ambitious recordings and eye-popping cover art, the Elephant 6 collective also includes bands such as Apples in Stero and the Olivia Tremor Control. As shrewd conceptualists and passionate music geeks, the Elephant 6 crew has managed to carve a niche for itself in the marketplace.
Of the lot, Mangum has been voted most likely to recede. A strong and sincere writer with a delicate demeanor and a whirring mind, he's been mentioned in the same breath as rock iconoclasts Brian Wilson, Captain Beefheart, and Roky Erickson. Like those three reclusive titans, he performs pop miracles by transforming the blood of life into potent sonic elixirs. Mangum's lyrics are filled with bursts of nearly inappropriate emotion bordered by airbrushed Jungian dreamscapes. In his world, adult experiences mix breezily with childhood wonder, rational thinking gets turned inside out, and the soundtrack to it all is both tuneful and timeless.
After soundcheck, Mangum sits on a wooden bench that may have once been a church pew in a darkened hallway outside the band's dressing room. Lit only by illuminated exit signs at either end of the hall, he smokes a cigarette and sips bourbon for a pesky sore throat. With each swallow, his face contorts slightly. "I don't necessarily understand what I'm doing," he says. "The songs just sort of slowly evolve in my head and become what they are. In my mind, the record doesn't have a title and neither do the songs. It's one long thing, one long song to me.
"And now, the songs and the band are getting attention and that's really cool, but I know it's only temporary. It's something I would never try to hold onto. My music can only handle so much attention before it eventually retreats."
Most likely, Mangum would retreat with it. "I'm getting more and more mentally detached from the way the quote-unquote real world works," he says. "At this point, I have to accept the fact that I'm caught up in living in a world where you have to eat and get in a car and put on clothes and stuff. I just want to make music with my friends and have that communal experience."
Mangum may sound idealistic and naive, but his look into the future is something of a deja vu. He already knows what it's like to be in a remote area surrounded by a protective cocoon of music and friends. Mangum grew up in Ruston, Louisiana (population 15,000), a Southern backwater best known as the home of Louisiana Tech University. But Ruston is also the magical place where Mangum and like-minded cohorts such as Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart of the Olivia Tremor Control and Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo cut their musical teeth.
During high school, they made recordings for one another, traded tapes, formed various bands and hung out at Louisiana Tech's radio station, where they raided the record library and eventually landed DJ slot - even though they weren't enrolled at the school. "There wasn't much to do, so we got into music," says Schneider. "We pretty much entertained ourselves."
"We created our own thing," says Mangum. "We'd never been out in the world before. We'd never seen anything. And then, we discovered all this crazy music at college."
Mangum recalls swooning with his buds over numerous records. At the radio station, they found copies of Frank Zappa's Uncle Meat, Yoko Ono's Fly, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, The Supersonic Sounds of Sun Ra and various Folkways titles that appeared to have never been played. Because they were DJs, record labels began sending them promo copies, and they soon discovered plenty of unusual contemporary artists like Jad Fair, Daniel Johnston or Galaxie 500. "You couldn't get a decent record within eight hours of the place," recalls Mangum, "but every day, records would just show up from labels like Homestead and 50 Skidillion Watts and Drag City. We'd be so excited. And when we weren't doing our DJ shows, we were recording. Wow! We had it all."
After high school graduation, they moved to different parts of the country but remained friends. Mangum took a few college courses, dropped out, traveled around the country and continued recording, sometimes under the name Neutral Milk Hotel. Schneider moved to Denver and set up a lo-fi recording studio. Doss and Hart put together Olivia Tremor Control and settled in Athens, where Mangum now lives as well.
When Schneider decided to release some of his friends' recordings as singles and EPs, the Elephant 6 Recording Co. was born. Elephant 6 turned out to be a short-lived imprint because the bands soon moved on to bigger labels - Neutral Milk Hotel signed with Merge, Olivia Tremor Control went with Flydaddy, and the Denver-based Apples landed on Spinart and subsequently Sire - but the Elephant 6 community and spirit remained intact.
A friend of Mangum since elementary school and the production whiz behind each Elephant 6 release, Schneider draws distinction between the collective's disperse camps. "Those guys are really wrapped up in their Athens scene, which is a really nice thing," he says. "They live close together and they perform on each other's records, but all of Elephant 6 isn't like that. Elephant 6 groups from the Western side of the country are less experimental and just bands. You know, bands that practice and stuff."
The Apples are different from their counterparts in Athens, as recordings such as Fun Truck Noisemaker and Tone Soul Evolution make evident. Less freewheeling and more firmly rooted in classic pop, they pledge allegiance to the Bealtes, the Beach Boys, and psychedelic rock. Instantly accessible and tightly melodic, they're more likely to rock the house - or at least the garage, thanks in large part to Schneider's buoyant songwriting and rich harmonies from bassist Eric Allen, guitarist John Hill, and drummer Hilarie Sidney.
"They're fun, really fun records," says Schneider. "I've been seriously making recordings and making them sound hi-fi since I was about 15 years old, and the Apples records are the culmination of everything I know. Whether it's a single or a CD, I get to put in all of my ideas, everything I've learned over the years.
"I'm real obsessed with production," he says with giddy enthusiasm. "I love sounds. I love recording. It's fun. It's really fun. Geez, it's great being in a rock band."
Although Neutral Milk Hotel started out as a bedroom solo project for Mangum, it's lately become more of a collaboration, and these days, Barnes, Koster, and Spillane are full-time members. Mangum says that won't be changing anytime soon. "There wouldn't be any music without the community," he says. "I spent five years traveling and amassing songs and all through that period I would always play my songs for my friends and have little shows in their living rooms. That's what I like to do."
As a result, Mangum can imagine a day when Neutral Milk Hotel is strictly a recording entity with no roadwork in its future. "I can definitely see that," he says with a smile. "I think we'll eventually move up to the Ozark Mountains and drop out of society completely. After all, I don't have a car, a computer, or a television. But I do have an eight-track, a board and an amp. We'll just make music."