photo credit: Mallory Turner

The Okkervil River frontman opens about up the unexpected impact of an early influence—The Incredible String Band.

Whenever I was both lucky and unlucky enough to have a sick day home from school as a kid, I would repeat the same ritual. My mom would fold our living-room couch into a bed facing our TV, and I would flip back and forth between the two channels our antenna could pick up. And when the boredom became unbearable, I’d have my mom thaw me out a package of Van De Kamp’s fish sticks and put on a VHS copy of the 1982 documentary The Compleat Beatles, which we’d taped off the TV. This was the movie that introduced me to The Beatles and rock-and-roll, and I knew all the music cues and the dialogue by heart. My favorite moment was one that also terrified me. When The Fab Four started dropping acid, the film broke from its staid talking-heads-and-archival-footage format for a sequence where the camera zoomed over an extreme close-up of the Revolver cover like it was a vast infinite plain, while alien seagulls screeched mockingly and John Lennon intoned, “Lay down all thoughts/ Surrender to the void/ It is shining.”

But, most days, I had to go to school and, most days, I managed to look away from the void. I had only a hazy notion of what drugs were and, mainly, I just knew I was supposed to say “no” to them. The local radio station played neutered synth-pop, exuberantly wholesome R&B ballads and embittered divorce anthems by middle-aged millionaires. I took it all at face value, and I enjoyed everything that was served to me.

My mom decided to take guitar lessons, and she met a teacher her age named Dennis Monroe, who had self-released several albums of Christian-inflected folk music with his wife, Mary Ellen. They were the first working musicians I’d ever met, and our families became close friends. Nick, their oldest son, was about a year older than me—charismatic and outgoing where I felt inward and picked on, stunted by childhood illness. I recall a glorious weekend when Nick introduced me to MAD magazine and ZZ Top’s Eliminator, both of which felt like a cauterizing blast of irreverence, irradiating the edges of my small-town 1980s universe.

The Monroes always seemed to have money trouble, which I gathered was linked to the fact that they were musicians. They moved all the time and, shortly after that weekend, they went away for several years. When they eventually came back, they settled about an hour’s drive from us. By this point, I was of sleepover age, and I started going to spend the weekend with Nick and his family in their log cabin, which was filled with candles, herbal teas, essential oils, guitars, dulcimers, lutes and fiddles. By day, I would sit rapt watching Nick—by now an accomplished musician—jam with his dad, or I’d sit with his mom while she’d say hours of rosaries, warning me of the coming apocalypse. By night, Nick and I would ascend a hill to a tent in the woods beside a pond, and we’d play guitars and cook over a campfire and talk all night.

I was in awe of the brilliant musicality that seemed to flow through the whole Monroe family. Dennis and Nick, in turn, were in awe of a group from the ‘60s called The Incredible String Band. They talked about them obsessively, and Nick made me a 90-minute cassette tape consisting of their three albums, Wee Tam and the Big Huge, The 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

I took this tape home and it blew my brain open, changing the course of my life. I had never heard anything like it before and it did things I didn’t know music could do. Robin Williamson, the more verbose of the band’s two main writers, seemed more like he was casting spells than singing songs. He incorporated Celtic balladry, Indian instrumentation and North African tonalities with modernist poetry, fairy tales and children’s songs, creating hair-raising epics riven through with an intensely personal yet depersonalized mythology. He seemed to be staring right into that void I’d heard about as a kid—or speaking from it. And his compatriot Mike Heron served as a gentle and accessible counterpart, a note of sweetness to counteract Williamson’s acidic headiness. One afternoon when my parents were away, I threw open all our windows, moved their hi-fi speakers to the opened doors and wandered the marshes and forest around our house while the rolling waves of music permeated everything—until it seemed as if the songs were emanating from the trees and the water and the earth. I bought blank notebooks and started transcribing the lyrics to every Williamson song, endeavoring to crack their code.

Nick began writing melodious, lucid songs, so I tried too, but my songs were clunkier. We would send tapes full of original songs, absurdist radio plays and old records that we’d gotten hold of back and forth. We made our first recordings in his father’s basement studio. But that beautiful time began to slip away. Nick’s family moved far away again, and I became closer to friends in my town. They were obsessed with Dave Matthews Band and Medeski, Martin & Wood. I tried to interest them in The Incredible String Band, but they, fairly definitively, didn’t get it. And I found my writing improved once I located some more musically conventional heroes like Neil Young and tried to wrap my fingers around just a handful of simple chords. The ISB got filed away, high on their own weird shelf.

Years later, I started a band and we eventually became successful. Every now and then, trading jams on a long van haul, I’d put on The Incredible String Band to see what my bandmates—who were weaned on punk-rock and bar bands— would say. Inevitably, they would guffaw and shout me down, and I would cringe to hear the music through their ears—pitchy acid-casualty elf-rock. But in the privacy of my headphones, I still derive a thrill from this music unlike anything else I’ve ever heard because I can still sometimes hear it with the ears of a 15 year old. And I still try to pilot my rickety little boat toward that unknown region, straight to the mouth of the void.

Singer-songwriter Will Sheff is the frontman and primary creative force behind Okkervil River. The group released the concert compilation, A Dream in the Dark: Two Decades of Okkervil River Live, in September on ATO.