Easthampton’s Flywheel was packed Saturday night as area music fans took a rare opportunity to see enigmatic Houston musical project Jandek in the flesh. While Jandek has been releasing albums since 1978, the first live performance didn’t happen until 2004. At Flywheel, a characteristically uncomfortable set exposed a level of coherent vision rarely approached in the project’s vast recorded catalogue.
Jandek, the name of the music project produced by tiny record label Corwood Industries, is led by an anonymous ‘representative’ (who himself is often mistakenly referred to as Jandek). When Jandek plays live, this representative is often involved with an unpredictable cast of collaborators, chosen, in this case, by a member of the Flywheel committee. Saturday’s concert was no exception as the representative was joined by five musicians who respectively contributed pedal-steel guitar, fiddle, drums, banjo and vocals. The representative himself mostly stuck to bass guitar and vocals, occasionally adding a wheezy harmonica to the mix.
The tall, thin representative took the stage in a black suit and fedora. As the four instrumentalists took their places behind him (sans second vocalist), the representative sat down on the edge of the stage and made funny noises with his bass. The rest of the band, however, began to play fairly straightforward instrumental country music, seemingly led by the very Nashville-looking pedal-steel player. The otherwise traditionally structured jamming did show a perverse edge, with the noisy sliding bass and increasingly jarring flourishes of dissonance standing apart from the rest of the band. Thus, the music would have felt foreign both to the average country music fan and to anyone accustomed to the wildly atonal folk, blues, and rock that comprise most of Jandek’s recordings. To those longtime fans, the tightness of the music may have belied the project’s chaotic aesthetic. In light of the rest of the performance, this piece could be seen as a sort of overture for a surprisingly theatrical cycle of songs.
The second song brought the representative back on his feet and added the vocals that would characterize the rest of the night. The band played mournful washes of sound, abandoning the beat but still retaining to country palette, and the representative sang like a man having a very slow, quiet crisis. He sang about going to town and looking at people, as if he were invisible and unable to analyze his surroundings beyond sights and gut reactions. The singer himself is a uniquely transparent, ghostly-looking person, with an even more perpetually aged appearance than that of notorious literary phantom William S. Burroughs. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the flowers,” he sang, as if summer had ended many years ago.
Subsequent songs brought a sweet-voiced female singer to the stage, and they sang duets about meeting and falling in love with each other. The words started to create a context for the swirling and unrelenting country music, as the love songs were filled with the theme of entrapment. After a waltzing duet about their initial infatuation, the representative took another solo turn to warn her not to “make [him] lonely.” When his fellow singer returned, her character had fallen hopelessly in love, singing, “I can’t be free from you and I don’t want to be.”
The representative’s character did seem to be interested in her, but his personal fantasies took precedence over their relationship. In one of the strangely comedic turns that kept the night from becoming too suffocating, he put on a pair of glasses and sang, “No one would ever think a cowboy would wear glasses, except the one that got them all.”
The set proceeded with the pair getting married, but the female character was soon hit by the realization that he was not what she wanted. In the last song, the representative sang a confusing rant about his once-again lonely life, said he was better off without her and imagined an argument.
And then the concert was over. Was it worthwhile? It was a journey into a winding cave, led by a possible madman. If Jandek were releasing studio albums with this level of obvious craft, the project would probably reach a much wider audience. As it stands, the concert will live on as another stop on a journey that could lead anywhere or nowhere.
Will Henriksen can be reached at [email protected].
