Jandek concert review.

Here's a review I wrote after seeing one of my friends' favorite artists'.

Playing to a sold-out show at the Harry Du Jur Playhouse on Saturday was a representative of Corwood Industries, also known as Jandek. For those of you who don’t know, hailing from Houston, Texas, Jandek has been rocking in secret for 30 years with a catalogue of 50 albums and is known mostly for his anonymity and unconventional chord selection. If you want a Jandek album, you can’t find it in your local record store, you have to send a check to Corwood Industries and you will receive a hand-addressed envelope filled with a disc like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
One thing about Jandek is that until recently there was no real information on who he was; he never granted interviews, the only known photos of him look like they were on the same roll as the photos of the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, and nobody knew anything about him. Sterling Smith is the name that has endorsed checks for Jandek’s albums. The mysterious man behind Corwood Industries has inspired many rumors and filled many dull lives with something to speculate about.

In 2005, for whatever reason (some say cancer), he came out of his shell and decided to start making public appearances. Although his appearances may have ruined the Jandek appeal for some, many fans of Jandek have anticipated this moment for many, many years and they have shown up in full force. Jandek attracts a whole different genre of folks, for which I decided on a new category: dweebsters.

I can honestly say that the show on Saturday was one of the most thought provoking concerts I’ve ever seen. It was a test of patience, a two and a half marathon of dissonance, and a soul-searching adventure in “music”. Jandek, dressed all in black, looking deathly thin and just as pale, stepped straight out of a Friday the 13th movie and onto the stage with drummer Jim White (Dirty Three, Cat Power) and bassist Tim Foljahn (Two Dollar Guitar, Int’l Shades, Boredoms) who made the whole Jandek experience surprisingly palatable. Jandek’s music can best be described as improvisation by someone who has not only never listened to pop music, but who also had never heard a proper chord played on the guitar. As if Jandek’s looks weren’t freaky enough, his vocals were like someone trying to sound ghostly in the community theater. The vocals were one of the more welcome elements of the song not only because they provided a break from his guitar playing (I’m not sure if he has the rhythm to hold a strum while singing) but also because of his highly entertaining lyrics. Jandek’s songs run the gamut, from a trespassing hairy tattoo man in prison, to drinking and god. Apparently his lyrics change constantly, but he’s obviously thought about them since he needs to read them from his music stand.

My first impression was that this was somehow related to the current American Idol trend of glorifying the entertainment of failure. I was surprised though when I looked around and saw that most people had very serious, contemplative looks on their faces. It was at that point that I had wished I had smoked-out before the show. Rumor had it that Jandek shows rarely went longer than an hour and when the first hour came and went and hour two quickly approached, it became more than just a concert, it became a battle of self-control. I thought for sure that they would play until one of two things happened, either everyone left the theater or somebody committed suicide.

I’ll try to leave you with some of the more positive things I took away from the show. Drummer Jim White deserves some sort of medal. He was highly energetic banging away on his kit, which, sounded like it might self-destruct at any moment. Some of my favorite memories from the show were when I was scared for Jim’s life, hoping that the shards that remained from his crash symbol didn’t sever his head clean off or that he didn’t impale himself on the high-hat while embracing it. I decided that the only reason he would be interested in performing with Jandek was the challenge of it. Trying to prove to both himself and the rest of the world that a good rhythm section can make even the worst music sound good. At times I felt the tension between the drummer and Jandek to be intolerable. At any moment, I expected Jim to flip out, flip over his drum kit, go nuts yelling profanities at Jandek, and wrestle the guitar from him to start playing some recognizably structured tunes. In any event, that never happened, but over the evening, Jim did earn the respect of everyone there. He even had Jandek awkwardly bobbing like an old man attempting the hokey-pokey.