Music

Ten years ago this week: Neutral Milk Hotel at The L@b

Spencer Patterson

If you happened to be in the Excalibur’s casino on the night of April 9, 1998, you might remember seeing a scraggly cluster of youngish men, huddled around the Derby electronic horse-racing game as if their lives depended on the outcome.

It’s unlikely you were there, but odds might be even longer that anyone who was actually recognized the members of Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and The Gerbils—the three Elephant Six Recording Company bands that teamed for a Las Vegas house show earlier that evening.

“I still tell people it was the best show I’ve ever seen. That night definitely left its mark on all of us,” enthuses Illinois-based engineer Bil Hooper, a former inhabitant of the house on Patrick Lane just east of Annie Oakley Drive that began hosting live music under the watchful eye of Ronn and Kelly Benway and carried on the tradition when Hooper and friends Paul Sargent and Kris Poulin moved in and named it The L@b, showcasing Modest Mouse, Unwound and Dub Narcotic, among others, in 1997 and ’98.

After having lobbied booking agent Jim Romeo—unsuccessfully, they believed—to bring Neutral Milk Hotel to town, The L@b’s residents received late word that the Athens, Georgia, outfit actually did have a free date on its West Coast itinerary. So on April 9, frontman Jeff Mangum and his mates pulled into Las Vegas, scarfed down vegetarian burgers and spaghetti prepared by Hooper and played an hour-long set to a crowd of fewer than 50 in a converted garage in Henderson. The set focused on material from just-released NMH album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, now widely considered one of the 1990s’ most important works.

“I remember the music was really loud despite the fact that they were just playing out of their amps,” Sargent recalls. “[Aeroplane] always sounds like it’s falling apart at the seams to me, like at any moment it might explode, and that’s how it was live. And Mangum was one of those approachable heroes—quiet, but really fun and friendly.”

Not surprisingly, given his subsequent fade from public life, Mangum didn’t hit the town with the others afterward, instead staying behind to rest. But Sargent sees another figure from that night quite vividly in his mind’s eye. “Scott [Spillane, of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Gerbils] kind of looks like a gnome,” laughs Sargent, now an artist living in Brooklyn. “It was hilarious to see him at the Excalibur, like he could have been walking around carrying a battle ax.”

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