I will be perfectly honest: I had heard the name Jandek once or twice before Acrobatics Everyday announced that they had booked him to perform at UC Irvine and I didn't know anything about him. The fact that he would be playing with a personal music hero of mine, Mike Watt from The Minutemen, made me pretty certain that I would be going, but I needed to look this cat up to be sure. The backstory made it.
This dude Jandek is an outsider artist who's been self-releasing music since the late 70s but didnt play live until 2003 and has only granted like 2 interviews over all that time so he's mysterious as hell. One of the descriptions I read of his overall sound is "songs by someone who's never heard a song but been told what a song is" which doesn't really make much substantial sense but is interesting. I couldn't seem to find any of his music to illegally download and it wasn't until the week of the show that I began earnestly looking him up on more immediately means like YouTube but it became very clear that this was gonna be a show to attend.
So I mobbed up to Irvine listening to Black Lips, Q&Not U, and Dying Fetus. I got there and parked in one of the legal spots along Stanford with only about 13 minutes to get to the show from where I was at. I thought that it was going to be at the Cross Cultural Center, where Acrobatics has alot of their shows, but when I arrived there the place was empty! At first I was a bit distraught but I knew that this show was too big to fail so I called up Sam, Acrobatics' main man, and he told me that the show was at CCA. I haven't been on the UCI campus for like 6 months now, which is odd in its way, but I mistakenly went to Humanities Hall instead of CCA and lo-and-behold, no one there. It was then that I remembered where I was supposed to be at and I hurried over.
I thought it was a bit remarkable that there appeared to be not only a professional sound staff but a professional video staff as well for this performance. That more than explained the $20 ticket for tonight's show; most every Acrobatics show I've ever been to has been within $5-$7 but for this one you gotta factor in the sheer personality power of the 3 performers especially the elusive Jandek, and clearly an expensive crew of sound and recording people were hired as well.
Anyway, the show didn't start exactly at 8oclock like the promotional emails had been stressing, but it wasn't too long after either. When they came out from the back room I saw Jandek without his hat on for a brief moment and it was odd. He looked so old. They came out to applause that pretty quickly dampened down as they got their things ready for the performance. Jandek latched his strap onto the bottom hook of the guitar, wrapped it around his back, and then latched the top hook. He had the signature all-black clothes, insanely lanky and markedly creepy look that I've never seen him without.
The performance began with BJ Miller's drums. I have never heard the band he normally plays with, called HEALTH, and didn't really know what his style would be; it was heavy and powerful to say the least. He really hits the drums hard. He played a quasi-metallic, quasi-tribal kind of style throughout the show that actually suited the anxiety of Jandek's music pretty well if you ask me. Especially at first it just seemed SO aggressive it added to the jarring nature of it all. After a few permutations of the intial pounding beat the other two chimed in.
To be perfectly honest, Mike Watt was on the opposite side of the stage than I was sitting at, and his amp must really not have been set up well or something because I could barely hear his contributions at all. From what I could make up it wasn't funky like he usually is but still very fast-paced and on a pretty regular time structure. For some part of the show he was kind of bobbing around merrily like he does and it was an odd juxtaposition to Jandek's confusing darkness.
Jandek was a fuckin trip. His demeanor is very dour and serious like a mortician (full disclosure I once heard the final Faith No More guitarist described that way but it's just too accurate here not to steal) and for the first like 20 minutes he stood facing away from the audience looking down at his guitar doing his bizarre ghost strums. He has this peculiar way of approaching a strum where he kind of circles around the top 4 strings and then apparently randomly hits upon them in a kind of shuffle of sound. There are also quasi-solos where he'll focus on particular strings a bit more focusedly but for the most part its like a jamble of repeating, very whispery and eery guitar jangle.
He plays around discordant 'chords' for the most part but really it's not too far off the mark that most of his music sounds like someone who doesn't know how to play guitar playing an out-of-tune guitar. That said, this wasn't a shitty performance it was really really cool, I don't know how to describe it really because to the average music fan I'm sure it would have seemed like the most pointless noise ever made, but it was so encompassing in its way it was like nightmare music. Not how metal or goth stuff approaches 'nightmare' sounds but the off-putting nonsense made into a sort-of narrative feel of a nightmare...that's what this was like.
Jandek would kind of pace around his little area of the stage slowly and surely, and the rare occasions where he would walk down the stage a bit and kind-of look at what Mike was doing seemed like really big deals, as did the very few times he stepped up to the microphone. The very first time he came up he sang a short line about leaves or something, and then next time he spoke a ramble, "I was walking by and there were these kids, standing there, smoking. And I thought, Why are they doing that? What's up? They didn't say nothing back, probably cuz I was just, thinking..." That stayed with me for whatever reason. After finishing his phrase he turns around and does a sort of solemn wail on the guitar that is so off-tune and yet completely fitting with the atmosphere. This performance was all about atmosphere.
A line that he repeated a few times was "She didn't like...She only told the truth." He sings it in this like mournful-sentinal, low-pitched but randomly melodied drawl that feels very real and almost scarily, cryptically deep. The things he says are very simple things but he says them with this ghostlike separation that they are imbued with an unspoken significance you can only guess about. Another section of his vocals was "You say, please don't leave/I don't know what you see in me/I'm not going anywhere" or something like that, and after he said that last line he turned away so darkly and determinedly it was really a creepy sight to see. (I have this moment in one of my videos of this performance on my YouTube account user diy324)
At one point, Miller's snare drum literally broke off its stand. He was hitting those things so hard that the metal neck of his snare stand broke halfway through. At first he tried to jimmy it between his legs or something but that wasn't gonna work, and after a few moments he just said fuckit and put it aside to finish out the rest of the performance (still awhiles to go as it turned out) sans snare. Kudos to him both for the power to break a stand like that and the versatility to continue playing minus such a key part of the set without ruining the performance whatsoever. I have never seen something like that happen, and he said thats never happend to him before...just a testament to the visceral power of this bizarre performance.
