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

animals a great deal, and she likes to dance—maybe she should be a Circus Queen?”
    Small wonder then that when the call went out for the members of the new, touring version of Neutral Milk Hotel to coalesce, Grandma’s House was their destination. For Julian it was just a train ride in from the city. Jeremy camefrom Chicago. Jeff left Denver and looped through Texas, where he found the final core member in the form of Scott Spillane, the perennial cool older guy from Ruston. Scott was working at Gumby’s Pizza in Austin and living out front in his van. Jeff’s visit coincided with the 2 AM drunk rush, so Scott put Jeff to work saucing pizzas. Later, as they sat exhausted, with their nasal passages stinging from the flour they’d inhaled, Jeff said, “Man, this job sucks!” Scott didn’t disagree. “Why don’t you come with me to New York and play guitar or something?” Scott handed in his two weeks notice the next day.
    Jeff was the first to arrive in New York. With him there, Julian and Robbie’s tiny apartment became a hive of creative energy. Julian recalls that someone “would be recording anytime anyone wasn’t there. Jeff and I would share spots. We’d record overlapping; we’d record together: he’d have the evenings; I’d have the mornings. And we got really into tape loops because we had tape machines for the first time, so there were tape loops strung all over the apartment, enormous tape loops that would go across the entire room. You’d come in and there’d be pencils and cups and the tape would be stringing along.”
    Scott’s bus arrived in New York early enough in the morning that his first sight of the city was of a satanic red glow behind the skyline. Dropped at Port Authority, surrounded by the scariest sorts of thugs, he had half an hour to feel desolate before an ecstatic Jeff appeared, calling him brother and dispensing heartfelt hugs. The two caught a cab to the temporary residence Jeff had arranged, a spot on the floor of his girlfriend Colby Katz’s dorm room. After a few months sneaking in and out of the elevators, they movedinto Julian and Robbie’s place, increasing the already high count of warm-blooded creatures by two. It helped that one of the building’s residents frequently took long trips and had entrusted his neighbors—who included Dan Oxenberg of the Supreme Dicks and singer–songwriter Azalia Snail—with a key. When it got to be too much in the close confines of the Koster–Cucchiaro pad, Jeff or Scott would sometimes slip off to the vacant apartment for some blissful solitude.
    Soon everyone relocated to Grandma’s House, and from then on it hardly mattered that the group was physically living in the New York metro area—they could have been anywhere. The house was filled with the collections of a lifelong pack rat who couldn’t stand to throw anything potentially useful away. Grandma herself lived in one tiny room, and was so hard of hearing that it didn’t matter how much noise Julian’s friends made. Sometimes she would collaborate with Julian on little films, or he would come up to her room and play softly to her. Her garden grew enough food to fuel all-night practice sessions and marathon Wiffle ball tournaments in the street and the supermarket parking lot.
    Julian says, “Everything we needed was there. And we would go into the city and occasionally wander around, but we really were having so much fun playing. We literally were playing all day and all night, recording all night. There were no hours, nothing mattered. When we weren’t making Neutral Milk Hotel music—and it was all starting to be new music, too, the stuff that became
Aeroplane
all came out of that period—we started planning for this tour which was still largely imaginary. I don’t think it existed in any real way, but
we were gonna do this tour!
We also had a recording four-track set up in the basement, four-track set up in the bedrooms, so there wasrecording in every room.