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Unix is meant to be A MONSTROSITY.
-- Ratsnatcher
Jandek is Indestructible
1999-07-28 23:40:56
Poor Jandek: all he wants is to spend his whole life recording incomprehensible, amateurish music, self-releasing albums about once a year and never playing live, giving interviews or making public appearances, and just plain to be left alone, and now somebody had to go and reveal that he's just some middle-aged guy in a fancy suit.
In case you don't know the Jandek story, here it is: all there is to know about Jandek is what can be found on the albums he releases on his (one assumes) self-owned Houston record label, Corwood Industries. He releases about one album every year and ships copies out to numerous college radio stations, and the album covers always consist of either old snapshots of parts of his yard or house or living room, or candids of him taken years ago. There is nothing else to know about Jandek. No one seems to know who he is, and if anyone does, they're clearly not willing to say.
I first encountered Jandek back in the late 1980s when I was serving time as a DJ at my college radio station. There he was, right next to the Jane's Addiction records: a neat little row of Jandek albums, each one with the enigmatic photgraphic and only the barest information available on the back cover. No liner notes, no fan club, no nothing. Curious about this oddity, I pulled out a Jandek record and gave it a spin and heard the strangest music I'd ever heard. Here was a profoundly amateur performer plunking lamely on an out-of-tune guitar and mumbling the most deeply personal lyrics I could imagine. It was exquisitely manneristic geek rock performed without a hint of irony, and not a lot of fun to indulge in, truth be told.
I forgot about Jandek for more than a decade until news about him turned up on a mailing list I subscribe to. Turns out that someone from Texas Monthly magazine got curious about just who this guy was, and decided to go track him down. Well, after a complicated search, this writer found Jandek and actually sat down and had a beer with him; it turns out he's some kind of yuppie and he seems very embarassed about the whole secret life as Jandek, Rock Star. He was basically telling this writer to completely ignore the connection between him and Jandek, although he was very clearly Jandek himself. Personally, I think Jandek was just horrified that anyone would want to know anything about him and go to the trouble of finding out his secret, maybe because his music really is awful, even though Kurt Cobain used to name-drop him before he offed himself, and it's sort of like the recordings me and Bobby Hodad used to make in college when we would get drunk and both play electric guitars hooked up to a Panasonic tape deck.
But that won't stop Jandek. Nothing can stop Jandek. Jandek is indestructible.
Check out the Texas Monthly article below, and check out this little collection of Jandek mp3 tunes here. But don't be scared: it's only music.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
You need to make a fruity tropical drink and you have no recipe? Here's a mix recently tested by Pigdog's crack bevertology team that's made with ingredients available from most any grocery store. It tastes sweet, fruity, and is perfect for guzzling on the last hot days of summer. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
The Liquidation of Hobo Junction
Albany, CA's homeless hooverville by the Bay, "Hobo Junction," is going to be torn down by The Man. Entrances are already being blocked off, and it's now difficult and dangerous to get there. Worse, these obstacles are making it hard to get to the nearby HORSE TRACK on foot. Local historian, Pao Tzu, has an overview of situation. (More...)
About 14 years ago when I was on a road trip and stopped in Seattle, I was invited to a party. At this party there were these little tiny glasses sitting in a flat-bottomed bowl of ice. Thin cylinders about an inch in diameter and 4 inches tall, with thick glass at the bottom. Into these were poured frozen AKVAVIT... also known as the water of life. (More...)
A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)
Skunk School -- Learn Why Not To Keep Skunks As Pets
There is an alarming trend in pet purchasing habits this fall. People inspired by the WWII film, "Life is Beautiful" -- the one with that annoying Italian guy -- are buying descented skunks by the millions. (More...)