On a whole I have this to say to Jandek: I relate to him and I see him as a childhood thought, childhood unreality, a childhood never-meant-to-be come to life for a bizarre 30 year run.
When I was younger, like really young before I even knew what punk rock was much less the idea of "outsider music", I used to make lists. I still make lists, I'm a listomaniac, but when I was a child they were much more unrealistic. I would list bands that I wanted to start like just names of bands that I would someday start...I imagined having either a plethora of different monikers under which I released music or having a band that released a different sort of album every time we did something. And this is all well before I could actually play guitar at all, this was just my mind running away with itself as a kid imagining himself something great. I just imagined having this bizarre shapeshifter of a music entity , but I had absolutely no musical training with which to make it a reality.
Also, when I was a kid, I used to play on my dads guitar not knowing what the fuck I was doing. I would just go and make up random little "songs" on the guitar that didnt resemble actual chords or anything but nevertheless to me it was a pattern. This is the way I relate to Jandek. I feel like for 30 years he's been that kid, just discovering the guitar and its endless possibilities, and just endlessly experimenting without ever learning a goddamned thing about regular music theory or even regular music structure. But he never gave up on that naive ideal, he never stopped with that childhood dream. He just plays it the way it comes to his untrained but emotionally expressive self.
Partway through the Jandek performance I began seeing it this way, as though he's the childhood me aged to his 50s...Just jamming discordantly without knowing a thing about traditional music things, but still making a true and real expression, a real piece of human feeling through music. Jandek's music is very very dark and somewhat impenetrable, and I feel like maybe thats somehow the way he feels about his memories or something....it feels so harshly real and unexplainably ITSELF that it just has to be the reflection of true emotion.
Sorry for the overtly self-referencing aspects of this review, but these are the thoughts that were in my head as I watched Jandek perform. It really did remind me of what would have been the fruition of pre-'music knowledge' expression song. It's like he has his own knowledge of music that is uniquely hi
s own and can never be replicated in the slightest.
s own and can never be replicated in the slightest.When the show ended the three went back into the back room where they had been before, and I stood with the applause for a few moments before going to the bathroom. It had been like an hour and a goddamn half for chrissake!! I had personal business to attend to.
Upon coming back to the auditorium, I could see Mike Watt gathering up his things and attracting a small group of indie dope-nerds around the stage area. I used this opportunity to ask for a picture with the man, who had played such a small part in my experience of this particular performance but collectively his impact on my musical vision etc is great. He has such a warm, kind of comforting feeling about him, and its so obvious that he believes in the music so hard. I really love Mike Watt.
I was kind of waiting to see if Jandek was gonna come out and deal with his take-down himself or what was gonna happen. He has such an elusive legend around him I didn't know if he was gonna stay back in the CCA waiting room all night just to preserve it or not. But sho nuff, he came out and silently began helping unwire everything. He had this little black bag with him that seemed like it should be carrying mortician's supplies that he packed his effects pedals into. He was very solemn about everything at first but fanboy/fangirl impulses were too high. People started going up and asking him questions and shit. He even took a picture with this Asian girl who was wearing big fluffy earmuffs and told everybody she was the only one who would get a picture, although I think I remember seeing him granting pics to 1 or 2 early-high-school looking kids. At one point a dude came up to him and asked him if he would sign his record, and Jandek just gave him the oddest, most apprehensive look before eventually saying something to the effect of "that's really rare" in regards to the particular album the guy had. You could tell this was a big lapse for him but he must have respected the dude's ownership of such a rare record, so he signed it saying to the guy "I better not see this on the, you know, Internet" or something like that. He didn't sign Jandek, he signed "CORNWOOD" in nice cursive writing. Of course.I shook his hand and took a picture with him in the background to show that this surreal event had in fact taken place, but I really didn't know what to say to him with this close access. Like, "I really enjoyed the show" or whatever the fuck I said is just so predictable and hollow, but I don't know how I could convey to him the feelings I had while he played. So I just shook his hand and told him that I enjoyed the show.
There was a guy there with a beer belly and a bonafied blue-collar worker's shirt who appeared to be Jandek's friend. I wanted to be snoopier than I was even being, but I sat kind of across the aisle from where they sat together after the performance and kind of listened in on what they talked about. It seems like they were just catching up on old friends etc, like this was some guy who wasn't there because he knows Jandek through the music world or his crazy music personality, but this was really an old friend of his who had come by and they were catching up. It made this mystic impossible-to-understand 'music' Jandek into 'human' Jandek for me.
Also cool was when the 3 performers - Jandek, Mike Watt, and BJ Miller - got lined up and took a picture together on the CCA slope. I got a classic picture of Mike and Jandek standing together and laughing; Mike Watt is just that dope, he can even make Jandek feel comfortable and laugh. It was a great thing.
I was standing with my friends from the Acrobatics Everyday central crew who were tearing everything down still as Jandek left. He just kind of looked over at us and lifted his hand as a wave with a slight, muted smirk, and we all spoke out our final thanks and leaving compliments. I hung out with the AE crew for a minute longer and we talked about the movie "Inception," which one of the girls was rabidly talking shit on, before I started on the drive home to Temecula.
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