Shh

I hadn’t really intended to write about Jandek this week, but well, here I am. I went to his SXSW performance, expecting to find it pretty crowded and it was, but not the line-around-the block crowded I was hoping it wouldn’t be. I guess now that he has played a handful of shows, there isn’t the sense that you have to go see him because if you don’t, you never will. Assuming, that is, you even know what a Jandek is. And I got the sense that a fair amount of the people there didn’t. They were there because of the hype associated with him and they showed up to see a spectacle, the way many of Daniel Johnston’s and all of the late Wesley Willis’ fans do, secretly hoping that the performer will do something really crazy that they can tell all their friends about:

“Dude, he totally started crying. And then he pulled out a can of lighter fluid and set the place on fire, while he sat there cackling and drawing pentagrams with the chicken blood he poured from a Welcome Back Kotter Thermos. I had to stop, drop, and roll a few times and I barely made it out alive. It was awesome. You should have been there.”*

Take all this with a grain of salt, because I didn’t take a survey of these people’s opinions or anything and my brain tends to go on about things which often turn out to be utterly wrong. With that little disclaimer out of the way, I shall now go off the deep end of the pool of crackpot theories and talk more about the Jandek image while mostly ignoring the Jandek music.

Jandek hype centers around the—I think completely contrived—image of the reclusive anti-star. Everything about him practically screams out that he doesn’t want to be seen. Or I guess, doesn’t scream out, because screaming would actually call attention to the screamer. What I really mean is something exactly the opposite of screaming. An anti-scream, if you will. So everything about Jandek anti-screams that he doesn’t want to be seen.

The Jandek albums are full of what could be characterized as mournful songs of some guy sitting in the corner of a room not wanting to be recognized and yet calling attention to himself anyway. Album covers, if they have a picture of him at all, have blurry representations in non-specific settings, that Jandek really only inhabits as some sort of apparition. Even his name is anonymous and defies the general propensity to hang meaning on the things we name.** There’s no Jandek here, folks, please move along.

At the Central Presbyterian Church in Austin, Jandek stood at the front of the stage, fronting what was essentially a rock band. This is not the position that somebody who wants to be anonymous takes, but he tried his best to stay hidden. He was somewhat obscured by a music stand. Now, most people would have some difficulty being hidden by a music stand, but Jandek is stick thin (all the better to be invisible), so there isn’t much of him to hide. He also wore all black and capped the ensemble off with a black fedora. His guitar was fairly generic and looked like it was chosen simply because it has a black body, black headstock, and a dark, rosewood fretboard, making it fade into the background like he does. Jandek is not here. You are not seeing Jandek.

The backing band consisted of three other musicians who stood very much apart from the man in black. The harmonium player paid little attention to the others and focused entirely on his drone. The drummer and Globetrotter Tom*** did controlled freakouts, that sometimes bordered on rhythmic, putting things in an oddly rock context, which as I mentioned is not really what is traditionally Jandek (if it can be said that anything is traditionally Jandek). Before each song, Jandek shuffled through the papers on his music stand, presumably deciding which one to play next. The lyrics that he may or may not have been reading from these papers (part of me wants to think that the papers were blank) ranged from what you would expect: I don’t like myself/I’m sorry but it’s true to those that belied his outsider status: I think I’d like to go/To the land of ice and snow. Did he just lift lyrics from “Immigrant Song”? That doesn’t sound like a guy with no connection to the world. All the better to obscure the lyrics that are actually personal, I suppose. Showiness is just not what he does. And there seems to be a slew of Houston musicians that are similarly unshowy.

Beyoncé notwithstanding, there is a whole tradition of Houston musicians that seem almost anxious to push their way to the back of the stage. It’s not just Jandek. There are also the Charalambides, Jana Hunter, Dunlavy—the list goes on. These people are just uncomfortable with or just plain aren’t interested in the kind of attention that usually comes with being a performer. Is this what is really responsible for the lack of any success for Houston artists the way Houston Press music editor John Lomax defines it? And can it all be traced back to Jandek? Or is that just my own crackpottery?

I have to admit that there is something sort of glorious about this bunch of people who aren’t constantly trying to call attention to themselves. In a world filled with media that feels like it needs to shout ever louder to be heard, it’s nice to see some people just revel in the quiet.

*Unfortunately, these will probably be the leaders of tomorrow’s men or possibly already are the leaders of today’s. They will make the laws and guide the industries. They will, on the other hand, never be able to get punctuation right, like I did in the referring quote. So I have that on them. And they can’t take that away from me.

**The first album that Jandek put out was actually under the also generic sounding moniker “the Units,” but another band already had claim to that name.

***I forget who it was that first pronounced “Charalambides” as “Harlem Globetrotters,” but I’m sure you’ll agree that’s it’s an easy mistake to make. I find the mispronunciation endlessly amusing in way that I would guess nobody else does.