The Elephant 6: it's a legend to W. The Elephant 6 Recording Co.: wasn't that what Jeff Magnum used to write on the DIY albums he gave to his friends? Ruston, Louisiana, that's where it began. Ruston, full of jocks, full of enemies meant they had to become friends, had to band together. Music was their shelter. Music the forest in which they would wander together.
What were their bands called? There were so many of them. Everyone was in at least three. What mattered was their collective: the Elephant 6. What matters is that they recorded songs for one another and performed for one another. What matters is the cassettes they exchanged, and their home-run record labels on which they put out each other's music in tiny editions.
Ruston, in the middle of nowhere. Ruston, nowhere in particular. The Jocks were too much. The isolation was too much. Who among them had the idea that they should all move together to Athens, Georgia, and start a new life there? The Athens, Georgia of R.E.M. and the B-52s. The Athens, Georgia, where rent was cheaper and people were more laid back and there was a music scene to be part of, which they'd never visited, but to which they decided to relocate en masse.
So they left their crash pads in Ruston. They left their shitty jobs. They drove across America. And they found new crash pads in Athens, and new shitty jobs. And they continued to make cassettes and give them to one another. Continued to write songs only for one another, living in each other's imaginations.
Then they scattered again, a blown dandelion clock. Then they came together again, this time in New York. They dug through thrift stores for records. They lived on coffee and cigarettes. They wrote songs through the night and into the dawn.
They lay on the grass in Central Park and dreamed of the future, of the new day into which they'd step together. Of a door that would open in the sky. Of living in the woods in a communist utopia, where they would make music with their friends and have no contact with the outside world. Of building geodesic domes and giant waterwheels for electricity and setting up speakers, blasting out sounds randomly. They didn't need anyone! Only each other!
They played gigs, mad gigs, like evangelists. They played to hear themselves through the ears of an audience. They played to hear each other play, their songs becoming new, becoming light, and floating up through the darkness.
And Jeff Magnum sang like a magic realist. His voice swooped and dropped and roared in a fever dream. He sang and he strummed and the band played their accordions and singing saws behind him. They played uillean pipes and the zanzithophone. They played fuzzed bass and flugelhorn. They played trombones and bells. They swapped instruments onstage to play like amateurs, like people who'd never played before.
Then back to Athens again, back to their crash pad with its tin foil walls and brightly coloured canvasses, with old keyboards and reel-to-reel machines, and a twelve foot Chinese dragon and a theremin. Back to the house where twenty people wrote and recorded and slept, where kids and dogs wandered in and out.
Was it there Jeff Magnum first read Anne Frank's diary? Was it there that he sobbed for two days and two nights, and rose on the third and composed songs aloud in the bathroom?
They heard him there, his friends of the Elephant 6, and knew something was happening. They heard him singing songs over and over, working them out without writing anything down. They heard him recast songs he had written over the years, breaking them up and mixing them with new bits and pieces of songs.
They heard his voice crack and strain as he sang about loving Jesus. They heard it wandering passionately off key as he sang about loving Anne Frank, and about Anne Frank's ghost.
They heard his songs as a single, everlasting piece, images and motifs repeating themselves endlessly. They heard the song cycle of In An Aeroplane Over the Sea as it came together in the bathroom, and were ready with their many instruments to learn the songs and make them new.
Then they toured again. They were friends on the move again. They practised their songs on the road. They were a mad marching band, part marachi and part salvation army. They played carnival music and Bulgarian folk music. They played musique concrete and acid folk.
Who had ever heard anything like it? Who had ever heard songs sung with such urgency and desperation and compassion and tenderness? He sang to make people feel, Jeff Magnum said.
He sang about going back in a time machine and saving Anne Frank. He sang about Anne Frank being reincarnated in a Spanish boy. He sang about a two-headed boy in a jar and about siamese twins freezing to death in the forest.
People felt, but what did they feel? He sang of the interconnection of all things. He sang of joy and death, or murder and birth. He sang of the past and the future. He sang of grief and being united in grief. He sang of the world's sadness, and of the joy of those who, together, saw that sadness and knew their friendship must include that sadness.
And he sang of friendship, too – and love. Sang of counting everything beautiful we can see, of a shower of stars against the blackness of night; of death, of the end of things and the end of love.
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