Jeff Mangum / The Music Tapes, Lincolng Theatre, January 26 & 27

Per the usual with Jeff at this point, there was no recording of video or audio at these show. Not even pictures. There’s a handful of stuff floating around the Internet’s mighty tubes, but if you’re interested, I’m sure you can find them.

The show itself was tight. Jeff played mostly the same set each night (with a slightly varied order), both of which were nearly identical to the sets he played when I saw him in Baltimore a few months ago. The only real difference was the inclusion of “Little Birds” in both sets and the exclusion of any covers this time around. His voice sounded as piercing as ever, and the inclusion of Julian’s saw on “Engine” and “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” took those songs to even greater depths. They also segued perfectly from Jeff’s solo performance of “Oh Comely” into a full band (Jeff on guitar and the three Music Tapes [which now includes Spinto Band bassist Thomas Hughes, whom I remember fondly from when the Spinto Band used to play State College seemingly every other week] on trumpet, accordion and bass drum) performance of “The Fool.” A double encore punctuated both nights.

The Music Tapes opened both nights and seem to be on top of their game. The acoustics at the Lincoln Theatre are spectacular, and this was as good as I’ve heard them sound. I’ve seen them now several times in a variety of different settings (though this was the first time I saw them play “Television Tells Us,” which I was happy about), but this one stood out sonically.

But while the Lincoln Theatre is an acoustically stellar and visually stunning building, the setting seemed to detract from both performers. The Music Tapes, despite the on-stage clutter they always bring with them, seemed not big enough for the stage. I suspect this is because I’m used to seeing them in smaller clubs and, in a couple cases, living rooms. I’ve watched them perform so close to me that I could touch them. This was a much different, much more detached experience. The band itself seemed not even a little intimidated and performed no differently than it would otherwise–the same surrealist song introductions, the same quirky instrumentation, the same goofy jokes that don’t quite land–but a gigantic old theater seemed not to be the right milieu.

And while Jeff received a warm reception when he took the stage, the crowd still seemed relatively cool throughout the night. When he played in Baltimore, he had people singing and clapping and stomping along to his songs and shouting questions to him anytime he stopped playing. As for this weekend, I don’t know if it was because it was a seated venue, because it was a slightly older crowd, or just because it was DC, but the audience was just a bit too reverent and docile. They applauded and cheered at all the appropriate times and gave a standing ovation that brought out that second (possibly unplanned) encore on both nights, but even when Jeff would urge the crowd to sing along, he was met with relative silence.

While I’m sure a lot of people were relishing the chance to see Jeff perform for the first time in such a long time (which was likely, for a lot of the crowd, their first chance to see him ever), you can listen to him sing from your house. He hasn’t made a lot of records, but he’s made some, and he didn’t sing anything that isn’t on any of them. You go to a show for a more visceral connection with the artist, and what better way to make that bond than by singing along? Besides, Jeff has the sort of voice that can easily rise above any group chat. For how much we’ve missed him, we gave him quite the chilly reception.

The good news is: it’s not going to take him another 13 years for him to come back. I’ve got high hopes for his next visit.

 

Georgia on my mind

Could be a big weekend coming up. Jeff Mangum has a couple dates at the Lincoln Theatre, a gorgeous concert hall in northwest DC. I’m guessing photography will be prohibited again, but use your imagination:

Just picture a beflanneled man with a guitar in the middle of the stage. I have no idea where my tickets for Saturday night put me, and I’m guest listed for Friday, so I don’t totally know what my view will be (though I’m not ashamed to admit I’m thankful for a seated venue — my feet were killing me after the third act of a show last night I watched while standing on unforgiving linoleum). But it should be a terrific show. The Music Tapes are opening both nights, and having seen them three times int he last few months (and Mangum twice in the same span), I’m not sure what else I can say before the show that I haven’t said already, but I’m hoping for some news this weekend. That’s all I’ll say about that for now.

Somehow, I’m already looking past it a bit, to late February. I’m planning a road trip down to Athens (and possibly to Lexington) to tie up whatever loose ends I can down there (plus also eat delicious food). I’m fixing to head down somewhere around February 19 or 20, give or take a day or two, and spend about a week or so down there. I might have company, but I might now. But I definitely have less than a month to prepare.

