Author Douglas Coupland once wrote in his seminal 1991 slacker work, “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” that “nostalgia is a deadly weapon,” and one supposes those words can be cautionary tales about our youth, what we romanticize and what potentially holds us back from growing because we can’t move on past it. I’m not exactly sure what that has to do with the new documentary, “‘The Elephant 6 Recording Co.,” about the late ‘90s recording collective The Elephant 6, mostly comprised of lo-fi indie bands from in and around Athens, Georgie, other than to say after watching this appropriately chaotic, shaggy and baggy documentary, Coupland’s quote immediately flashed back into my memory.
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That is not to say The Elephant 6 wasn’t great; homegrown slacker lo-fi pop bands like Apples In Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power and Of Montreal, definitely had a brief moment there in the late ‘90s when they were riding the wave of the zeitgeist, threatening to crash through and wrote some ridiculously catchy and ambitious music. But it was very fleeting—maybe as long as Neutral Milk Hotel’s proper recording lifespan, On Avery Island (1996) to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)—and seems to have been over-sentimentalized or even turned into a religion by some (they reunited in 2014 at Coachella, and were probably paid a handsome amount for it, which says a lot about the aura around the band and the price you can put on nostalgia).
Directed by C.B. Stockfleth (another romantic look-back music doc “Other Music”) and produced by filmmaker Lance Bangs, who appears in the doc as a talking head so much he seemingly wants to direct it himself but doesn’t, “The Elephant 6 Recording Co.,” is engaging and interesting because the bands themselves were engaging and interesting too. But the indie rock doc is also a little like trying to recapture ephemeral magic in a bottle or encapsulating a shooting star; it’s just hard to do if you weren’t there for the moment and it would be very curious to see how it plays to those who didn’t witness it first hand (or haven’t turned this period into idolatry, which rock critics who missed it first-hand tended to do).
While structurally more ping-ponging around discursively, the lo-fi doc essentially has three chapters or three bands to focus on and their leaders: The Apples, The Olivia Tremor Control, and Neutral Milk Hotel, which threatens to overwhelm the story, so are wisely kept for last.
The principal songwriter for the Apples, but also the leading producer and architect of the Elephant 6 collective, none of this music scene is really possible without the bursting exuberance and enthusiastic ambition of Robert Schneider. Apart from producing many of these now-revered records, his goal was essentially to create a Beatles-esque Sgt. Peppers sound, but if it were recorded on lo-fi 4-tracks tapes with all the hisses, pops, mistakes, noise and collage-y cutups of a dada-ist experiment.
Then there’s Olivia Tremor Control, led by Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss. Doss is more of a perfectionist, slowly and patiently crafting pop gems, and Hart is still so bursting at the seams with creativity, he’s almost vomiting out songs, he’s so scattered and all over the map, and potentially in need of medication for help.
But it’s essentially a doc about creativity that quickly caught fire, inspired like-minded others who rallied to the cause (all the bands that wanted to be part of the E6), created a special community, a simmering and exciting potent moment of pop/rock/psychedelia experimentation, and one that fizzled out way faster than it should have (yes, many of these bands went on for longer than just the late ‘90s, but their cultural moment didn’t expand much further outside of die-hards).
“The Elephant 6 Recording Co.,” also falls a little prey to the Jeff Magnum of it all. The head of Neutral Milk Hotel, Magnum basically became a recluse shortly after the big success of ‘99s Aeroplane, and in many ways, inadvertently helped fuel the mystique of the band making them the most legendary of them all in retrospect. Magnum stopped playing shows and went radio silent in the early aughts and his unexplained absence seemed to just stoke more intrigue and allure around NMH (“When the guy sneezes, it’s on the front page of Pitchfork,” a legal rep for the band once quipped).
And the doc’s a bit damned if they do and damned if they don’t, honestly. It’s unclear if an entire doc about Magnum and Neutral Milk Hotel could hold up to scrutiny beyond the ride-or-dies, but the story of this band, the biggest from the scene, is like the… ugh, sorry, elephant in the room that must be addressed and the doc seems trepidatious to cover until it doesn’t.
It’s a shambolic rise-and-fall doc, of course, but perhaps so enamored by the ebullient years or promise that “The Elephant 6 Recording Co.” mostly skips over the years when the cultural spotlight turned off (yes, some of these bands have still continued on to have good, sustainable careers that are worthy of attention).
Naturally then, most of the doc then centers in and around the tipping point, right before the decline of the E6. Stockfleth’s doc seems gets a bit ensnared in Magnum’s outsider story (turns out by his own admission, he just had a “nervous breakdown,” couldn’t handle things, but is grateful that it happened). It’s at this point that “The Elephant 6 Recording Co.,” begins to quickly wrap itself up, knowing the waning years aren’t all that interesting as things just started to fade away for all the bands rather than burn out in a blaze of glory.
That said, there is one natural “hook” to the story of decline; the ultimately death of OTC’s Bill Doss in 2012 at the age of 43 (he passed from a sudden aneurysm). By this point, many of these bands are defunct or disbanded, but his passing reunites everyone for one last jubilee of celebration that encapsulates an era of wild and unbridled inventiveness.
Still if this E6 portrait gets anything right it’s the chaotic creativity that seemed to burst out of many of its members like exploding sunlight their bodies could not handle as if something out of a kooky sci-fi film. “It doesn’t matter if anyone hears it; we’re making rock n’ roll history,” Ben Crum of Great Lakes says at one point, recalling a thought from Robert Schneider, summing up the ethical, pure and punk-rock ethos that also dominated this imaginative art collective.
I was at a Neutral Milk Hotel show in 1999 (in what turns out to be a legendary show among fans, perhaps because they showed up three hours late), and while I try and refrain from indulging in nostalgia and the past, it’s admittedly one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life; as if a clown car of acrobats crashed into the stage, were fired out of the vehicle from a canon, but somehow landed on solid ground and then created an electrically unpredictable show that was on the verge of falling part the entire time, but stuck the wobbly landing in the end. I suppose I might not have the proper deference and affection, but definitely understand how those momentary flashes and sparks of genius inspired such devout and long-lasting followings as the one presented in this well-meaning and largley engaging tribute doc. [B]