Do you remember where you were when you first heard this?

I don’t think I heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea until around April or May 1998. Alison and I were playing croquet in the front yard of our friends’ house on Macon Highway house in Athens, GA (the one with no shower and a lofted roof which made all that Brit rock sound so nice coming from their massive speakers). It was one of those magical days in Athens where a sunny day outside with friends turned seemlessly into a late night indoors and a 4a.m. walk home. We played that album over and over, first outside on the crappy boombox and then inside on those speakers booming through that shack of a house, and then put the speakers in the window so we could sit outside in the middle of the night and look at the stars.

I admit right now that I still don’t own a legitimate copy of this album; I was so poor at the time that I borrowed WUOG’s copy for two very guilty hours and illegally burned my first CD in my dad’s brand new CD-R drive. I also put as many songs from On Avery Island on that CD as I could, and despite the threat of consumer-grade CD-Rs having a lifespan of but a few years, that much used/abused CD-R plays just fine to this very day. I used my dad’s scanner to scan in the liner notes, and printed those out in color on his at the time brand new (but today total crap) inkjet printer.

My fondest memory of Jeff Mangum in Athens was not the Jittery Joe’s coffee shop show or when he’d join the 40Watt stage with Elf Power, but one late fall night in 2001 or so when I and a few founding members of GLAD (girl librarians are drinking) were walking home down Harris Street. Mangum and homeless Athens rapstar DJ Jazzy J(ay) serenaded us with an impromptu performance. It genius, of course, but also a side of that poor guy that doesn’t ever seem to be written up: hilarious, spur of the moment, and completely unforgettable.