Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper Page A
Authors: Kim Cooper
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want to see some of the footage.” All this was before the album came out.
In late April, Neutral Milk Hotel went out on the road with Olivia Tremor Control to play dates in the South, Northeast and Midwest, with the highlight being their April 26 appearance in Providence, Rhode Island, for the Ptolemaic Providence Perambulation, a benefit for the psychedelicBritish fanzine
Ptolemaic Terrascope
. The festival was informally known as Terrastock. Band affiliations were fluid that weekend, with the Olivias joining Neutral Milk onstage for the latter’s Saturday afternoon set, Julian bringing his banjo, accordion and keyboards up on Sunday when OTC played, and Jeremy Barnes filling in on the drum stool for the Supreme Dicks. The set list was typical for the period between
Avery
and
Aeroplane
, a mix of older songs (“Garden-head,” “Song Against Sex”) and new (“Oh Comely,” “The Fool”), including evolving material, like the last part of “Oh Comely,” at this stage a separate song called “Goldaline” which was usually appended to the end of one called “Message Sent” (sometimes titled “Through My Tears”).
On May 3, they played in Minneapolis at the Seventh Street Entry, finally giving Jason Norvein Wachtelhausen a chance to see the band that had wormed its way into his and his friends’ consciousness. Jason lived in a loft with a bunch of people, one of whom had “Song Against Sex” on a mix tape. They became collectively obsessed with the song, and would play it like a sort of theme song whenever they were going out. Someone finally bought
On Avery Island
and they loved that, too. Jason remembers, “we spent so much time talking about those guys and wondering about them. Like, what could some guys who could create music like this—this real and untouched by pretension and seemingly unaffected by any desire to succeed as musicians—be like? And we sort of formed this image of the band and all kind of agreed on what they must look like. We’d never seen a picture of them. It all sounds so much like something teenage girls would have done in the fifties and sixties now that I look back on it. I mean, I’m a black guy covered in tattoosand, all stereotypes aside, it’s even hard for me to imagine myself sitting around with my friends fantasizing about what some dudes in a rock group look like.”
When Jason, who ended up being the only member of his Neutral Milk Hotel fan club to attend, got down to the gig, he saw some scruffy looking characters hanging around outside and thought, “‘Wow, if this band has even made these dirty fuckers get their shit together enough to come see the show, they are really reaching out to the masses.’ And then it turned out that the dirty fuckers were the band. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. These guys were so far from what we had imagined the band would be like and that just made them like five hundred times cooler.”
The Dog Museum was the name under which Jason and his colleagues traveled, a gang loosely allied with a record store in Vermont, interested in literature, humor and language games. They became regular fixtures at Neutral Milk Hotel live appearances all over the US and friends with the Elephant 6 crowd. The next time he saw the band, Jason felt compelled to give Scott his unfinished copy of Amos Tutuola’s
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, which triggered an inter-group book exchange ritual that would see copies of Haruki Murakami’s
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
, René Daumal’s
Mount Analogue
, Voltaire’s
Candide
and various pataphysical texts by Alfred Jarry traded between the camps at future gigs.
Looking back, Jason suggests that the key to Neutral Milk Hotel’s specialness was their refusal, or inability, to fit into a standard rock band mold. “I think the reason they touched so many so deeply was because you always knew they were right there with you. They were so fundamentallyhuman that they avoided any pedestals we
In late April, Neutral Milk Hotel went out on the road with Olivia Tremor Control to play dates in the South, Northeast and Midwest, with the highlight being their April 26 appearance in Providence, Rhode Island, for the Ptolemaic Providence Perambulation, a benefit for the psychedelicBritish fanzine
Ptolemaic Terrascope
. The festival was informally known as Terrastock. Band affiliations were fluid that weekend, with the Olivias joining Neutral Milk onstage for the latter’s Saturday afternoon set, Julian bringing his banjo, accordion and keyboards up on Sunday when OTC played, and Jeremy Barnes filling in on the drum stool for the Supreme Dicks. The set list was typical for the period between
Avery
and
Aeroplane
, a mix of older songs (“Garden-head,” “Song Against Sex”) and new (“Oh Comely,” “The Fool”), including evolving material, like the last part of “Oh Comely,” at this stage a separate song called “Goldaline” which was usually appended to the end of one called “Message Sent” (sometimes titled “Through My Tears”).
On May 3, they played in Minneapolis at the Seventh Street Entry, finally giving Jason Norvein Wachtelhausen a chance to see the band that had wormed its way into his and his friends’ consciousness. Jason lived in a loft with a bunch of people, one of whom had “Song Against Sex” on a mix tape. They became collectively obsessed with the song, and would play it like a sort of theme song whenever they were going out. Someone finally bought
On Avery Island
and they loved that, too. Jason remembers, “we spent so much time talking about those guys and wondering about them. Like, what could some guys who could create music like this—this real and untouched by pretension and seemingly unaffected by any desire to succeed as musicians—be like? And we sort of formed this image of the band and all kind of agreed on what they must look like. We’d never seen a picture of them. It all sounds so much like something teenage girls would have done in the fifties and sixties now that I look back on it. I mean, I’m a black guy covered in tattoosand, all stereotypes aside, it’s even hard for me to imagine myself sitting around with my friends fantasizing about what some dudes in a rock group look like.”
When Jason, who ended up being the only member of his Neutral Milk Hotel fan club to attend, got down to the gig, he saw some scruffy looking characters hanging around outside and thought, “‘Wow, if this band has even made these dirty fuckers get their shit together enough to come see the show, they are really reaching out to the masses.’ And then it turned out that the dirty fuckers were the band. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. These guys were so far from what we had imagined the band would be like and that just made them like five hundred times cooler.”
The Dog Museum was the name under which Jason and his colleagues traveled, a gang loosely allied with a record store in Vermont, interested in literature, humor and language games. They became regular fixtures at Neutral Milk Hotel live appearances all over the US and friends with the Elephant 6 crowd. The next time he saw the band, Jason felt compelled to give Scott his unfinished copy of Amos Tutuola’s
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, which triggered an inter-group book exchange ritual that would see copies of Haruki Murakami’s
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
, René Daumal’s
Mount Analogue
, Voltaire’s
Candide
and various pataphysical texts by Alfred Jarry traded between the camps at future gigs.
Looking back, Jason suggests that the key to Neutral Milk Hotel’s specialness was their refusal, or inability, to fit into a standard rock band mold. “I think the reason they touched so many so deeply was because you always knew they were right there with you. They were so fundamentallyhuman that they avoided any pedestals we
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