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

would be crashing at any time.
    For Julian Koster, visiting Ruston really meant spendingtime in the countryside outside of town. There was a girl called Squashie whose parents had a farm and allowed the Elephant 6 crowd to host small music festivals and roam around their cow pastures. Sometimes they’d lure touring bands out to participate, which is how Hampshire College’s Supreme Dicks happened to play several times in the area. Scott recalls that John Fernandes went to their show in Shreveport and asked them back to Ruston to play poker, thus starting a relationship that would culminate in some Neutral Milk Hotel/Supreme Dicks gigs in 1996.
    One time when Julian visited, he found Will and Jeff house-sitting outside of town. They had a four-track there and ended up collaborating on some recordings, with Julian playing the accordion that he’d just acquired through a typical bit of Julian happenstance. “I had been traveling around and ended up staying with this friend’s uncle in Texas. This accordion was on top of this shelf of books. It completely captivated me, and I ended up playing it for a long time. The guy came out as we were going—he was really gruff—‘All right, you can
take
it! Now just go before I change my mind!’ So I ended up with this accordion that just sounded unbelievable. It had the richest low tones.” On this visit, too, Julian watched Will completing the artwork for the first Apples single, and began to sense that Elephant 6 was “the foothold, the word combination that suddenly began to signify this collection of feelings.”

Athens, which almost but doesn’t quite make it
    By the time Jeff Mangum and his friends were old enough to start thinking about where they might want to live, Athens, Georgia, was already firmly imprinted on the consciousness of young, hip America as a desirable destination. From outside, it looked like an Eden for nascent musicians, whether they were ethereal traditionalists like R.E.M. or arty party geeks like the B-52’s and Pylon. Plus there was a college, so you could convince your parents that you were doing something with your life. Rent was cheap, part-time jobs plentiful. Rent was so cheap, in fact, that the element of desperation that played such a large part in the experience of musicians in urban centers was nearly entirely lacking—bands could bum around, exploring their influences and developing their own identities with a leisurely Southern cadence. Add to the mix several good record stores, enthusiastic fans and a generally appealing atmosphere of genteel decay and in retrospect it seems natural that Athens wouldflare up as it did.
    Like scientists wondering if a given planet has the building blocks to generate life, rock historians like to puzzle over why some towns suddenly belch up that elusive quarry, the Scene. It seems random, and it maybe is. Why Minneapolis in ’84, Seattle in ’89, London in ’66 and San Francisco in ’67? Athens in the early 1980s had everything necessary to nourish a scene, and happily, it did. And if by the time the Elephant 6 gang arrived most of that magic magma had bubbled away to feed some other city’s nightlife, that didn’t mean it wasn’t still a very nice place to live and to play.
    Athens became the official destination of the E6 crowd when Will Cullen Hart and Jeff Mangum accompanied Robert Schneider on a trip to Shreveport with Cherry Red—a junior high school punk/new wave band featuring Robert on lead vocals—which was booked to play a gig at Water-world (Will and Jeff justified their presence by jumping onstage with kazoos to help out on “Mellow Yellow”). In the car down, the trio made a pact that after high school, they would all move to Athens—a town none of them had visited up to that point. Robert changed his mind and followed his family to Denver after graduation, and many of his friends came out for a short time to try living there, too. But eventually most of the Ruston weirdo