The old prejudice sees the most authentic form of performing in the singer/songwriter, singing along with an acoustic guitar. The troubadour who sings the truth to the powers that be, the songwriter who speaks hushed and intimate truths about her life, the unplugged performance that at last reveals the songs themselves, stripped of their ornamentation: each time, it is a matter of reaching the real, the bedrock, the deep river of song that has always borne us.
Is it this prejudice I inherit in wanting to discover a real Jandek in the solo acoustic recordings? Then it is a way of putting aside the collaborative recordings, and especially those where there is a lightness and humour. To say: Jandek is serious first of all, and seriousness is the real river that runs through his oeuvre, from one album to another, breaking itself up in collaborations only to return to itself again, like the river that braids and then returns to its channel.
Listening to Ready for the House, Living in a Moon so Blue and then, later, Twelth Apostle, Glad to Get Away, and then, later still, I Threw You Away, Khartoum … Each time the return to open string, one chord playing. Each time to the microtone and to a playing that brushes and plucks, sometimes strums or plays strings individually. And, as the albums proceed, a vocal that drawls, that pulls what is sung apart … Isn’t it here the real Jandek can be discovered? Isn’t it here that the singer and guitarist is able to deepen his idiom, to travel further into what it allows him. To proceed along the narrow road that lets his dissonant idiom sing of itself?
Ah, this is naivete! What simplicity! But I want to indulge my fantasy of a man in a room – a man alone in a room with a guitar, with a reel-to-reel tape recorder running. A man alone, and singing, and playing, not of his pain or his despair, but of the pain and despair of his idiom which chose him before he chose it. A singing and playing engaged by the river of song, by blues forms and folk forms, but becoming something else with his singing and his playing – just as blues forms and folk forms are transformed by Charles Mingus or Albert Ayler.
Dissonance. A sound untempered. An idiom sings and plays, and the singer sings and plays to accompany it. No, it is not of his pain that he sings – and sometimes I think the collaborative songs about depression betray the deep river of song for this reason – but of pain in general, of suffering as such. As though he’d discovered a musical idiom that sang of all suffering without sentimentality, without tears. As though an idiom had discovered itself in him that would sing of the suffering of suffering, the way it experiences itself without respite.
As though he passed through Dante’s inferno – through the limbo of pain that precedes bodies. A pain in which parts of bodies throb – a head that aches, a phantom limb – but that allows no body to be constituted. As though pain itself were a river that passed through us all, and came to itself, singing of itself, only in the music of Jandek. Pain is dissonance. But pain not enobled through dissonance, as for Nietzsche. No Wagner. No art music. Pain calm and singing of itself. Suffering suffering itself in song.
The idiom is simple; it does not ask to be enobled. Absent, here, the clash between freedom and necessity that opens up the tragic. Here, freedom has become necessity. Freedom – Sterling Smith, singer, player, experiences the necessity of Jandek. Of becoming Jandek as he sings and plays …
The discovery is there on Ready for the House. What had Sterling Smith undergone to have allowed him to sing and play with that simplicity? What had he experienced that he was brought into that idiom? I imagine he’d written a great many songs before that. I imagine he’d played and sung and recorded many times.
But with Ready For the House there was a new simplicity. An idiom reached itself, shining darkly from itself. A beginning had been found, that was also an end of a long process of experimentation. Experiment gave unto experience. The beginning had found itself; the idiom knew itself and asked to be the subject of the songs it permitted. And it asked for a life to be lived in accordance with itself. That’s what it asked of Seymour Smith, and the formation of Jandek (of the Units, first of all) was the way he responded.
I think he knew the music would never be popular. Gone the avant-garde naivete, fostered by the state sponsorship of Old European countries that atonality would fill the concert halls. True, he pressed up 1000 copies of the album, sending them out in big batches. True, too, that he was discouraged when there was no response to the records he mailed out – and that it took a few favourable reviews to keep him going.
Thereafter, he would get only 300 copies of each album pressed, and sell only a fraction of those. 10 years after he began recording, he’d still only sold 150 copies of the many records he had made. But what did it matter? He’d found a way to bypass the recording industry. He relied, pretty much, only on himself, though he also worked in collaboration. He would not deviate; he didn’t need to, working in the daytime enough to fund his activities. Music was at the heart of his life, but it was not all of his life. He was part of Jandek, yes, but he was also Seymour R. Smith who worked in the world and bought himself an apartment and then a house.
I know those for whom Beckett, and especially late Beckett, is the exhaustion of an idiom – the last remnants of a now old modernity, wearing itself out. And so Jandek’s records can often seem they are reaching an end – his music is music of exhaustion, not beginning. And yet it is by way of this same exhaustion that he allows his idiom to reach itself. It is from the end that the beginning comes – from the sense that everything is exhausted.
Jandek does sing of personal suffering, of what each of us might endure. But of a suffering instead that traverses us by pushing us aside, as though it didn’t need us. An impersonal suffering greater than the world … a cry that is the infinite attenuation of the infinitive ‘to be’. Being, now detached from any being, the given as it is given to no one. The universe as an open wound, with the wind blowing over.
Etymology shows the link between suffering and experience, between pathos and endurance, between undergoing and becoming. But this link is there in the music, before etymology. The music learns and it teaches, and through Jandek. The albums released in the last few years see the wail and the drawl carry the lyrics on its streaming. A wail and a drawl stretched as being is stretched, as the ‘to be’ attenuates itself into the infinite.
Song of the nothing-is-happening. Song of nothing-happens and nothing-can-happen. And yet that this marker of nothing is itself something. That it is itself the new, even as it lets suffering – the suffering of being, of being as suffering – sing of itself. This is why there is also a joy to the music of Jandek – that it is borne by the joy that is the surprise of its possibility, that to sing of nothing is itself not nothing, that there are forms that can be set against the streaming of fatality.
Torn forms, broken limbs and an aching head – the scattering of organs in pain. Scattered as the head of Orpheus was carried along the river when his body was torn apart by the Maenads. But a voice, with Jandek, that is not glorious or beautiful. Dissonance does not burst forth in a great art music, in a concert hall, nor even in the descendants of that art music, funded by the government subsidies of old Europe.
Here is a voice that keeps company with suffering, without glory. That never raises itself from the thickets of pain. A voice lost in the forest of itself, like a bird in one of Max Ernst’s pictures. Here is a music that strums without change, without variation, that refuses, pretty much, the dynamics of tension and release. A music of the end, that is also of the beginning. A music that has seen everything, known everything and worn out the world. Music of the fraying of the world, of the world’s great age. Music of before and after the world.
No melodies, then. Or the barest melodies. No riffs. Or only the ghosts of riffs. No variation, then. Or only the most meagre of variants. For myself, I heard it straightaway, when I came across the song The Humility of Pain by chance. Heard it and knew it straightaway, rising from the other room, from where I heard it. Is it Skip Spence?, I asked myself. What is it? I’ve never heard the like. And I came into this room and looked it up. Jandek – The Humility of Pain. But who sang? And what was this song? …
That was two months ago. And from then on, a river rolled through my days and nights. I worked and came home. Home, and then – holy hush – I listened to one album, and then another. Home and in the quiet, one album, another, experiencing the necessity that revealed itself when I heard The Humility of Pain. And thought: all the music I ever heard has led me to this. Thought: but this is not an ascent, but a descent. Down the winding staircase, I thought. Down like Dante into the depths of hell.
But down until I am the hearing ear in the streaming of limbs and parts and fragments. None of us is whole, I thought. Lizards’ tails without lizards, I thought. We are born then we die. Born and die in life, I thought, and at every moment, glinting upwards like light on water.
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