Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea Read Online Free Page A

place, a person, a job, a course of study. To a man, Elephant 6 was more butterfly than pachyderm.
    The only stationary member of the collective was the most independent one, Robert Schneider. He was still living in Denver, accumulating the equipment that would become Pet Sounds recording studio and starting his band, the Apples (later Apples in Stereo). Julian Koster remembers that Will Hart and Jeff were living in Denver too, and that they put out a call for all their friends to
just come
, to stop talking about doing things together and to actually start doing them. It was summer, and Bill Doss was visiting Julian in New York. They got the message and drove nonstop toColorado, with no idea of what they’d do when they got there, where they’d live or what would happen next.
    Julian inherited the walk-in closet where Jeff had been living (and which Jeff claimed was haunted), and later took possession of Jeff’s moldy boiler room outside Robert’s apartment. While the players were finally in proximity to one another, and Robert could record in his apartment, there was nowhere they could play. Broke, they lived off stale popcorn from someone’s theater job.
    Jeff didn’t stay long in Denver, taking off for the West Coast, but in some permutation Ruston was present in Colorado for about a year. Julian ended up collaborating with Will and Bill on some of the Olivia Tremor Control arrangements that ended up on
Dusk at Cubist Castle
, then bringing Will and Bill into Chocolate USA for one last national tour that had the trio appearing on the same bills as members of both bands. When that tour alit in Los Angeles, Julian was shocked to find the audience full of hipsters, hipsters who seemed to be enjoying themselves. “That was maybe the beginning of understanding that somehow, this thing was gonna be embraced by people like that—which happened, and was really surreal. It was alien to us. We’re
not cool!
I’m a poster boy for not being cool. So to have people like that be all nice to you, it’s like,
what’s happening?
”
    So again, the center failed to hold. Jeff would live briefly in Seattle and Los Angeles. Julian’s last go-round with Chocolate USA spat him out home in New York City, with a prized set of reel-to-reel recorders, a parting gift from Bar/None Records. Robert continued his band and studio work in Denver, and Will and Bill went to Athens to focus on Olivia Tremor Control. One rare vinyl artifact to comefrom the Denver sojourn was OTC’s debut EP, “California Demise,” released on the Elephant 6 label.
    But was the Denver time a failure? Julian doesn’t think so. “We’d all gone out there specifically to create something together, but we didn’t know what it was. ’Cause it wasn’t
a band!
I don’t think it even necessarily centered on music.”
    The important thing was that they’d all been together, liked it, and wanted to do it again if they could.
    But first, Jeff Mangum was going to have to make a record.
    He started with a seven-inch Neutral Milk Hotel single, “Everything Is” b/w “Snow Song Pt. 1” on Nancy Ostrander’s Seattle-based Cher Doll label, then went back through Ruston in search of a band. He met up with Ross Beach, who agreed to join him in New Orleans for a show at the Howlin’ Wolf opening for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Jeff and Ross rehearsed twice, then played their early set to a nearly empty room. In this nascent version of Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeff was drumming and singing; Ross played guitar.

On Avery Island
sessions
    The first thing to understand about the Neutral Milk Hotel album
On Avery Island
is that there was no band called Neutral Milk Hotel. No Julian, no Jeremy Barnes, no Scott Spillane with his lunatic horns.
On Avery Island
is a Neutral Milk Hotel album in the manner of the early Ruston tape releases. Jeff had been using the name Neutral Milk Hotel for his projects since high school, so when he swung back into Denver with the intention