Which is plenty of time. It’s actually way too early to start setting up interviews now. With most of the folks I plan to talk to, trying to set something up more than a few days in advance would be a fool’s errand; four whole weeks is, in most cases, impossible. I might have a few specific times set in stone before I get down there, but mostly I plan to just let everyone know I’ll be around and then figure it out as I go. Perhaps this makes me sound a bit naive or green, but it’s just the opposite. I’ve learned many times over exactly how these things work with the Elephant 6 folks.

What I do need to get done is figure out what I’m still missing, and then decide who I need to talk to and what I need to ask them. There’s a handful of people I still need to talk to just generally (folks I’ve interviewed either not at all or only briefly), but there are also people I’ve talked to a ton (too many to name) who can fill in some blanks and connect some dots. I just need to decide which blanks need to be filled and which dots need to be connected.

So my job now is to read every single word I have. In most cases, I heard each word once when it was spoken originally, once when I transcribed it, and once more when I outlined it, and then I probably came across it at one or another point in the process, at least. But I’ve never actually read the full corpus all at once, sequentially, as a single gestalt. There’s a few significant things to look for.

As anyone who has spent any significant amount of time around me these past few years can attest, I can recite from memory countless E6 anecdotes germane to any subject. But unfortunately, a sizable portion of those stories was shared with me off the record or on background, and so there’s a lot in my brain that, for one reason another, has to this point been omitted from the working manuscript. When I notice gulfs like that, I need to make a note to myself to find a way to get it on the record.

Another important thing to look for is contradictions. By design, I’ve talked to an awful lot of people for this project. The whole point was that no individual’s memory is ever infallible, which is a fact that’s highlighted when folks start sharing their personal resumés of hallucinogenic drug use. So my goal was to cross-reference everything I could in the hopes that I could corroborate whatever I could. I’ve practically given up on pinning down hard dates for most events, but there are some basic facts on which there seems to be some disagreement. So anywhere I see some sort of contradiction, I need to make a note and see if I can find someone to help resolve it. On a similar note, anywhere I find something dubious with only one source, I need to see if I can find anyone to back it up.

Lastly, I’m certain I’ll see some gaps in the narrative. Not this has to be a smooth linear thing (nor that it even could), but I’m sure I’ll see some holes I can fill. For the first two priorities, I have to look at things as a journalist, but for this one, I get to view what I have so far through the lens of the Literary Giant I hope to one day become. Which is neat.

So I’ve got my work cut out for me, and for maybe the first time, I have an actual timeline to get it done. If I haven’t figured it out by mid-February, it will render my Athens trip almost pointless (in terms of this book, at least–my belly will be thankful regardless). What I have so far is not a finished product by any means, but purely in terms of length, it’s a full ass book, and the lack of polish will surely make it more difficult to digest. I’ve read books of this length in much shorter periods of time, but reading a book on a laptop screen makes it an awful lot harder (and way less portable), and I have no interest in printing it all out. I might have to exercise some discipline here for like the first time ever.

Music Tapes in my living room

This year’s Music Tapes Caroling Tour was put together more hastily than usual. Booked only a few days in advance and lasting only a couple weeks (as opposed to the three months it spanned last year), this one had a bit more of a ramshackle vibe than years past. Which made it all the more Music Tapes-y.

Last night, the tour stopped in my living room, and for about an hour, the Music Tapes performed for about twenty of us. If you count the injured Mechanized Organ Playing Tower, Gingerbread Orchestra, Singing Snowman, and Bell-Playing Mice along with Julian, Robbie and Ian, the performers outnumbered the crowd members. As is typical, many of Julian’s songs came with whimsical anecdotes, about how we chop down fir trees for Christmas to teach them to walk or about how Cary Grant (né Archibald Leach) only became an actor after his skills for levitating oatmeal diminished.

As is also typical for a Music Tapes show, every song featured a change in instrumentation. Sometimes, as pictured above, it was Ian playing a chord organ, Julian bowing his banjo, and Robbie blaring a trumpet. On another song, Julian and Ian bowed banjos together while Robbie played a muted euphonium over a decades-old tape loop of a hobo singing a song about Jesus. On others, Julian added saw to music sung by a plastic snowman, and on a Louis Armstrong cover of “Zat You, Santa Claus” to close the set, he got some help from St. Nick himself.

The lack of press for this tour as compared to the chatter over previous ones isn’t much of a surprise given how little build-up there was, and after a few years of this caroling tour, I suspect the novelty of such a quirky format has worn off a bit for the Pitchforks and AV Clubs of the world. But if I had to guess, I would say only a small minority of the audience last night had ever heard a Music Tapes song before the show, and many had probably never even heard of the Music Tapes. There were people there who didn’t even know there would be a show going on. As long as I’m speculating, though, I’m going to guess that the Music Tapes made a few new fans last night.

At the beginning of the show, Julian remarked that he tours like this because he doesn’t like playing clubs, which are dark, cold places full of strangers’ silhouettes, and I sympathize with that. But I also think this method takes a lot of bravery, too. Performing in a club is predictable. There’s room for improvisation, sure, but you generally know how things will play out, and there’s not much margin for surprises. In someone’s house, a lot more can happen. There’s no security guard, no rider, no green room, no buffer between stage and crowd.

This afternoon, while reviewing invitations for the rest of the tour, Julian and Robbie found one from someone who seemed to think the Music Tapes were working in concert with extraterrestrials and had something to do with the forthcoming apocalypse. “I hope he doesn’t shoot us,” Julian said casually. Weird music draws weird people sometimes, and the Music Tapes make weird music. As safe as Julian’s music may sound, this is an edgy band, doing things few other brands have the courage to do.

For Julian, though, the payoff is much higher. His primary goal as an artist seems to be forging a bond with people, and this is much easier to do when you afford yourself the ability to learn everyone’s name, to share cookies with them, be close enough to touch them, to touch them. Last night’s show as a memorable performance, but more importantly, it forged a lasting connection.

It’s about time for another update. I’ve got nothing huge to report right now, but it’s been a while, so this one will be about an inch deep and a mile wide.

First, something. This blog doesn’t have a ton of readers, and the ones it does have, I suspect, mostly come here directly, whether because the have it bookmarked, saw it linked on my Facebook, or whatever. Those that come in through search engines usually get here by searching for me or the blog specifically, or by stumbling onto one of my immaculately tagged pictures. Occasionally, though, someone gets here by searching for something that doesn’t exactly exist anywhere on this site. So I just want to say, to whomever found this by searching for “feel life is aimless,” you’re probably right. I feel like Google is psychoanalyzing me, and I’m more paranoid than usual about how accurately it nailed me.

Moving on.

Generally speaking, I try not to share too much of what I’m saving for the book. This little bit, though, I found so enjoyable that I’d share just a taste.

If you were in Athens in November of 2003, you may have seen posters like the one below for a show at the Caledonia Lounge featuring a band called the Dutch Scrubber as one of the openers for the Ladybug Transistor.

If you attended the show, you may have even noticed that the band was basically just that incarnation of of Montreal, sans Dottie Alexander: Kevin Barnes, Bryan Poole, Jamey Huggins, and Kevin’s wife Nina. Coming up with a name like ‘the Dutch Scrubber,’ though, takes an imagination like Kevin Barnes’s.

Touring bands often have a lot of time to kill in the van between shows, and many bands come up with games to keep themselves occupied. One of the games of Montreal came up with was, basically, coming up with the most outlandish acts of sexuality they could imagine. Here’s one of Kevin’s more surrealist contributions, as relayed to me in a recent interview with one of his bandmates:

‘The Dutch Scrubber’ involves a man and a woman, and it starts at night or whatever. The woman lies naked on the floor, on her stomach, and then the man ejaculates as many times as possible, all the way until it becomes morning, onto the woman’s back. Sometime in the morning, whenever the sun comes up. And then this man called the Dutch Scrubber will just appear, and he will clean the woman’s back. And then after he’s done cleaning the woman’s back, he disappears. That’s ‘The Dutch Scrubber.’

In addition to an encyclopedic recounting of the Elephant 6′s rich history, my book will also include 99 Tips to Make Your Man Melt.*

Moving on.

Whenever I hear a bit of news about something Elephant 6 related, my excitement as a fan is offset by a twofold anxiety as biographer/historian/writer. First, I think to myself, “Shit, how am I going to cram even more content into this book?” Then, I think, “Shit, is someone else going to start writing a book about this, too, and will they beat me to the punch?”

Luckily for me, that anxiety subsided pretty quickly the other day as I listened to a Weekend Edition piece on Neutral Milk Hotel. I say lucky because the piece contained no real new information. It’s a well produced piece and worth listening to for even the most knowledgeable NMH devotee, but it’s mostly a survey of the band’s history leading up to a review of one of Jeff Mangum’s performances in Baltimore last month (one that I attended myself). Specifically, it touches on some of the Neutral Milk Hotel-inspired pieces of art from the last few years, from a Mangum-centric RPG to a play based on Aeroplane to a shout out on one of the best comedies on television right now, NBC’s Parks and Recreation (video of which no longer seems to be available online, but if you can find episode 14 from season 3, it’s in there).

That Neutral Milk Hotel can be a reference on a primetime TV show should surprise no one who reads this blog, but it’s still pretty neat, and if it draws more people to the music, all the better. And if it makes people say, “Ew, Neutral Milk Hotel is too mainstream,” well, fuck those people.

Moving on.

Finally, I should probably share a bit of an update on my book progress. As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t make for good copy to say “I conducted a few interviews, transcribed them, and then worked them into my massive outline,” which is why I don’t post very often anymore. But it’s worth mentioning that things are still plugging along. I’m still conducting interviews and digging up secondary sources, and everything is on track. At some point later in the winter, probably in February, I’m planning a road trip to Lexington or Athens or both to tie up some loose ends, and I’m sure I’ll see some folks in the meantime, whether in DC, Philadelphia, or some other northeastern metropolis. Such progress will probably be relayed to you, the reader, through vague, coy blog updates. Strap in.

_________

*Most of these involve ice cubes.

The week in review

It’s been a good one. In only a few days, I saw the Olivia Tremor Control, Jeff Mangum (twice), the Music Tapes (twice) and a Hawk and a Hacksaw (whom I’m seeing again next week).

The Olivias were way tighter than my cell phone camera would have you believe. They had faces, even.

The Music Tapes opened for Olivia on Friday and for Jeff on Monday.  The sets were mostly the same thing, but both were warm and heartfelt. Julian is very much a performer, and while it’s not an act suited well for a rock club, a couple old churches worked just fine.

Every song either has a story or a game that leads into it or gives Julian the chance to use one of his anthropomorphized homemade toys, like the Mechanized Organ-Playing Tower or the 7-Foot-Tall Metronome.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw opened for Jeff on Tuesday. The lineup was a bit different from the last time I saw the band, but the music was the same devastatingly beautiful thing as before.

There’s not much I can say about the Olivias or Jeff that I and others haven’t said before, and to that end, I’m planning to post later in the week an aggregation of the reviews of their respective tours. As much for your benefit as for mine.

I enjoyed these shows as a fan, for sure, but the reason I’m still excited days later is that I got a chance to talk to just about everyone. While I’m living in DC, it’s hard to keep in touch with these guys, and I wouldn’t characterize as easy the logistical backflips I had to pull to see them all, but I still feel enthused by having spent time with them. Seeing folks in person makes it easier to keep up with them from afar.

News forthcoming

As I’ve mentioned before, this is an exciting but confusing time for me relative to this project. If my fun, carefree time spent cavorting about Athens was this book’s childhood, it’s now firmly entrenched in the awkward milieu of puberty.

The main reason is that, for a while, even though all these E6 guys are still doing things, the narrative that will form the backbone of this book seemed like it was in the past tense. But not anymore. The Olivia Tremor Control and Jeff Mangum—the two entities whose respective hiatuses were most responsible for the perception that the collective was in a bit of a lull—are currently on tour. Though neither has a date scheduled for DC, both are playing in places proximal enough for me to check them out.

The first is the Olivias, who will be playing in a building on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus this Friday. My plan for that one is to head up to Philly Thursday night, check out the show Friday night, and then come back to DC on Saturday, as I’ve had plans to camp out at the National Zoo* that night since before this tour was announced.

Then, after work on Monday, I’m heading up to Baltimore to see Mangum play in an old church. He’s playing Tuesday night in the same venue, so I’ll be crashing with a friend and seeing that show, too.

At this point, I don’t have much to report other than idle pre-show giddiness, but I haven’t posted in over a month and so the threshold for noteworthy content is low. In all likelihood, I’ll have a lot more to report next week.
_____

*I concede this isn’t even remotely relevant to this blog, but I’m pretty fucking stoked about it. Sleeping at the zoo! Hanging out with pandas!

 

Onward and upward

After a whirlwind outlining session, I’ve finally finished the first round of arranging all of the content I have to date. The overwhelming majority of this stuff came from interviews I conducted first hand. A small portion of it is some of the older articles and features and interviews I’ve found so far, and an even smaller portion is stuff I drafted myself. As you can see from the cropped screenshot above, it’s just about 222,000 words, or approximately 444 pages.

There’s still a lot more to come. As I mentioned in my last post, I have a couple books and a lot more articles to pore over, and because the Olivia Tremor Control has a tour coming up and Jeff Mangum has one going on as I write this, there’s more to be written. More action is a positive thing for me as both a fan and a historian, but it makes my task a bit more Sisyphean.

On a less whiny note, a friend of mine/de facto News & Fish correspondent drove to Toronto tonight to see Jeff Mangum’s show at Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church. From the flurry of text messages I’ve received from him tonight, it’s pretty clear he was wowed. He promised to write down all his thoughts tonight for me, so I’m thinking he and the folks he brought to the show might make for some good interviews for a later chapter in the book. At the very least, maybe we’re looking at a guest post here in the near future.

So what’s the next step for me?

Everything. For one thing, this is sort of an arbitrary benchmark. There’s still a lot left to outline: I just have to find it first. That means digging for articles and pinning people down for interviews. On top of that, the outline I have still needs tightening. And whenever the mood strikes me, I can work on composing an actual manuscript. Still a long way to go, and it’s less structured now than it was a few hours ago.

But that’s what makes it fun, right?

Progress report

Outlining has gone much better than transcribing so far. It’s certainly not as soul-crushing.

Of all the material I’ve transcribed and compiled, I have maybe 10-15% left to outline. But that’s not all, folks. I also need to work into the outline the different pieces I’ve annotated in Kim Cooper’s 33 1/3 book about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and John Cook’s Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, though obviously only the bits and pieces that will keep me within the terms of Fair Use and, you know, basic human decency. The same goes for the countless interviews and features I’ve found online and elsewhere. So there’s still a lot to wade through, but nothing in comparison to piles and piles of content that’s come from the interviews I conducted myself. The overwhelming majority of this book will come from conversations I had with these people firsthand. I’ll use secondary sources for context, corroboration and the occasional rhetorical flourish, but this is going to be almost entirely new material, and I’ve gathered a lot of stuff already that isn’t known by the general public. Not to be coy or anything.

Of course, there’s still more stuff to be found. For one thing, I still have a bunch of people I plan to interview (though, if I haven’t pinned them down yet, there’s a chance I’ll never be able to), which means a lot can change.

The other, bigger thing is that the Elephant 6 is not in the dormant state it was in a few years ago. In particular, both the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel are working their way back toward their late ’90s peaks: Jeff Mangum played the first solo show of his mini-tour earlier this week (and was by all accounts already in midseason form), and the Olivia Tremor Control announced a full tour and reissues of its first two albums. I don’t expect either party to grant many interviews promoting themselves, but at the very least, there ought to be plenty of pixels spilled reviewing these shows. This all makes it much more difficult to find an end point for this narrative, but it also makes for much richer content.

On to the next phase

Ladies and gentlemen: I have no more interviews to transcribe. As of right now, every interview I have recorded for this project has been converted to text. It’s time to move on. There are still a lot of interviews I’d like to do, which means a lot more transcribing as well, but my focus has shifted.

The next step in the process is organizing this mountain of content. I have approximately 250,000 words to sift through. There was a time when I was organizing everything as I transcribed it, but I gave up on that long ago because it was just not efficient (it slowed down both the transcribing and organizing processes at once), and the parts I did organize were sorted into an outline quite different from the one I’m working with now.

But I feel much better about this step than I did about the transcribing. It’s now the third time (at least) that I’ll be seeing this stuff (first when I heard it originally, and then again when I transcribed it), so of course it’s not as fresh. But the nice thing about this part of the game is that it’s just copying and pasting into different parts of an outline, and that means I don’t need audio. I can do it on a train without bothering people. I can do it with my girlfriend sleeping next to me. I can do it with music playing or the TV on or a roommate shouting to me from another room. I am unstoppable.

(My laptop’s headphone jack, however, is quite stoppable. It hasn’t worked properly in a long while, which is why I haven’t been able to just wear headphones and transcribe anywhere noisy [like a coffee shop or with music playing] or anywhere I couldn’t make noise [e.g. Amtrak's quiet car].)

The other fortunate thing is my recent discovery of Scrivener, which I mentioned in my last post. With 28 days remaining on my free trial, I’m already on board with buying the full version. The actual word processing element leaves a bit to be desired (at least as far as I’ve gotten with it), but I can always just export it to Word when I’m ready to polish it up. For my current needs, I’ve found its various organizational tools—from outlining to a virtual corkboard—are incredibly useful. And that’s just the stuff I’ve found with very limited tinkering. This almost feels like cheating.

Now, if I could only get myself a mouse, I’d really be cooking with gas.

Authorial experience

As should be abundantly clear by now, I’ve never written a book. I don’t even really know anybody who has written one, or at least not one with many similarities to mine. So I’m open to advice from wherever it comes.

I’m especially open to it when it comes from established, experienced authors. This piece from the Guardian last year was an interesting read, even though it mostly referred to fiction writing. I came across a similar sort of piece today that was more focused on non-fiction.

I’m in the process of winding down my transcribing (necessary as I run out of things to transcribe) and ramping up my actual composition. I’m planning to continue to do interviews when I can get them, but let’s just say the stones that remain unturned at this point are either too big to move or too small to find. So while I’m still open to talking to whomever will talk to me, most of my energy at this stage is going to go toward actual writing.

And so pieces like the one I stumbled upon today (through Kottke, not StumbleUpon, just to clarify) are invaluable. The main takeaways for me were a couple pieces of software I’m planning to grab ASAP (Scrivener, a word processing and organizational tool, and SelfControl, an app whose utility is as needed as it is self-explanatory), but there are lots of little bits of wisdom that I take to heart.

Some are things I’m already doing:

Do as much research as possible away from the Internet — with living people, in real places.

Some are things I’m not doing but know I should be:

Develop a very, very, very serious plan for dealing with internet distractions.

And others are things I just won’t do:

Do not open email until 5PM on any weekday or other day when i expect to be writing much of the day.

Some are words of encouragement:

You’re better off than you think, because you’ve done this before, just not in as large a format. Almost every technique and skill you’ve used to structure and tell a story at feature-length scales to book length. So, let go of the excess anxiety about never having done this before.

Others are more critical:

Bonus tip: Be good to your spouse/partner and protect time for them. They’re in this with you, but unlike you, they didn’t choose it.

There’s traditional advice:

Shitty first drafts. Anne Lamott nailed it! But with books, it seems to be more like “shitty 20th drafts.” So shitty, for so long.

And nontraditional:

Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the next day — that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you’re writing.

The whole thing is worth reading, and I’m not just saying that to reconcile my cognitive dissonance between fair use and Fair Use. Especially if you’re a writer. Despite everything, writing a book can be a very lonely endeavor. Reading stuff like this is not only encouraging and educational, but it feels like a bit of a verbal hug.