Photo Credit: Amoeblog

A Jeff Mangum live review. Did I really just write those words? To review a live show generally implies you SAW said show, which means I SAW Jeff Mangum play live. Wow.

I’m not going to lie – I’m a Jeff Mangum fanboy. I’m the sort of person who, when you think of the worst of the overly passionate Neutral Milk Hotel lovers, you picture me. I have my reasons. I think that Neutral Milk Hotel is one of the most important and influential bands of the past twenty years. I’ve also found their most well known album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, to be the soundtrack of some of the most important times of my life, a friend that was always there for me, and one of the most fascinating and endearing documents of passion that I’ve ever come across. So keep all this in mind as you read my review.

As excited as I was to see Jeff Mangum perform tonight, I was more excited to see the crowd’s reaction. I’ve seen Jeff come out on stage before at shows and the crowd reaction has always been the best part. Somebody sees him and a singular shout goes out, which quickly turns into a roar; a tsunami of energy, anticipation, and excitement. The wave ripples through the crowd and it’s incredible because the heart of everybody in the room leaps at the same moment. It feels as if you are water being thrown into a hot pan. You hit and instantly you vaporize. Jeff walks into a room and instantly a crowd vaporizes.

Jeff came out from stage left with two guitar bags in his hand. The roar, deafening, ran through the audience. He seemed in good spirits and not particularly nervous; he certainly did not come off as somebody who has not performed publicly in 9 years (and not in this hemisphere for over 11). He sat down in rather quick order and launched into “Oh Comely”. His eyes were closed most of the time as he sang and he rocked back and forth, almost like some spastic. He instantly qualifies as the most passionate performer I’ve ever seen. The music is sparse, the melodies are simple yet haunting, the lyrics are constant and full of dense imagery. His words just leap from his rocking body. Jeff’s voice is still nasally but slightly lower and almost sounds as if he’s singing with some slight foreign English accent. However, the voice is still instantly recognizable.

The entire room of five hundred people watched with their mouths agape, partially in a smile, partially in shock. Dead silence, outside of Jeff’s voice and his guitar. The only noise he had to fight with was the air conditioner and that he easily overpowered. All the other performers for the night stood at the edge of the stage, watching intently. Kyp Malone and Ira Kaplan stood on opposite ends of the stage, in the audience, starting at the same performance.

As the verses of “Oh Comely” go by, I feel myself having flashbacks to all the times I’ve listened to this song, sort of like Richie Tennenbaum with “Needle in the Hay”. Into my head pops visions of happy times, depressed times, alone times where I’ve heard this song, connected with this song, have thought deeply about this song, obsessed over it, been healed by it. And now I’m watching it be performed live by Jeff Mangum himself. This is too fantastic to even think about.

“Oh Comely” finishes some six or seven minutes and as soon as Jeff is silent, maybe a moment earlier, he crowd just launches into a roar. It’s like a missile went off. One moment the room next to silent and then, the instantaneously deafening blast that is sustained for a good 30 seconds, minute. Jeff looks bemused and certainly not unappreciative. I’ve never seen or rather, FELT an audience like this. The word “palpable” is often used and it is apt. The entire collective consciousness and energy of five hundred people melded into one mind. It was unreal.

Next was “A Baby For Pree”, off On Avery Island, and the scene is much the same as with “Oh Comely”. An intense performance from Mangum followed by a fantastic and sustained roar from the crowd.

The third song is “Two Headed Boy, Part Two”. It’s incredible. It almost moves me to tears. That sounds ridiculous, I know, but go search on twitter and you’ll see I wasn’t the only one. There is such power and beauty in Mangum’s words and he delivers them with such open and honest passion; it’s devastating.

About half way though “Two Headed Boy, Pt 2″, something sort of amazing happens. I *think* almost the entire audience started to sing the song but I’m not quite sure. It’s a quiet murmur right on the edge of being audible. One second I’m sure I hear it and then the next I doubt myself until I hear it again a few lines later. I look around and I see almost everybody mouthing the lyrics to the song. The collective mouthing of the lyrics by five hundred plus people equals maybe the equivalent of the voice of 1/2 a person and so Jeff is accompanied by barely audible whisper. This mouthing seemed almost subconscious, everybody knew every line by heart and they’d been repeating them to themselves for so long that, when they saw the real thing finally, they were unable to not sing along. It was incredibly powerful and, in a way, moving.

To use words such as “powerful” and “moving” in a review sounds forced and melodramatic but search on twitter or as somebody who was there, and they will reveal similar reactions. It was special.

After the impossibly even louder roar that followed “Two Headed Boy…”, Jeff announces this will be his last song. The crowd expresses their disappointment but they don’t seem the least bit sad or let down. The final song will be In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Upon hearing the strumming of opening chords, a mighty cheer goes out and you can feel the giddy childlike energy take the crowd to another place. This time there is no mistaking it, the entire audience is singing along. Why not? They know every word. It was…beautiful. I don’t think I can come close to conveying how powerful a scene it was.

Jeff walks off stage but we all knew he would be back. There is no way that this crowd would let him leave without an encore. After several minutes he relents and comes back out and takes his seat again. He says he is going to play Engine and we can all sing along, if we like. He seems truly happy. Everybody sang along and it was incredible. It added to the song. After he finished the song and he was walking off a fan asked Jeff to sign a copy of the 33 1/3 book on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Jeff happily obliged, resting his acoustic guitar on the ground as he scribbled a small picture on the inside cover of the book.

Jeff Mangum, when talking to Pitchfork in 2002, gave the following as one of his main reasons for leaving music:

Also, I think that the difficult thing after Aeroplane was that, when we started doing the Elephant 6 thing, we had a very utopian vision that we could overcome anything through music. The music wasn’t just there for entertainment: we were trying to create some sort of change. We had a desire to transform our lives, and the listener’s lives. I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after. So when so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain… I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can’t just sing my way out of all this suffering. I have to try to understand human nature and myself and the nature of suffering and a lot of these other issues on a deeper level. When I realized that a lot of my understanding of these issues was on a pretty flimsy platform, that’s when the platform started to give way.

One of the biggest wounds that I carried around with me for a long time was that a very dear person in my life, and the person who had probably the biggest influence on my life artistically, had been molested and abused by her father from the time she was a baby. After Aeroplane came out, I saw her going through a lot of pain, and I also saw some of my other friends crumbling. So I realized that even though I believe with my whole heart in the power of music… it didn’t provide any solid answers on how to heal myself and heal others so that they could overcome what had happened to them. I realized that I wanted to take a deeper look at life in order to be some kind of truly healing force in people’s everyday lives.

I couldn’t help but recall this quote tonight as I watched his set. Here we were, here he was at this benefit to raise money for a dear friend of his and a musician that many of the rest of us admire and respect, Chris Knox. His presence alone likely counted for tens of thousands of dollars raised for Chris’ medical treatment. This is pain he’s helping to heal. Then I looked into the audience during his set and I saw the faces of the crowd. I saw them all just beaming, mouthing the words that they all knew by heart. They all knew the words by heart. I knew them by heart because they’ve been an incredibly healing force in my life and I know that I’m not alone in that. I couldn’t help to feel that, as I watched Jeff and the rest of the crowd, that he was wrong. Maybe he was unable to heal himself but he surely did much to heal Chris Knox, to heal myself, many of the people at the show tonight, and thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people out there who’ve heard his music. I hope he realizes this.

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