50 Albums

Jandek! 50 albums (nearly), one or two a year, packaged similarly, a blurry picture on the front, the same typescript on the back saying very little: a list of the songs, a list of the players. The day before yesterday, drinking Cava and ready to do nothing else but listen, as Bill Callahan recommends – just to sit and to listen in a room full of mouldy furniture from the kitchen – I heard Jandek for the first time.

What did I hear? Chair Beside A Window and then – what a title – The Humility of Pain. And nearly straightaway, and all at once I fell in love with Jandek, with the surface of his LPs, with their minimal information, and with the way he kept himself hidden all these years, recording, releasing records at his own expense, and then sending them to whomever wanted them for a minimal fee.

I have always loved those who resist the great machines of publicity, which call out to a public that is only a dream of the marketer. Publicity – the author interview, the special in the Sunday supplement, all that. But interviews, too can be marvellous. How marvellously witty Morrissey was in the 1980s! And how discrete! How well Mark E. Smith resisted any kind of appropriation, even to the point of obnoxiousness!

And later, I marvelled at Pynchon’s disappearance, and then Blanchot’s – even more complete, and at one with his work. To disappear, to become anonymous, and, like Jandek, to work anonymously and without fuss. Under a pseudonym – a false name? No: under a heteronym, the other of all names, the name as the other: how beautiful.

And the music arrives with barely a context. And the music! A guitar tuned to make new sounds. A guitar that drones the new sounds – drones along a mode (is it a mode?) and in songs all in a row. One song – then another – themed (I think) into a long player. Songs in a row, focused, discovering. Attuned, but to what? Magnetised, but by what? A kind of imperative, that bears the music itself, but that sets itself back from it. That says: this must be; one song must follow another, and whole albums must follow one another: this is how it must be.

What a grasp of dynamics, I said to myself last night, barely knowing what that word meant, and attack, barely know the meaning of that word either! What a grasp of rhythm, as if it could be distinguished from arrhythmia in his playing, his singing! It is best of all when he plays alone. Guitar and vocal. A vocal in tune in a new way. Which rises and then falls to drone. And then leaps up again.

I admit that at the moment, I don’t like his use of blues forms, when it occurs. I want a non-blues like dynamic, a non-blues moving forward, if only because the greats of the blues are peerless and far from us like stars. Peerless, in peerless, sparkling brilliance, inimitable. Just as Jandek (produced Jan, as in January, and Dek) is peerless when his guitar is jagged.

Jandek has a day job, and I like that too. He works – when an interviewer tracked him down to his house, he was dressed for work, and then took her to a bar where his fellow workers were. He didn’t admit to being Jandek. Or Jandek was to be spoken of in the third person – this is marvellous. He always presents himself, the thirty-something man the interviewer thought she’d met, as a representative of Corwood Industries. A representative of the company which distributes Jandek products. And he speaks of Jandek as ‘they’, in the plural, as if they were a whole band.

Younger, Jandek assented to another interview. It’s on Youtube, along with some footage from his first ever live performance in Glasgow, in 2004. His first performance – and unbilled. 50 albums, give or take. One after another, and without fuss. One, then another, and until recently, no gigs. He plays gigs now. Dressed in black with a hat at Glasgow, he wouldn’t stay in a hotel with the other artists, wouldn’t eat with them. He appeared and disappeared, playing with a band he picked up for British gigs.

The discovery of a fan community on a marvellous website. Such a clean website, so perfect. Whose webmaster quotes Bela Tarr at the bottom of each email, and one of my favourite quotes: ‘… ontological shit.’ A community of fans, patient through all the years. Later, I’ll go through their posts, leading up to the moment when Jandek started playing gigs. What a surprise that must have been! How they’d earned it, the fans! And I reading these emails as a newcomer, having heard Jandek for the first time only the day before yesterday! A newcomer, completely fresh!

Pain, though, as I realise the cover of the second Palace Brothers album is virtually a Jandek pastiche. Curtains, blurry picture. Excitement as I understood what the young Smog might have found in Jandek – what an inspiration! I wish I’d had him before me when I was young, star-like, peerless!

Ah, this post is awkward and rambling … I’ve written without care, one sentence lurching enthusiastically from another. One, then another, and listening to The Humilty of Pain – what a title! Listening to the fan heater go in the kitchen, and with the rich smell of mould in my nostrils! Listening this early morning in the middle of my life, the sky blue above the houses opposite, the concrete yard still wet, still soaked!

And Jandek played in my city for his first gig under his own name. My city – here! And I ever knew he was playing; I’d heard. We were sat up at the pub looking down the Tyne, looking down at the Sage, but neither of us had heard Jandek, not then. But he played in my city – half an hour from this flat. Here! It’s a sign, I tell myself. And of what did he sing at this gig? I’ve ordered the DVD. I’ve read the lyrics. He’s – how old – 50? At 50, and to sing those lyrics! At 50, and to sing in that way, and of those things!

Morning in my idiocy and the yard before me, concrete. Morning and the mould-spores in the air, drifting. The washing machine black with mould beside me. The rusting microwave, the cupboard with a mouldy back. And damp-sticky pots and pans. And my morning dressing gown, torn and dirty. And a pile of clothes, dirty because there’s nothing to wash them in. And a pile of sour oranges, and three remote controls, a tube of Calendula. L’Attente, l’oubli to take notes from. A TV Guide.

But I have to look to see these things. To look – to smell, to take the mouldy air deep into my lungs. Because I am listening, and all of me is listening. All I am is listening, and writing jaggedly of listening, at the edge. What idiocy, this listening! How idiotically I listen, and write of listening! Jandek is howling a bit now. Howling a bit and droning a bit and the guitar is droning a bit under that. ‘We’re not talking never’: but those words stretched, stretched. Those words festooned across what? ‘I want to look in …’ And the guitar going, droning. And now the song’s stopped. And another song started, passing through the same magnetic field. The Same, the Same: Jandek knows you should only sing of the Same …

Jandek versus the mould, I tell myself. Jandek versus the damp, it’s Gnostic. Jandek on the side of dryness, of clean air, and the damp on the other side, evil.

For a time, Nancy sings on the records. For a time, and then she is gone. For a time, drum backing – Moe Tucker style bashing, untrained, imperative. And three a capella albums for which I will send off. A capella! Jandek! A voice and nothing more. The voice with its naked non-rhythm and attack and non-attack. The voice, droning, going up and down like a theremin. Attuned to what? Tuned to what alien radio station? Channeling what cosmic storm?

Jandek is a satellite. Jandek broadcasts from the moon. Jandek versus damp and mould. Jandek who has lived and died 50 times. In the beginning was Jandek and at the end, too. Jandek is discovering things, over 50 albums. Jandek is rarefied. Jandek studied philosophy. Jandek worked as a machinist. There is no end or no beginning to Jandek. There’s a kind of progress. A kind of rarefaction.

Who is Jandek becoming? Other, and the other of others. Jandek is going Outside, and to the Outside Inside. Jandek knows that to unfold the soul is to unfold stars and darkness. The cosmos inside, where Barry Malzberg’s astronauts go mad. Inner space, where Ballard’s disasters have hollowed out the sun.