Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.

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The Neutral Milk Hotel Aeroplane Takes Off

Up on stage, the players tapped into a trancelike—but hardly calm—state where the unexpected was the norm. Perfor­mances turned frighteningly physical, bodies and instruments flying, blood being drawn without anyone realizing they’d been hurt. Ben Crum says, “They are easily the best live band I ever saw. There was a powerful energy to their show that I really haven’t seen anywhere else. It was definitely dangerous. There often seemed to be a very real chance that someone, probably Julian, would get hurt. Jeff was always doing things like picking him up and throwing him into the drums.”

Julian soon discovered that their onstage behavior was frightening people in the audience. Fans wanted to talk with them after shows, but they’d hesitate, as if they were approaching dangerous, possibly demented people. This perception was a major impediment, since the band was hoping most nights to find an agreeable floor on which to crash. Sometimes it was only after Jeff, Jeremy, Julian, and Scott settled in at a fan’s house that they discovered their host was petrified of them. They found this disconcerting and troubling, and wondered how to handle the situation.

Still, it’s hardly surprising that the sight of Julian playing piano with his nose, Scott with his fabulous cantilevered beard jumping around like an inflamed Viking, Jeremy flipping out behind the drum kit, Jeff falling into that drum kit when he wasn’t howling words so intensely beautiful that they made jaded hipsters feel things they didn’t necessarily want to feel, that all of this barely contained chaos would startle and worry people who came to it freshly.

There were nearly six months between the completion of the Aeroplane recordings and its February 1998 release. Merge planned a tour to begin on February 14th in Birmingham, start­ing out sharing stages with Superchunk and finishing with Of Montreal and the High Llamas. The band spent the time before the album’s release gearing up for the tour. Their sets, which had averaged around 45 minutes, would need to be expanded to a maximum of 90 minutes for the road dates. Friends like John Fernandes and Will Westbrook were brought into the tour­ing band and taught the horn parts, culminating in a marathon rehearsal session in a freezing practice space on the edge of town during the first week of February.

It was hard enough expecting a newly expanded band to play the songs from Aeroplane and those older Neutral Milk Hotel songs that had survived in the live show into 1998, but Jeff set additional hurdles for the players. Up until the week they left Athens, they were still trying to figure out how to incorporate an ambitious, horn-heavy improvisational cover of Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che” into the set. This would only infrequently be played, supplanting an original improvisational piece based on the colors of the rainbow that had sometimes found its way into the live performances in 1997.

Ben Crum, asked about the improvisational and collabora­tive aspects of the band, says, “Jeff guided it, but everyone had some freedom. Those guys didn’t need much direction, though. Their instincts were good, and they knew how to complement the songs and stay out of the way of the songs and their direct route of communication to the listener.” Jeremy Barnes concurs, “Jeff wrote the songs and we experimented as a band to come up with arrangements. Jeff was very open to our opinions and receptive to our ideas. We were much more collaborative than a lot of bands I can think of, where one leader does everything, and passes jobs along to others. I think Jeff had confidence in his musicians, so he could lead without necessarily telling us what to do. There were no weak links in the band, and every­one really admired each other’s musical abilities.”

Lance Bangs, who attended those final Aeroplane practice sessions, noticed how gentle and encouraging Jeff was with the other musicians, telling them that he loved them and that everything was going to be okay. “And he wasn’t any kind of a taskmaster—never turning and glaring at anybody—it was never like that. Clearly, there was a love of his circle of friends that made it important for him to build this community and bring them along with him. And at any point that he’d wanted to, he could have gone out on his own and not had to split the money twelve different ways. It wasn’t about that: It was about build­ing this community of likeminded people and supporting their eccentricities. That was really inspiring, and kinda reestab­lished my faith in what the best part of music can be, building this protective enclave of misfits and lost kids. That really meant a lot to me, and added to my sense that it was really important to document this.”

As Jeff and company took those new songs out more frequently, the Athens music community became aware that something really special had been born. On October 14th, Jeff got up onstage at the 40 Watt, in a slot opening for the Tall Dwarfs’ Chris Knox, and slew the room. Lance says, “There was a sense of all of us kinda realizing how special it was and making a point of not missing the shows, and not talk­ing, not being as flippant as you might be if it was just some other band that happened to be playing where it wasn’t as cru­cial to catch every note.”

Neutral Milk Hotel would be on the road more than one day in four during 1998. February through April saw them canvass Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota. May was two nights in London, June three Florida dates, July a weeklong East Coast/Canadian tour sharing stages with Of Montreal, Elf Power, Papas Fritas, and Marshmallow Coast (aka their Denver friend Andy Gonzalez). Then from August through October the band played Sweden, Norway, France, England, Brussels, Hol­land, Germany, Scotland, and Ireland.

Although she played with Neutral Milk Hotel at nearly every show, Laura Carter’s most significant role on the tour was that of mix-board translator, a position she’d first held for Olivia Tremor Control. For the first part of a Neutral Milk Hotel set, she’d sit with the soundman, physically handling the board and advising him of what to expect. “‘Okay, next song, Julian’s gonna throw that accordion on the ground and he’s gonna pick up the banjo—the pickup’s barely hangin’ on, so if it starts to squeal, that’s what it is!’ It was more like talking them through what was about to happen, because so much was happening onstage that without someone helping, it was a wail or squeal and the soundman would look at twenty instruments onstage and not know what to dive for.” Once the soundman was accli­mated, Laura would jump onstage to play the songs on which she was featured, which were conveniently clustered near the end of the set. While ordinarily a club soundman might have been insulted to have a strange girl come up and tell him how to handle a band’s mix, Laura’s personable blend of humility and diplomacy managed to soothe hurt feelings before they erupted into attitude. She learned a lot and kept the sound from devolv­ing into chaos on many a night.