Jandek, the enigmatic singer-songwriter from Corwood Industries, in younger days.
has never played Denver in his 30 years of releasing records, you say? Well, break out the confetti.
Fans and gawkers alike funneled themselves down the aisles of the claustrophobic on Friday night, excitement flaring gently in their nostrils. Collected onstage were notable Denver faces, including of and Brittany Gould of . Perhaps this was an act of goodwill to appease the Denver avant-gods, who, luckily, are more turns mirthful than wroth.
The show was seated, meaning that the audience was stripped of normal posturing and arm-folding and instead assigned disembodied heads of various shapes and sizes, which formed an eerie sea in the blue dark. Jandek, hidden by the angular shadow thrown by his fedora, was who we’d come to see, although nobody had any idea what his name was or where he was from. He was a sliver of a person, skeletal, with white skin stretched taut over his frame and clothes hanging on him as from a wire hanger. Thumbing his bass, he spoke atonally into the microphone as the band clattered and whirred behind him. The mysteriousness of the whole operation lay thick in our throats.
(The entity known as) Jandek never plays the same show, swinging from experimental, outsider puttering to folksier treatments. On Saturday there was none of the latter. Things were kept strictly weird, but it was wild woolliness that any fan of the unorthodox might find familiar. Were they all just jamming together, or was there some sort of agreed-upon format? It was fun to imagine the ghostly musician muttering instructions into a team huddle, arms gripping flanking shoulders, eyes rooted timidly to the ground.
I probably should have just asked; then, perhaps, I could join the ranks of the scant few who’ve ever talked to the man at length. He didn’t seem like someone who enjoys humanity buzzing in his ear. When performing, it seemed as though he was unaware that he was standing in a roomful of people.
He was up there alone, like a man waiting at a crossroads. His backing band, on the contrary, seemed very aware, looking up every now and then with coy wonderment. What now, Mr. Jandek? Shall we begin another song?
Indeed, more songs came, and quite similar songs at that. The formula, if there was one, reminded me of childhood, when I would make up a tune with friends and we’d sing along in sentences, giggling because we weren’t rhyming and weren’t trying to. This was adult playtime, and with feeling: the scatterbrain rhythms and breathy backing vocals didn’t make much sense, but they held a world-weariness that children can’t fake.
You should have seen the veins bulge and quiver in that skinny man’s neck every time he prolonged a note. But the voice was just a voice, neither husky nor high, and the words hung dead in the air, chilly and flat against the fuss in the background. Suddenly, he began to smile and move in the direction of Ms. Gould, who I could see was also smiling. The two smiles became grins; they held for a moment, and dissolved as the slim figure slunk back to his post.
What had we just seen? Do historic events have tremors that can be felt? Outside, post-show, the atmosphere was breathless, but skeptically so. “That was great,” evinced one fellow, who was beaded in sweat (how?). “What did you think?” I asked a friend. “I don’t know,” he responded plainly. Similar conversations peppered the sidewalk, usually with answers ending in question marks: “Cool?” “Neat?” I’m certain most of the people that night felt that they were bearing witness to something important, especially if they’d followed the work of Jandek faithfully, but if they, too, believed that history carried a noticeable weight on one’s skin, they might have felt disappointed that they couldn’t feel it.
Perhaps the answer might be to cope the Jandek way — by smiling widely and then moving away, gently, back into the ordinary.
Alex Edgeworth is a Denver-based writer and regular Reverb contributor.
