The Elephant Six Holiday Surprise Tour came to Salt Lake City on the 5th of March to play a show in our town's beloved rustic shack of a venue know as Kilby Court. In telling the story of this show I must first describe the unique layout of this particular venue to those who may not be familiar. As you enter through the archway where you're tickets are collected and your hand is stamped, there is a concession booth to your right, further to your right is the merch house as it is known, in front of you is the outdoor courtyard area where people are usually seated around the fire pit in it's center (which this time of year especially would always be lit), and to the left the garage of some long ago converted house where the music is typically played. I feel before getting on with the story I must also give a brief history on the Elephant Six Collective.
Elephant Six is the record label/collective of close friends which, beginning in 1991, hosted a sort of big bang whence worlds of poppy, folky and psychedelic indie rock were born. At it's epicenter were Robert Peter Schneider of Apples In Stereo, Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss of The Olivia Tremor Control, and Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. Later on in the decade the recording company had expanded to include bands such as Of Montreal, Beulah, Dressy Bessy, The Music Tapes and Elf Power and the output of Elephant Six took on an immeasurable level of gravity and importance around which all indie bands of the next decade would set into orbit. There is something so alive and real about everything the people of Elephant Six create together, and that night we all felt it, on and off stage. The moment we entered the venue, Will Cullen Hart was waiting beneath the archway to shake our hands. It was an inspiration to me how an artist so vital could be so genuinely humble and gracious to their fans. To the right, the merch house had become a sort of Santa's workshop for a very jolly Scott Spillane of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Gerbils. Inside, he was finishing his Holiday Surprise angels, which were a piece of concert memorabilia he hand carved and hand painted from blocks of wood. JulianKoster (The Music Tape, Neutral Milk Hotel, Chocolate U.S.A.) and Andrew Rierger ( Elf Power) met with fans around the bonfire. Once everyone had been sufficiently acquainted, band and audience members filed into garage. The audience made up a crowd of about 25 while the band members, a crowd of 15. The stages width had to be extended on stacked pallets to hold the many musicians and their many, many instruments which outnumber them two to one. The show started very energetically with Circulatory System's “Yesterday's World” and from that song on through the rest of the night there was something about the experience which was so uniquely magnetic. It wasn't simply a matter of the band drawing in the crowd because many great performers are capable of that, this was a connection that equally brought together every individual at Kilby Court. It was as if a singular feeling of electric joy held up the room and inhabited us all. No one ever seemed preoccupied, unimpressed, board, frustrated... At one point during the show, Scott Spillane brought everyone back into the courtyard to share a very Elephant Sixy folktale he made up about “The Great Snowman” and how “we must help him throw his snowball through the moon to welcome in the Springtime” which meant a volunteer needed to slingshot a Styrofoam snowball through a paper moon held up on a wire and as a reward the participant who met the challenge would be allowed to choose any song from the public domain for Elephant Six to preform as soon as they returned to the stage. Finally, after a few extra mercy tries, the third contestant got his snowball completely through the target, and when asked to chose a song, very confidently and assertively, they requested “You Are My Sunshine” and, in fact, no song in all the public domaine could have been more perfectly suitable. By anyone else in the indie hipster realm something with this level of optimism and simplicity would be dealt with a very apparent level of sarcasm, but in the spirit of that night we could all sing “You Are My Sunshine” together with complete sincerity.
This brought something very sharply into focus for me that is so special about Elephant Six: The folksiness, the psychedelic lyrics and noise experiments, the Beatlesy sense of melody, the spare recording, the use of strange instruments have all been copied over and over to the point of becoming genre convention, but nobody else could imitate that feeling that lives within all their music which that night made so tangible. The simple fact of it is that it can't be imitated, it has to be completely genuine and true or it doesn't exist at all. Nearly any other music with this level of experimentalism and influence carries with it some heavy air of condescension, but the creative force of their work evokes only a simple sense wonder; one that is pure and free and childlike. It became very clear that the show wasn't really about any particular bands that recorded with Elephant Six so much as it was a celebration of that feeling, and even someone who had never followed Olivia Tremor Control or The Music Tapes or Elf Power or Circulatory System or Sunshine Fix or The Gerbils would have felt just as connected and wrapped up in the experience. After an incredibly expansive set of old songs, new songs, magnetic tape recordings, saw solos, whacky stories, candy throwing and all the various forms of crowd involvement, all the musicians took up horns, drums and acoustic instruments, building and building upon a soft waltz until it became a thunderous rapture. As the song went on, building endlessly, they all walked off stage into the audience and eventually encircling us, at which point the song had built into a sing along about being in love with nature and stars and other planets and we all waltzed and swayed and sang with purpose from the bottom of our hearts this repeated chorus of a mystical cosmic love. We went on and on increasing in passion and volume until Julian Koster led the way through the door and we settled around the fire, still singing, still swaying, mesmerized by the waltzes repetition. The song went on for about five more minutes until the show finally ended and we were all left with the sort of feeling you want to carry around with you forever. Of coarse no feeling or emotion can be infinitely sustainable, so you must hope you can at least sustain it in memory. This show, fortunately, was of the sort one simply couldn't forget.
