Image Credit: Will WestbrookNone of the 500 or so people who bought $75 tickets for the Chris Knox benefit show held at N.Y.C.’s Le Poisson Rouge last night were quite sure what we were getting into. We knew that a motley group of musicians and comedians would take the stage to raise money for Knox, the New Zealand indie-pop hero who suffered a stroke last summer. One of them, stunningly, would be Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel — a man as private as he is brilliant, who has performed very, very rarely since 2001. (He’s pictured above, second from the left with the rest of Neutral Milk Hotel in 1998.) Beyond that? Zip. The event’s organizers refused to provide the performers’ order or start times beforehand. Mangum’s “very short acoustic set” could be coming at any time between 6:30 P.M. and 1 A.M.

Standing in line outside Le Poisson Rouge before the show, I wondered if Mangum wouldn’t turn up at the very end of the night, play “Sign the Dotted Line,” the stirring Knox cover he contributed to last year’s Stroke tribute CD, and disappear again. I found myself thinking of an old Jewish folk song, “Dayenu“: Seeing Mangum sing even just that one tune would have been enough for me. So I went downstairs and settled in for the first few performers. Some of them, like TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and singer-songwriter Sharon van Etten, were quite good. Out of nowhere around 8:35 P.M., comic Rachel Feinstein ended her raunchy stand-up routine with a casual, “Okay, Jeff Mangum is next!” Suddenly the room got very loud. READ FULL STORY »