Growing up in Ruston, Louisiana, is similar to growing up in Hell. There is nothing to do there for young people but football, hunting, fishing, and drinking prodigious amounts of beer. If you know the right people you can also get some marijuana, but that's pretty much it if you're a white trash boy growing up in Ruston in the 1970's and early 80's. If you're an artistic kid, you might as well be buried alive as live in Ruston. That was the mold that Jeff Mangum grew up in, and what created Neutral Milk Hotel.
Neutral Milk Hotel was basically Jeff Mangum and whoever he could recruit to play the instruments he heard in his head. The first album was rather amateurish. The second one, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, was both wildly inventive and expertly done. Jeff had finally managed to get the music in his head onto tape. And so he stopped. Stopped dead. As in, walked off the stage after his last performance with the band, and kept walking, never to be seen by audiences or by the band again. He has been only glimpsed from time to time ever since, with no real answer to the question "Where is Jeff Mangum and what happened to Neutral Milk Hotel?"
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
(Disclaimer: Jeff is a distant relative of mine, though I know that only because I happen to have a copy of the Mangum family tree handy. I may have met him once at a Mangum family reunion, but if so, I don't remember it).
Growing up in Ruston, Louisiana, is similar to growing up in Hell. There is nothing to do there for young people but football, hunting, fishing, and drinking prodigious amounts of beer.
ReplyDeleteFuck football, but nothing wrong with hunting and fishing and drinking some beer. It's a good country life.
If a man knows how to hunt and fish he can get by when others can't.
ReplyDeleteBBC -
ReplyDeleteYou have an almost uncanny talent for missing the point.
Cheers!
JzB the pointed trombonist