Trivia NYC/DSO Media

Today I absolutely paid the Stupid Tax.

I got to the Kimmel Center at NYU three hours before the box office opened, just to get the same-day-only tickets to see Jandek, our favorite outsider artist still in the game. Wild Man Fischer’s on his meds, and Wesley Willis is dead. Jandek is all we have left. Jandek lives. Viva Jandek.

So I managed to finagle four tickets even though the limit was two per person, because I am a master of disguise and — look, don’t question me. Which would not matter, except that I managed to forget said tickets as I was on my way to the venue, and it was only through the good fortune of Jandek’s relative obscurity (and the fact that he’s been through town three times in the last two years, which even for the Jandek fans in town is largely enough to more or less scratch the itch) that there were enough free tickets left at the theater that I didn’t have to cab all the way back to Astoria for us to see only the second half of the show. If this was, oh, a Taylor Swift show we were getting into, we’d have been at the Stoned Crow or Vol De Nuit instead, watching the hockey game, with me buying round after round after round for the four of us in penance for my own absent-mindedness.

So.

As the show starts, it’s already way different than the first time we saw him, two years ago, in a semi-announced show at the Anthology Film Archives (he insisted on his name not appearing on any of the promotional materials, except as “A Representative Of Corwood Industries,” but word managed to get out, especially as he’d just played his first ever show not long before at the Glastonbury Festival, and so the Jandek fanboy community had their antennae up) - he comes out in all black like before, wordless, but he & the band come out together, & he’s playing guitar, which is already a step up from the keyboard he muddled through the first time.

The audience is different too. Not a full house, a lot more informal, people taking photos, eating. I’m typing this account out on my phone, fergodsake. All of this would have been grounds for ejection at the first show of his, where his stipulations were made very clear before he made his entrance: no pictures, no speaking, no jostling, nothing that would spook the talent.

This is a different gig. It’s almost normal for a free-jazz concert. They come out, plug in, and start into a noise-warmup, Jandek on guitar, plus a sax player, female sound-vocalist, electric bass & drums. The bass is overpoweringly loud in the mix.

Song 2 (none of the “songs” have titles; this ain’t a Roxette show, homeo) starts with the sax playing a Sonny Rollinsy phrase solo. My god, did they actually rehearse? Jandek wearily stands, and delivers his first vocal of the night.

The female vocalist, as it turns out, is the dancer, Biba Belle. She begins to sway at center stage, tentatively, like she hasn’t warmed up or doesn’t quite know what to do. Not a good sign for her. The band, however, sounds fine.

“I’m sure not going out there.
You cannot entice me.”

Jandek reads diligently from his notebook as always, and the first three pages of lyrics go by, all of them with the theme of water (mostly in cooking & drinking contexts) and with a very strong sense of I’m over here-you’re over there. Oh, and there’s a lot of thinly veiled sexual metaphors. Did he just get divorced?

“I’m at the crossroads of my life
I can sink or I can swim
There’s something I can beeee.”

Song 3 is where he first sings instead of drone-speaking.

“Thank you, Xanadu…”

…and from there the show took a frenzied turn into an extended metaphor of clam digging that gets pretty, there’s no other word for it, sexy. I have to say, the last thing I expected was Jandek telling the audience how horny he was in such stark terms.

Song 4 starts with a fairly declarative late-Coltraney sax-driven devolution into a sonic wall of noise, to the point that when Jandek comes in after three minutes or so, he has to shout to even have the tone of his voice rise above the din. He finally yells in that droney yell of his about his intended’s little sister. I’m waiting for my hypothesis to deflate, which frankly it hasn’t yet; I have five bucks on divorce.

This band is ten times as good as the other band we saw him with at Anthology three years ago. They interact, they find melodies in the muck and build on them, they pay full attention to dynamics, they hand off focus among each other cleanly, they have a clear respect for the front guy and his source material, even when said material gets one-note and corny, which it occasionally does… I’m very impressed.

You know, I wish I could say that Jandek needs to be better known, that he needs a Marc Ribot or a Howard Shore or someone to clean up his rough edges so he’d be ready for prime time after all these decades on the outer fringe of the music world. But honestly, Jandek wasn’t, and isn’t, ever going to replace, say, Tom Waits (or Laurie Anderson or even Eugene Chadbourne) in anyone’s universe. He’s just not that versatile, his lyrics have spasms of brilliance but far too often lapse into junior-high-level on-the-nose-ness, and while he can make excellent twang-jazz noises with his guitar, he’s not great with actual individual note lines. And it’s also true that he knows, at most, three chords. If you’ve gone this deep in your life without Jandek, then it’s entirely possible you won’t ever actually need him. But he does have a certain unique something to his character and style, which can either scratch an itch in you or not. Personally, I dig him, and among my friends, I am far from alone.

It was a free show tonight, but that wasn’t enough to fill the room. The Eisner & Lubin Auditorium holds (I’m guessing) about 300 people, and it was a little past half full at the beginning of the show (and a little less than that at show’s end). I don’t suspect, outside of his Texas home, that Jandek’ll be able to draw even this many fans anywhere else. But that doesn’t mean he’s not an artist who has created a lot of relatively important art, and who deserves, if not more of an audience, at least enough of one that he can keep on doing his thing into his golden years.

“I’m a mystic, and I’m about to destruct, into a bunch, of molecules!”

he proclaims, as he climbs his intended’s stairs, and comes in her house, and gets naked with her, and as he goes from his usual whine into what could only be described as a throaty bellow, my only thought is: My God, he’s channelling Jim Morrison!

By the end of the show, there were three girls (”fuckin’ drama majors,” my friend Sam said, which cracked up the rows on either side of us) who were screaming rather, well, theatrically for him. When the band finished and walked off, everyone who stuck through the nearly-two-hour show clapped and stomped for an encore, and the sound & lighting tech left the lights down, perhaps not knowing who they were dealing with.

It isn’t in Jandek’s character to do encores; to do so would mean acknowledging the audience, and while I’m sure on some level he has finally, late in his long and reclusive career, come to accept the role his audience has in the world he has created, to publicly admit that screaming stomping customers in the audience would want him to come out again, well, I don’t see him being able to acknowledge such a thing.

See, Jandek is self-contained. He is sui generis. Jandek Equals Jandek, and you, the listener, whoever you are, wherever you may be in this world, are outside that equation, just like everything and everyone. Jandek has become, has always been, the other, the glorious, noisy, randy, isolated Other. I wish him long life.

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