I finally have some time to put down something in writing about this, and it’s probably for the best that it’s almost a week later, because if I had written it immediately afterwards it would have been even less coherent than this is going to be.

So.

I went up the show by myself on the CTA. I had planned to go with friends, but no one else I know had been able to get tickets, so I was there by myself. I don’t mind going to shows alone— I’m seeing Veronica Falls this Thursday regardless of whether or not I can convince someone else to go. I obviously prefer seeing music with friends, but being a music critic in college meant that I went to a lot of concerts, and not all of them came with a plus one, or featured bands my friends were particularly interested in, so I got used to occasionally heading to concerts by myself. This turned out to be excellent preparation for field work, incidentally. Anyway, before the show, I went to the diner across the street and ate my sandwich as I listened to old men in fedoras talk about the just-played Super Bowl and how they respected Tom Coughlin because he did things “the right way.” I wasn’t really sure what this meant. So I finished my meal and left my tip and walked across the street and stood in a really long line to pick up my ticket. The guy behind me mentioned that the last time Jeff Mangum played a show in Chicago, it was at Lounge Ax, which I know from being in High Fidelity but hasn’t actually existed in over a decade. 

The opening band consisted of Scott Spillane (from Neutral Milk Hotel and Gerbils), Laura Carter (from Elf Power), and Andrew Rieger (from Elf Power) playing some old songs and covers. They were pretty great, and in any normal circumstance I’d have been really excited to hear them— I mean, Scott Spillane sang “Two Skies,” which is an awesome song. But it was hard not to be distracted by the thought that oh my God I’m going to see Jeff Mangum in a few minutes. I do not envy the openers their role, because they had to play every night in front of an audience who was perfectly polite but obviously waiting for somebody else.

And then Jeff Mangum came out, and he just started singing. He went into “Two Headed Boy Part II,” and the woman beside me started crying. I didn’t cry, but it didn’t take long for the first of many shivers to run up my spine— for those scoring at home, it happened precisely at And when we break, we’ll wait for our miracle / God is a place where some holy spectacle lies, which happens around 3:24 on the recorded version. And it just kept going like that.

And at first everyone was really quiet, almost as if we weren’t completely silent, Jeff Mangum would disappear or something. Like this was a collective illusion that we could all hold on to if we were just really, really quiet. And then he played “Holland 1945” and he told us to sing along, and some of us did, but a lot of us were still really quiet because is this really happening? We all clapped really loudly, and then we would get quiet again because oh my God he’s playing “Song Against Sex.” 

I mentioned before that it must be strange to be Jeff Mangum, and what I mean is that no one there treated him like he was person, at least for the first part of the show. I couldn’t decide if we were looking at him like Kafka’s hunger artist or some sort of prophet or what, but we definitely weren’t treating him like a person, which is, you know, what he is. Like, if you put out In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and then just sort of disappear, it’s easy to become not-a-person for the public, I think, especially for people who have never known you as anything other than the genius who wrote this perfect record and then disappeared. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is my favorite record of all time, so I totally get that. This would have been like if, before he died, JD Salinger had decided to do book readings from Nine Stories. And there would have been this dude standing there, and he’s just be a dude, but he’d also be reading these stories that are inscribed inside people. Certain songs they get so scratched into our souls. 

So amid this deafening quiet and contemplation, Jeff Mangum all of the sudden said, “You can yell at me, too. You don’t have to be so nice.” And that was funny, which sort of broke the tension. He’s funny on Live at Jittery Joe’s, too, which I think I really appreciate because it’s so easy to turn him into something that’s idealized or holy or alien. Sometimes I think that’s why Bob Dylan is such an asshole sometimes— just to remind people that he’s a person, too. But Jeff Mangum did it by being funny, and from that point on people were more comfortable, and more willing to sing along, which was important, because it meant I got to sing along to “King Carrot Flowers Part 1” and “Naomi” and “Two-Headed Boy” and “Engine.” We all sang along.

I know that religious metaphors are overdone in music writing, and I just got done talking about how weird it is that people were basically treating Jeff Mangum like a shaman, but the only thing I can really compare these songs that night to are hymnals. Other than Christmas services when I go home to my family, I haven’t been to church in about a decade, but like the hymns I remember from when I was a kid, these were songs that everyone just sort of knew, like they’d been with us forever. Everyone there knew them by heart and had clearly sung along to them, by themselves or with friends, for years, never thinking they’d ever get to sing them in a setting like this. This was when I wished my friends were there with me, when everybody finally decided it was okay to sing along. 

He closed his encore with “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” And it was unreal, in the sense that I actually couldn’t totally believe it was happening. I go to a lot of concerts, and that doesn’t happen very often. I think the last time there was a moment like that was in 2006 when I found out that Neko Case’s voice actually sounds like that. But it was happening. I don’t really know how to talk about this, regardless of what the previous thousand words would suggest. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times in the last ten years, alone and with friends and with strangers. I’ve sung along in my room and at parties. When my mom died a few years ago, it was Tennyson and this song that I quoted at the memorial service. I find myself singing it to myself constantly for no reason at all. And looking around, I think everyone there had a relationship like that with this music, if not this song in particular. Everyone there had lived with this music for a long long time, and I don’t know that any of them ever thought it would come alive for them like this, beyond anything but vinyl and YouTube videos.

And then it did, and then it was over, and Jeff Mangum, person, walked off stage, and everyone shuffled out of the theater, past the merch stand full of t-shirts and posters, and into the cold Chicago winter. People were talking, but I don’t remember what they were saying. I just remember that everyone was smiling. They weren’t big beaming smiles, either, but little ones, smiles that looked like something had happened that they couldn’t tell anyone about, not because it was forbidden but because it was something they couldn’t really describe.

What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all around the sun.