Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (2005)

Kim Cooper is a busy author based in Los Angeles with many different interests, publishing zines and blogs that run well afield of rock music. She's still obscure enough that she doesn't have her own Wikipedia article, but her 33-1/3 entry remains one of the bestselling in the whole series. I take that as mostly artifact of the cult following of the band, such as it is. Neutral Milk Hotel was mostly a product of one man, Jeff Mangum, who came up with two albums before moving on to mysterious other things. He's considered by many to be one of rock's great lost souls, like Syd Barrett or Arthur Lee. It's not entirely fair, but there are the facts: he's an eccentric, he made an amazing one-of-a-kind album, and then he has mostly disappeared since. Cooper is not particularly into the myth. Like most of the cult she is into the album. I am too. I will say that, for being one of the bestselling titles in the series, it gets kind of a shabby translation to e-book, with what looks like a quick and dirty OCR scan job. But maybe that's more of a jab at Amazon and its customers. It's legible enough. Cooper goes with a clipped, just-the-facts-ma'am approach, detailing the travels and interactions of the informal Elephant 6 consortium, of which all NMH members were more or less participants (along with Apples in Stereo, Beulah, Olivia Tremor Control, and others). The project was mostly based in Athens, Georgia, although Denver, Austin, and other towns were involved too. I like the continuum from the B-52s to R.E.M. and on. In fact, a graphic designer for R.E.M. was responsible for the Aeroplane cover. Long after the album and even this book came out I finally had my own infatuation period with the strange masterpiece. Nothing else is quite like it and it stands timeless of itself. Cooper gets into the history of Mangum and the band, has some insights on the nuts and bolts of recording and production (based on numerous interviews with nearly all the principals but Mangum), runs through the album track by track, and entertains the inevitable questions about Mangum and his semiretirement from music. I learned a lot of things I didn't know. Some I might have been exposed to before, such as the oblique focus on Anne Frank or Mangum's cryptic Southern Christian spirituality, which I wanted to respect but found a little more creepy. I hadn't actually noticed the yelping for Jesus that much before. But that's OK—really, as weird as it is, it only makes the album richer, deeper. If we're going to make comparisons of classic rock, I think Mangum is linked more closely to Jonathan Richman than Syd Barrett. Check out this album sometime if you haven't yet. You could be surprised. If the appreciation runs deep enough, and you have some questions, that's the time to turn to this useful little book.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.