At 7:30 on a Friday evening, a pale, gaunt man dressed in black with a Stetson hat emerges from an old Honda in the back streets of Annandale and walks with gravitas past a small crowd of music lovers queuing for a rare performance. As soon as he arrives, he disappears into the scenery. This is Jandek, the musical project of an outsider musician from Houston, Texas, whose name and profile remained a mystery for over 30 years.
His recent performance at the Mu-Meson Archives opened with the 2004 film, 'Jandek on Corwood', which documented Jandek's recorded history and interviewed the few fans and journalists who had had contact with him. At that time, he had never played live and had only given two recorded interviews. Up until October 2004 when he performed for the first time live at the 04 Music Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, no one was certain of his identity (Tisue 2009, para. 2). Jandek’s international prominence, despite the lack of traditional structure, chords or tuning in his dissonant, commercially unviable folk-blues, demonstrates the changing possibilities of an artist’s recognition brought about, both by changes in technology, and the prevailing effect that has on music culture.
As typical of his work, Jandek’s Friday performance worked in an idiosyncratic and atonal form of folk and blues that bordered very closely on the avant-garde. The rhythm, as in all of Jandek’s work, was in no particular time signature. Jandek’s trademark slow, ambling guitar strumming with a closed fist predominated throughout the beginning of the performance then returned in the middle with a new force and confidence, relating closely to the series of recordings he made between 1982 and 1987. The few, augmented chords he played on an electric guitar were often stacked atop the untuned E string, although it could scarcely be identified as a tonic. Likewise, Jandek’s vocals were atonal, with long, meandering phrasing. Emotional contrast was created through the varying use of shrillness and hoarseness, as well as in the juxtaposition between different dynamic changes, both sudden and gradual.
Heather Leigh Murray accompanied on bass guitar, played on her lap with a tremolo pulse reminiscent of Holger Czukay’s playing style. David Keenan appeared on drums, alternating explosive polyrhythms with moments of pure textural abandon and accelerated breaks. Keenan himself describes Jandek’s current performance style in his Volcanic Tongue publication, locating it as ‘somewhere between Keiji Haino’s dense, clean guitar work on Fushitsusha’s John Zorn-produced album Allegorical Misunderstanding, and Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt circa Nazi USA’ (Keenan 2005, para. 5).
Also present were Jandek’s emotionally dissolute, stream of consciousness lyrics. Imagery of stark landscapes, beaches and seas persisted across the work, ‘I found a cave in the desert to defend’, as well as spontaneous allusions to violence in the middle tendency, ‘Hey mister, can you tell me, is that a knife stuck in your face?" Over the course of the performance, there was increased black humour and hints at self-deprecation and crowd interaction, directly breaking the fourth wall surrounding the impenetrable avatar that he had created for his artist persona. The moment when he erupted with the line ‘I made the decision to get real wild’ was responded to with cheers from the audience. Douglas Wolk likens this lyrical style to ‘some of the more morbid, death-letter blues of East Texas stylists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, as deconstructed and channelled through the playing of an idiot savant’ (Jandek on Corwood 2003, 25:31). This bleakness perfectly complements the absence of Jandek’s album covers, whose salient imagery of negative space is reminiscent of Takamitsu (Burt 2001, p. 11).
The structure was untraditional and not clearly directional, appearing to form a single overall work that had not been performed before on any of his albums or a previous live concert, and with tendencies rather precise sections. It began with a melancholy, meandering tendency which recalled the style of his 1978 debut. It moved gradually into something resembling a middle section with occasional semblances of tonality and chordal tuning, before slowly crescendoing into an intense climax which ended with a long, drawn out fade to silence.
The entire performance straddled the line between polyphony and homophony, with the drums and vocals often forming interdependent voices and the bass drone and ‘rattled cage’ guitar providing the ambient sound. Despite this, Murray and Keenan maintained their performances primarily as a rhythm section, never to upstage Jandek himself. The only significant break in the overall texture came with the gradual fade to monophony during the finale.
Like others such as Daniel Johnston, Hasil Adkins and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Jandek is described by Irwin Chusid as an “Outsider” musician, musicians who are not part of the commercial music industry who write songs that ignore standard musical or lyrical conventions, either because they disagree with them or because they have no formal training. Because this music has few outlets, performers or recordings are often promoted by word of mouth, fan chat sites and independent radio, more usually among communities of music collectors. Outsider musicians usually have much ‘greater individual control over the final creative’ product either because of a low budget or because of their ‘inability or unwillingness to cooperate’ with modifications by a record label or producer (Chusid 2000, p. 3).
Because of Jandek’s lack of appeal to mass audiences, his significance to contemporary music lies in what it says about the dramatic changes that occurred in the music recording and distribution culture in the late 20th century. As Wolk points out, Jandek’s 1978 debut album Ready for the House followed the emergence of punk and the DIY aesthetic (Wolk 1999, para. 4). As technological change facilitated changes in economies of scale, artists were releasing their own material en masse for the first time in history. Despite selling albums only by the hundreds, and then only by direct mail order to the artist, he built over time an exclusive fan base which came to include Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth (Vine 1999, para. 2). Likewise, Jandek’s decision to go live and his increased output since 2003 is a reflection of the international communication and collaboration between creative individuals and groups facilitated by the digital age.
Chusid argues that the key to appreciating Jandek and other Outsider musicians like him lies in the question, ‘"What were they thinking?" … Because it's not really a question – it's a statement in disguise, implying, "The mind that created these unearthly sounds is beyond my grasp"’ (Chusid 2000, p. 3). This is symbolic of the 21st century necessity to dispense with preconceived understandings of music. It also raises questions about the motives of an artist who shuns all publicity apart from occasional performances, resists all classification by journalistic media, produces records at a loss and continues to be prolific despite the lack of any commercial appeal.
At the end of Friday night, the soundwaves generated by the instruments gradually dropped away. Jandek paused for a moment then flipped the switch on his amplifier. The lighting was shut off. Murmurs sounded as a bevy of fans slowly came to their feet, rushing to the back to buy CDs. There were none for sale.
References
Burt, P. 2001, ‘The music of Toru Takemitsu’, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Chusid, I. 2000, ‘Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music’, 6th edn, A Capella, New York.
Blue Corpse, 1982, CD, Corwood Industries, Houston, Texas.
Chair beside a Window, 1987, CD, Corwood Industries, Houston, Texas.
Jandek on Corwood, 2003, motion picture, Unicorn Stencil, Houston, Texas.
Keenan, D. 2005, ‘First ever tour’, Volcanic Tongue, viewed 19 March 2010,
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Ready for the House, 1978, CD, Corwood Industries, Houston, Texas.
Tisue, Seth. 2009, ‘Guide to Jandek’, viewed 19 March 2010, .
Vine, K. 1999, ‘Jandek and me’, Texas Monthly, August, viewed 19 March 2010
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Wolk, D. 1999, 'Mystery man', Providence Phoenix, 18 September 30, viewed 19 March 2010, .
