Richmond, Virginia. He played the Firehouse Theatre, a little black box venue housed in an historic firehouse that can hold a little more than 100 people. It was the 20th show for the legendarily reclusive man, who is probably named Sterling Smith.
That it happened here in Virginia s capitol, a city most bands of interest see only in the rearview, is nothing short of amazing. They just don t come here much these I didn t recognize many people at the show. I think most were from out of town.
The guy sitting to my left had driven from Atlanta weeks earlier; he told me it was fucking amazing. I heard other people talking about catching upcoming gigs in Austin, at SXSW, or in New York a bit later. Jandek show they can before he dies.
Just a little more than two years ago it seemed going making up for lost time. Me, I own four of the man s albums, so what do I know about Jandek? For me to offer an opinion on his career based on this scant Day s Night.
He s going on 50 records, and I have less than 10% of them, so I don t have any idea what I m missing. His first album, Ready for the House, I love. The way it creates and sustains a single mood reminds me of nothing else.
But for all I know, another half-dozen of his albums do it better. Still, I know enough to say that I find him fascinating and even inspirational. His career proves Edison s old saw that genius is 90% perspiration, and Charles Bukowski s adage that endurance is more important than truth.
I m reminded also of John Cage s comment to Arnold Schoenberg, upon being told that he would always confront an impassible wall as a composer, because he had no feel for harmony. In that case, Cage told him, I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall. That s Jandek for you; only he s in a room with three additional walls-- melody, rhythm, and pitch.
And it s more like a closet than a room, really, with him rattling around in there like a penny in an empty can of Coke. Jandek got to where he is because he kept something else. He spent years self-releasing records that almost no one cared about, fewer still ever bought, and most of these despised.
But he kept them coming, year after year. You have to admire him. Once he finally played live in Glasgow in 2004, all of playing guitar and singing and he looked like the guy from the album covers.
I can t have been alone in being disappointed when I first heard this news. I d to assume that, as when a serial killing spree finally ends, Jandek had either died or gone to prison. But now, there will probably be a press release issued when that time comes.
No one knows for sure exactly what Jandek s take on things are now, but we know at least that he s making decisions and treating music in more or less the kind of business way everyone else is. So, OK, he s entitled. He put in his time and then some.
He deserves it. Good for him. Here in Richmond, he came out clad completely in black, of course, from his shiny leather shoes to his fedora.
His skin, on the other hand, looked like something you d use to write math equations on a blackboard. He played an electric guitar, and behind him were three guys from the local experimental music community, which is much more substantial than you would imagine for a city of this size: a drummer, a bassist, and a saxophonist. They appeared to be improvising and building each song from scratch, ostensibly under Jandek s direction, though it was hard to tell how he was instructing him and how much they had worked out beforehand.
Most of the songs were 10-minutes long or more, with only a couple lines of vocals added once they d been going for at least five. The band played well and I enjoyed listening to them, for a while at least. But Jandek s contributions struck me as very dull.
He Which, I understand, is an aesthetic choice; he can t have going for this long and not know how to play. Somewhere along the line, he decided that this is how he wants to sound, and some combination of descriptors with the word primitive could be assembled to explain what he was doing. But his left hand almost never moved; it retained the same shape, a fist.
And he strummed a little harder or a little softer with his right, based on what else was going on, and that was the extent of his instrumental contribution. The you leave it in a dark basement for a year. experience of records has nothing to do with music.
His art, of course, has always included more than just songs. From his album covers to his titles to the way he runs his mail-order business, it all works together to create a unique and compelling phenomenon. But watching him perform, and having the mystery of his physical presence dispelled, I could feel my appreciation of his thing being diminished minute-by-minute.
It was a curious feeling; and I was left with just the way the music sounded. And the sound wasn t bad, it was worse: boring. As I said, I have little invested in Jandek, so this shift wasn t such a big deal.
There was no loss of innocence to grapple with. colors the way we hear it. Not just the way we think about the music, physical thing, I think.
Imagine hearing Jandek s albums and knowing they were created by a 22-year old kid who d just earned a B.A. in English from NYU and now records on 4-track in his brother s basement.
The kind of dude you might hang out with. It s impossible to know what his work would sound like in this scenario, but it seems safe to say it d be much less interesting than how we hear it now. It s one of the first questions we have when we hear something that intrigues us: Where is this band from?
What s their story? We re not always privy to information about who made the music we re listening to, but once we know, the knowledge colors everything we hear. Moth Super Rainbow.
It s a fun album, dark and weird and a little goofy, a bit like early Ween, and I look forward to spending a lot more time with it. The the rural Midwest, isolated from mainstream culture and following their collective vision into uncharted territory. They re presented as pure, untainted; it s a powerful fantasy, especially at this point in time.
And you have to wonder: Is it even possible? Can anyone, especially a young person, live a life in the Western world any distance from the grid? thing you can feel happening, as technology accelerates and gains more penetration and the world continues to shrink, is that some of this sort of mystery becomes a statistical improbability.
Some version of ourselves exists online somewhere, where anyone can access it. Three thousand years ago we d all be together in a small tribe, and proximity would dictate that none of us had secrets. And then, for a long while there, we lived a life where secrets of all kinds flourished.
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