1.

As I made my way through the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, NJ, up to my assigned seat, I was surprised at how high I was going. Being in a row labeled Q of course didn't bode well, but I got these tickets after a feverish fifteen minute flurry of choosing "2," "best available" followed by typing out barely legible, automatically generated non-words, convincing myself that the tickets I'd been looking forward to for eight years, since the moment I first heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, were not sold out.

And they weren't! Somehow, in those 15 minutes, during which Ticketmaster snidely claimed, over and over, that they "couldn't find any tickets," they miraculously appeared, much like Jeff Mangum, the man himself. It's a miracle far beyond stooping to complain about seats, and if there were a describable abiding mood of the night, it was exactly that: unfazed gratitude.
For the uninitiated, or for the less direly obsessed, Jeff Mangum is the brains behind the enigmatic '90s band Neutral Milk Hotel, which arose, alongside other bizarre bands like Olivia Tremor Control and Apples In Stereo, from a collective of Louisiana-born musicians now commonly referred to as The Elephant Six. As NMH, Mangum released a handful of demos before his debut album, On Avery Island, in 1996 and the universally praised sophomore album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, that put NMH on the road opening for R.E.M. and caused such a stir that our man Mangum -- we assume, because he's not a big talker -- freaked in the face of fame and went into relative musical exile.

I don't have to elaborate on why Mangum's sudden and unexplained presence is important to his fans. Take a gander at his Wikipedia page: the bulk of it is a list of appearances that are just as enigmatic as his absences. Even J.D. Salinger -- to whom I've heard Mangum simplistically compared  -- has an entry that's at least a series of cogent paragraphs rather than a timeline of ghostings-through. Mangum left us with two otherworldly albums, a few scraps scattered hither and yon, and a long chain of bands who tried and failed to achieve what he had. He bowed out just as the limelight was trying to get a fix on him.

The auditorium lights went down, and the stage bloomed in a soft, sunset-y glow, casting light on four acoustic guitars encircling a folding chair. The room both panicked and seized as smokers and lobby lingerers flurried to their seats and anyone already sitting tensed in anticipation: holy shit, this is happening. He sauntered out, a tall fellow whose sailor's cap and green button-down made him look either like the gloomy son of a Greek sailor or an unconvincing steampunk.

2.

He opened with "Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2." Post factum, I can't help but think of this as a slow and depressing launchpad, but at the time, I don't think I thought much at all, except maybe: wow. When he finished, he meekly said, "Thanks for coming out," which is like a groundhog expressing appreciation to ardent, frostbitten onlookers, before he moved into "Holland 1945" strumming like a crazy man.

I looked around the crowd and noticed -- for a sold out show -- how very uncrowded it was. By the end of the next song ("In the Aeroplane Over the Sea") I was actually kind of offended by how few people had cashed in on their tickets.

After sitting on it for 24 hours, it now makes more sense to me to surmise that Mangum himself may have capped the ticket-count below venue capacity, especially in light of the anti-photography measures, which had people kicked out -- I assume, though I'm not entirely sure they were actually expelled -- for trying to capture the moment on their iPhones and flip cameras. Thus Mangum -- still not a forthcoming guy as far as celebrated musicians go -- is able to carve the limelight, to force it to bend in his favor so it would never get the upper hand, so things like a lowered show capacity and anti-scalping and anti-photography measures keep his shows intimate, present and, we hope, un-viral, giving him greater control.

He went into a five-song run of On Avery Island tracks broken in the middle by Aeroplane's depressing epic, "Oh Comely," and capped with "April 8th" joined by members of opener A Hawk and a Hacksaw. In that time, as probably the vast majority of the crowd there, I fell into a semi-depressive nostalgic reverie for the dozens of life-eras those songs clung to.

The bulk of the 23 songs on the two official albums (plus "Engine" from the "Two-Headed Boy" 7") have at least once enjoyed the status as my favorite NMH song, including "Fool" and "untitled," which might not be entirely unlike saying "Wigwam" is your favorite Bob Dylan song. I'll spare you my memory lanes, because if you're reading a concert review it means you're probably invested enough in the artist-at-hand to have your own cherished recollections, and they're probably not a far cry from my own. Either that or you're bored.

3.

I was surprised by Mangum's insistence, about halfway through the show onward, that the audience sing along. The songs themselves always felt very private, for listener and songwriter alike. Maybe I could listen to it with friends whilst high or drunkenly commiserating, but here, in this sacred sighting, I wanted to listen to him, though how could I argue when, transitioning from part two to part three of "King of Carrot Flowers" the man himself screamed: Fucking sing along!

Okay, fine, I will.

Then the place fell dead silent when Mangum decided he wanted to tell us something. "I've only played this song live once before, and that was in 1998. So, yeah, this is the second time I'm playing it," which I either misheard or is a lie, because there are at least three videos on YouTube of him playing it at various shows. I won't try to recreate the rest of what he said about the song, but the gist was that it was very dear and very confusing to him, and that it was kind of hard to play live. And that's when he played "Engine," the last song of his set. I don't think I've ever wanted an artist to come on for an encore as much as I wanted Jeff Mangum to come back. He walked offstage after "Engine" and, for all I knew, he had sunken back into the nothing whence he seemed to have recently come. Not unpredictably, he came back on, sat down and went right into "Two-Headed Boy pt. 1," the whole place singing along as the crew from Hawk and a Hacksaw filed on for the funeral dirge "Fool." While seeing Mangum play so comfortably and adeptly solo was an amazing experience, hearing him backed by a full circus-tinged band again made it feel, not like he was a terrified groundhog feeling out the environs above ground, but that he was, in his own light-handed way, joyously returning.
(Fingers crossed...)

Postscript:

The Tuesday after the above-described show, Mangum showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protests to play unplugged for the crowds there, who were extremely happy to see him. Watching the video of his reception and the energy he infused in the protesters both gives me chills and makes me kind of misty. In the context of (largely unemployed) people fighting financial back-handedness in the face of a growing economic meltdown, the chorus of "Holland, 1945" takes on special new meaning:

                And now we must pick up every piece
                Of the life we used to love
                Just to keep ourselves
                At least enough to carry on

Photo by Danny Krug