We Will Begin Again

A couple of weeks ago, we went to see Jeff Mangum play at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. It is a beautiful venue, ornate and very old. We had terrible seats, but it didn’t matter. I’d been waiting for over a decade to see him play. After the 1998 release of his album In the Aeroplane over the Sea, Mangum basically had a nervous breakdown and withdrew from society. A 2008 Slate article called him “the Salinger of indie rock.”

This is about where we were sitting:

I have been obsessed with this album for so many years, which probably means that there is something wrong with me. The above-referenced article succinctly describes it–the album is “about Anne Frank in which vocals about lost Siamese twins and semen-stained mountaintops mingle with the sounds of musical saws, fuzzy tape loops, and an amateur psychedelic brass band.” Now do you think something is wrong with me?

So I was unsure of what to expect from a reportedly fragile man singing for an hour or so about a little girl who died a horrible death. I did, however, know what to expect from the audience. Oh, there were handlebar mustaches. And very tall men in high-water skinny jeans. Beards and glasses and blazers and broaches and lensless glasses and suspenders. There is nothing like a crowd of aging hipsters. (I fully implicate myself.)

The show was scheduled to begin at 7pm on a Monday night. The very fact that I was in downtown L.A. on a work/school night speaks to how much I wanted to see the show. When we got there, a line wrapped around the building and the marquee announced that the show would now begin at 8:30pm. I began calculating how much babysitting money this would cost. He probably didn’t have an opening band. We’d be home by 11, at the latest. I could still get 6 hours of sleep.

But, no. There was indeed an opening band and they did not begin until 9 and their music, like the music of most opening bands, was tedious. I was getting impatient. I was falling asleep. I was too old for a show on a Monday night.

After a brief intermission during which several acoustic guitars were propped on stands, Mangum took the stage around 10pm. He wore a button-up shirt and brown corduroys and a newsie hat. He sat down and began playing and while I do not remember which song he sang first, I remember thinking how beautiful his voice is even though in many ways it is not what many would consider beautiful. I guess beautiful isn’t the correct word. The right word would be emotive. It’s kind of how I appreciate John Lennon’s voice (and pretty much everything else) so much more than Paul McCartney’s. It’s thinner and rougher, but it is more honest.

Mangum repeatedly asked the audience to sing along, and at first people were hesitant. First, his lyrics can be complicated. Second, they can be morbid. An example:

And here's where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets 
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
And it's so sad to see the world agree 
That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

So about a third of the crowd hesitatingly made their way through singing a long with this. About 15 minutes of the way into the show, Mangum said, “I’ll be back in a minute” and just walked off stage. Ryan and I looked at each other, wondering if Mangum was okay. But he came back and continued without explanation. After a little banter with the crowd and some obnoxious people yelling song titles at him, he told us that he would sing us the song he “lost his mind to.” A handful of people nervously laughed. I froze. “You’re laughing at that?” he asked. But there was humor in his tone. Then he played a song I had never heard, “Little Birds.” It is not about the Holocaust, but it is about dead baby birds (literally, at least), and it is very disturbing.

At first it felt strange to sing along to songs about death and mental illness. By the end of the evening, a little crowd of about 20 dancing hipsters had formed behind the final row of seats. And by the time Mangum sang “On the Aeroplane over the Sea,” we were all standing together fervently singing. Mangum told us that he wrote these songs for one person, and he never expected them to reach anyone. He seemed truly grateful and humbled by the crowd’s response.

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