Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour at Bottom Lounge
Josh Modell
Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum made a surprise appearance Tuesday night.
Tom Petty was right, as Tom Petty so often is: The waiting is the hardest part. I don’t know about you, but I think I’m like most indie-rock fans when it comes to Elephant 6—a dabbler with an advanced degree in Neutral Milk Hotel. Sure, I own some of the classic (or “classic”) non-NMH discs in the collective’s loose-knit catalog, like Olivia Tremor Control’s Dusk At Cubist Castle and The Apples In Stereo’s Fun Trick Noisemaker. More than that, I have a great deal of respect for the music-for-fun’s-sake attitude and genial nature. But that doesn’t mean I want to see a bunch of them swapping instruments and jamming for three and a half hours just so I can hear Jeff Magnum play one song.
But I will, and I did last night. I probably wouldn’t have attended the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour if it weren’t for reports from the last couple of nights that Mangum—the mastermind behind Neutral Milk Hotel who basically retired in 1998—was not only singing backups on a couple of songs, but also stepping out on his own at some point to perform “Engine,” one of his best songs. So I headed over to the relatively new Bottom Lounge (very big, very nice) for the show, which began with an absurdist 25-minute movie featuring many of the collective members in a story about a magic baker. A box of “powdered Abe Lincoln” was involved. Mangum played a lobster, which means you never saw his face.
And then came the show, all million years of it. It started off fine enough, and I can’t say that objectively it was bad—fans of the various E6 offshoots were in heaven (seriously, I could see them floating) as members shuffled on and offstage, playing songs from various projects: Olivia Tremor Control, Pipes You See Pipes You Don’t, The Music Tapes, The Gerbils, Elf Power, Nana Grizol, and probably lots more whose names I don’t remember. Head Apple In Stereo Robert Schneider was joining the tour for the first time (I think), and he sprinkled some pop dust on things.
But in all honesty, it was a mess, and a mess that was only fun for a while. For those who don’t care about the nuances between Bill Doss’ and Will Cullen Hart’s ouveures, much of the show sounded like pleasant power-pop. A couple of songs by Scott Spillane—who looks like an Amish lumberjack—stood out, as did some much-needed punk energy courtesy Nana Grizol. But I suspect that a large percentage of people were there to see the elusive Mangum. And we waited. And waited. There was a slideshow break about an hour in. There were various rearrangements of players and horn sections after pretty much every song. There was a sousaphone. There was a singing saw. Then there were more songs. By 11:30, people were antsy. A couple shouted “Where’s Jeff?” (He had showed up briefly for some backing vocals, then disappeared.)
Spillane and The Music Tapes’ Julian Koster even teased the crowd a bit by marching into the middle of it for “The Fool,” the instrumental track from Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Would that signal Mangum’s grand entrance? No, it was another hour or so.
But he finally arrived, first in a little singalong with the rest of the crew and then out into the middle of the crowd with Koster for an intense reading of “Engine.” And no offense to Mangum’s friends and cohorts, but they’re not even from the same planet. The rest of the E6 posse has a swell time chumming around with psych-pop and bright colors, while Mangum—in one song, all he played—proved why he broke away from the pack so resolutely. He’s an amazing songwriter and an amazing singer, and he’s unfortunately sort of painted himself into a corner: He made what lots of people my age consider one of the greatest records of all time, and then he stopped releasing music and playing concerts. If he ever decides to make another record, he’ll be climbing an unbearably steep hill. But it’s a testament to the power of what he did record that a few hundred people were willing to wait (yes, some loved it, but many looked exhausted) through hours of his friends’ music just to hear him sing live one more time. Was it worth the wait for me? It almost wasn’t, but then it absolutely, positively was.
Jeff Mangum performs in the middle of the crowd:
Jeff Mangum performs in the middle of the crowd:
