It Was Five Years Ago Today…

... my Outlook calendar confirms it. I was puttering toward northwest Houston looking for a video equipment rental place to pick up a screen and digital projector for an attorney client (if he wanted to pay legal rates for that, fine) so we could make a presentation on a particular job. I turned on KTRU (Rice Radio) and some insouciant collegiate announcer was speaking charmingly about the end of the semester and the joy he had found playing music all year, and here were some of his favorites, and blah, blah.

A few songs in, I hear ringing acoustic guitar chords and a snot-nosed sounding count-off “two,…one, two, three, four…" and then an explosion of fuzz-toned bass, thundering distorted drums, a two-chord acoustic guitar progression and a passionate and loud-as-a-freight-train singer almost shouting his lyrics.

Since I was driving, looking for an address, and fumbling to turn up the volume, I couldn’t catch all the lyrics; just a snatch of, “but then they buried her alive, one evening 1945, with just her sister at her side”. I remember thinking, “Anne Frank?” More speaker rattling fuzz, but now a rather sharp horn section and, “so sad to see, the world agree, that they’d rather see their faces filled with flies”. Yep, Anne Frank. What the hell was that?

College radio loves to keep you hanging for half an hour before telling you what they played, so at the break I’m scrawling artist and song names on a sheet while still driving. Then I hear “Holland 1945” and something about “neutral”. Ah – must be it.

I’ve lived in Houston traffic for lo, these 25 years, and the few musical epiphanies I’ve experienced have occurred while in cars. “What a Difference a Day Made” – Dinah Washington – KNTH AM, about 1986, driving up US 59 at sunrise to a job I loathed. “Freak Scene” – Dinosaur Jr. – KPFT FM, summer 1988, Friday afternoon, sitting on the Pierce Elevated with my voice pager going off on the un-air conditioned passenger seat. Others, of course.

But never had I experienced the transcendent rush of undiluted dynamic quality that was “Holland, 1945” on that April 16, 2007. Maybe it was the air conditioning and the billing rate. This is the best sounding youtube upload. There are dozens - some with a million views. Not exactly a fresh topic.


Less than 24 hours later I owned “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, by Neutral Milk Hotel. SoundWaves on Montrose Blvd didn’t have it. Best Buy in The Woodlands did. Go figure. Corporate rock suks!!!

And then for about 3 months I was 19 years-old again. A CD released in 1998, when I was 38, and discovered (by me, anyway) when I was almost 47, turned me into a 19 year-old, at least while I was in the car. Every commute, every morning, every afternoon, was devoted to this disconcerting opus from a loose aggregation of high school friends originally from, of all places, Ruston, Louisiana.

The song that hooked me isn’t all that representative of the entire CD. Much of it is acoustic or uses unlikely combinations of singing saw, calliope organ (think circus organ – sometimes called a Wandering Genie organ), horns (including a zanzithophone which was a toy synthesized horn from Casio that I think provides the ear-splitting squall at the end of Holland, 1945), and little if any electric guitar. There are reportedly three singing saw parts on the masterful title song (played by a guy named Julian Koster) and the saw is somehow used to cataclysmic effect at the end (about 3:12) of “Ghost”. I think you can even hear it woogling away in the background of Holland 1945. The CD has been aptly described as sounding “like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier”. I know nothing of producer Robert Schneider other than he plays several instruments and is generally given a good deal of credit for the sound.

The voice, guitar, some bass, bone-jarring “floor tom” and primary pair of bright baby eyes gazing into the pit of doom belong to one Jeff Mangum (one of the streets on my route that fateful day was Mangum Rd. – Whoa…).

It is pointless to try to describe the themes of the entire CD. Anne Frank is there. So is her ghost. So is a two-headed boy floating in a glass jar filled with formalin for whom our singer appears to have an unhealthy attraction, so is the King of Carrot Flowers, so is the face of a friend blown apart by shotgun suicide –

And you left with your head filled with flames,
And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth.
Push the pieces in place.
Make your smile sweet to see.

You get the picture.

And then there is “Oh Comely”. 8 minutes 15 seconds that begin with what sounds like a strumming and chord pattern practice book topped off with disturbing vocals along the lines of “your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park”. At about 5:20 the voice fantasizes about saving Anne Frank in “some sort of time machine” cautions the listener to "know all your enemies" and then swings wildly up without lyrics while a trombone follows along in almost perfect unision. It is a singular moment.

It is stupid to try to characterize one bit of music by relating it to another, but I will do it anyway. For some reason, Love’s “Forever Changes” comes to mind. That album is far more delicate and maybe more traditionally accomplished than “Aeroplane”, but I can think of no other in which a unique voice cracks open a disturbed noggin and all the scary toys fall out. Arthur Lee of Love has said, roughly, that he thought it was his swan song, and one gets a similar feeling from “Aeroplane”. There was also something so disarming, I guess, about NMH’s wide-eyed, low-fi approach that this CD just burrowed in and got all the worms to sit up and pay attention. I hadn’t experienced this for decades. Probably won’t again.

Mangum is endlessly written about in fanzines as the dude responsible for maybe the most beloved indie CD of all time; who toured a little, released a field recording of Bulgarian folk songs, and then walked away. Pffffft. A nice overview, and the source of the mariachi circus line is here.

The other musicians soldier on in various loose amalgamations.

Annual rumors and hoaxes would tell of Mangum’s return to touring or recording, only to evaporate. It is generally agreed that he is married to a documentary filmmaker in New York and played a few songs at the Occupy Wall Street rape and rob-fest protests.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYb-Q8LxCI4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E4Y-BJH6zc
Well, nobody’s perfect. Maybe it wasn’t him. It was dark. But the voice sounds right and the sweater looks like one of his.

Most of you dear readers will click on one link, listen for a few seconds and, “meh…sucks”. That is the nature of music. I understand. I hope your own epiphany finds you.