by Adam Clair (Music 781.66 Cla)
Jeff Mangum is probably best known for his work in the band Neutral Milk Hotel, and the scene that he led is known as the Elephant 6 Collective, named after the Elephant 6 Recording Company which was started by members of the bands featured on the label. The music of Elephant 6 has been quite influential on pop music that followed their heyday 20 years ago, but there hasn’t been much written about how their scene developed, or what happened to the collective. Journalist Adam Clair, however, has been quietly documenting their history for years, gathering hundreds of interviews, and he has just published Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery, which you can borrow from Polley.
Clair’s introduction clarifies the scope of
his inquiry into Elephant 6: he’s looking for the human history behind the
collective, as opposed to analysis of albums or lyrics. And ultimately he’s looking
for any loose ends that might need to be tied up in the absence of public work
from Neutral Milk Hotel or their bandleader Jeff Mangum since the early Oughts.
As he puts it, “What’s missing—or at least
what’s not immediately apparent—from both the album (“In the Aeroplane Over the
Sea”) and the public understanding of Mangum himself becomes just as compelling
as what is actually there.” When Mangum pulled away from
public discourse, his music and band continued to grow in popularity, taking on
an unusual kind of legendary status in absentia.
The first chapter elaborates further on the
mystery of Mangum and its effects on Elephant 6 as a whole: Neutral Milk Hotel
released their final full-length in February of 1998, and performed their last
show for New Year’s Eve 1998. As their music continued to grow in popularity,
the effect of no more activity from Neutral Milk Hotel was fans old and new
digging into the other bands of the Elephant 6 collective. And ultimately this
has created a growing audience for many of the bands connected to their scene,
some of which are still together, like Of Montreal.
The Elephant 6 bands formed a tight
collective, and the earlier portions of the book discuss the early history of
individuals who eventually formed many of the bands within the label’s
umbrella. It’s an interesting story that takes us across the country a few
times. The book goes from Ruston, Louisiana in the late 70s and early 80s,
where the young Robert Schneider met the young Jeff Magnum in 2nd grade. The pair
of friends were eventually joined by Will Cullen Hart, Ty Storms, and Bill Doss
by middle school, where they formed their first bands. They all explored new
and unusual forms of music together as listeners and performers, and Jeff and
Will become DJs at WLPI radio in 1987, where they could play free-format music
after 10 PM.
As friend groups do, people spread out and
moved around the country upon graduation, but these friends stayed in touch,
and eventually the core of the Elephant 6 Recording Company was formed by Bill,
Hilarie Sidney, Jeff, Jim, Robert and Will. United by their friendships, as
well as a love for psychedelic pop music that was unique for the era, the label
become a reality in 1993, with core groups of participants settling in Denver,
CO and Athens, GA. Perhaps the key to the “collective” aspect of Elephant 6,
most musicians played in multiple Elephant 6 bands. They played on each others’
albums, toured with one another, and advocated for the whole collective of
bands in music press.
Through a little over the halfway point in the
book, Clair smoothly ties together countless interviews into a narrative of the
rise of all of the Elephant 6 collective bands, with some emphasis on the most
well-known acts connected to Jeff Mangum, Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor
Control. At this point, we reach the early-Oughts moment around 2002 when it
becomes clear that Mangum really is removing himself from public view. The rest
of the book, then, addresses the post-Neutral Milk Hotel period, during which
other Elephant 6 collective members have mostly continued to create and
perform, though most have also adopted a certain desire to protect their
privacy. Mangum declined to be interviewed for this book, but so many others
agreed to participate that it’s possible to get a picture of the modern era of
Elephant 6 members. And that is to say that the modern era is somewhat more
subdued again—after Bill Doss of Olivia Tremor Control and The Sunshine Fix
passed away unexpectedly in 2012, a lot of momentum among the collective was
slowed. There were occasional Jeff Mangum performances in the early teens,
including a brief reunion of Neutral Milk Hotel in 2013 through 2015, which
felt like a moment where the band was able to enjoy the boost in their
reputation after a decade of inactivity. But broadly speaking, now that they’re
far enough ahead in their respective careers that in most genres they’d start
to be billed as nostalgia circuit acts, those that are still very active like
Of Montreal are still writing some of the best work of their careers, while
those that have stopped playing continue to enjoy a kind of mythical reputation
that informs new bands to the present day.
It’s a very readable book—Clair’s style is
simply to string together moments of historical context, and let his interview
subjects speak for themselves. While he doesn’t get into great detail about
every single Elephant 6-related band, almost everyone is at least mentioned,
and you can get a very good sense about the bands, their music, their
influences, and most importantly, their relationships over the decades, through
the course of Endless Endless. Perhaps my
biggest takeaway from the book is that almost all of these bands share an
old-school kind of artistic integrity: they’ve all had ambivalent relationships
with the fame and money that often comes with music stardom, and for the most
part, they’ve found strategies to either work on their own terms, or stop
working altogether when they feel it’s not possible to have the kind of impacts
and audiences they prefer. This has kept a lot of Elephant 6 participants from
being able to live as full-time musicians, but through the course of these many
interviews, one gets a very clear sense that their memories of the times and
music they made together are the most important part of the work. These are
priorities one doesn’t see often in biographies of popular musicians, and for
that reason alone, I think this is a personable, attractive book for many music
fans.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Now is the Time To Invent! Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution,
1986-2000 by Steve Connell, or Your Band Sucks by John Fine.)
( publisher’s official Endless Endless web page
) | ( official Adam Clair web
site )
Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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