Jandek and the Puddle Jumpers
My package from Corwood
Industries arrived, stamped with its P.O. Box number
in Houston, my address sketched in ink on a white
sticker, on a Monday morning rife with bending trees;
the homeless man selling Real Change at the
Safeway warned of a huge storm for late afternoon and
newscasters kept their yelping edge unsubsided from
their "killer meteorites" of a week or so
before. I slid the unopened package into a bag along
with The Money Pit Mystery, about another,
much older conundrum than that of Jandek, and went to
find my best friend Sam at Scarecrow Video. He was
out to lunch. I leaned back into the wind for home,
returned to Scarecrow a few hours later so Sam could
see me open my package. He was out on an errand. So,
home again, I alone carefully popped the staples
fastening the mailer to itself, opened the revealed
end, drew two compact discs and a one-sheet catalog
into the amiably algae-green light of my shuttered
room. One of the CDs, White Box Requiem,
brought a flash to my nostrils of old basements; I
later found it had been dipped in water prior to
shipment, formulating the musty musk, adhering the
out-of-focus cover shot to the inside of the case,
and blobbing droplets, flattened into smears, of
moisture that prevented the disc's playing until
evaporation.
A few hours later I got Sam on
the phone. "I got a package from Jandek
today!"
"Jandek?"
"Two CDs!"
"Wow, what's it sound
like?"
"It sounds…it sounds
like Neil Young on bad peyote who forgot to tune his
guitar."
"That's not a great
recommendation. You know how much I hate Neil
Young."
Corwood's catalog boasts
twenty-seven Jandek albums (the last five as compact
discs) released over the last twenty years, but you
cannot order them through cdnow.com or amazon.com.
The perhaps misleadingly-adorned anycd.com and
everycd.com are no help. The Spin Alternative
Record Guide never heard of him, nor has any of
the five editions to date of the Trouser Press
record guides. Neighborhood record clerks, even at
independently-owned stores, usually push buttons and
shrug when I ask about the artist or his label.
Jandek grants no interviews, answers no phone
queries, issues no press releases, makes no public
appearances or performances. But I found Corwood's
phone number online, fantastically (the same web
White Pages could not produce numbers for Dreamworks
SKG or Koch International), dialed the next day, got
an answering machine message, left my pertinent info,
and received unto our box the package about a week
later.
The three stamps at the
package's corner showed, left to right, Father
Flanagan, Harry S. Truman, and Johns Hopkins. Author
Reynolds Price recounts, in Nicholas Basbanes' A
Gentle Madness, that "My copy of Paradise
Lost once belonged to Deborah Milton Clarke, the
daughter who took Milton's dictation after he went
blind. For me, it was like the apostolic succession.
I was touching the hand that touched the Hand."
After seventeen years I was quietly touching what had
touched the Hand, which plunked the Guitar, beat the
Drums, braced the Harmonica, pasted the Stamps.
Though I'd never owned Jandek
music before, I'd heard of him at age thirteen or so,
in a column from the back of the Rocket, where
the writer mentioned that you had to buy the album in
batches of fifty and that the song where you could
hear the microphone fall over was easily worth the
price of admission. (The vinyl albums, according to
that sheet of paper with the package, are
"wholesale only" with "1000 minimum
order.") Snatches of this or that from his
oeuvre, stolen mostly at KCMU or KAOS--Jandek's
meticulous about sending his works to college
stations, and most such feature a complete or
near-complete collection, if it hasn't been picked
apart by proud cultists--bolstered my impression that
here was a nut whanging randomly at strings, skins,
and metal reeds, and therefore too random for
concentrated study. But just as nothing sells like a
Furby in short supply, so nothing recurses in the
mind like a recluse. Sam and my brother Matt and I
joked about "Laser Jandek" down at the
Pacific Science Center, fantasized tour shirts.
On the strength of the package
contents I'll assert that Jandek isn't
whanging the guitar randomly so much as developing,
at long if inevitable last, his own logic for the
guitar, plus occasionally the drums or harmonica, a
logic perpendicular in certain critical aspects to
book learning. Vocally he's short the plaintive whine
which I so love to hear and imitate in Neil Young,
but he'll stretch words and let them waver, expanding
verbiage's eerie potential with stretching as Neil
condensed it with soft, short shocked diction on
"Ambulance Blues"; only the harmonica holds
a sharp attack, and its unexpected surfacings jolt
me. White Box Requiem holds wandering guitar
extemporizations between words and braided between
the two an aura of collapse; two CDs later with New
Town, he's swayed back closer to his own
established median of Biblical menace and
awe--religious figures populate New Town—"When
a sinner wakes/The priests are pining in the hay/A
little song/Sung away/Guess who's been after
you/Guess who's before you/Seasons turning, looks
like wind/We'll be coming back again." Or words
to that effect. I find New Town fascinating in
most every one of my moods except severe headache,
and hear in Jandek a worthy continuation, albeit
nebulous and fuzzy where tradition might dictate
stark and sharp, of the real folk blues Chess Records
was always going on about.
The Puddle Jumpers, a Northwest
quintet unified to use "prog-folk" in
describing themselves, are not to be found at any
above-named website except amazon.com, but it's not
for lack of trying; they work as tirelessly at
promotion as at their music and it's paid off; their
1996 debut Out of the Shadows sounded cleaner
and clearer, looked far more immaculate, than any
record I'd ever seen from a band not even in spitting
distance of anything resembling a major label. This
year's Choices weighs in just a teensy bit
less bouncy, slightly less suggestive that the band
would bounce on trampolines live if Phish hadn't
already done that to death, but the compensation is
in thought. You don't have to know Dave McGrath's
"Not So Easy" was inspired by Into Thin
Air's Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander
Supertramp, who journeyed seat-of-the-pants across
America only to starve to death in Alaska, to hear
McGrath's "It's easy to say/You'd do it another
way/Looking at it from the outside/But not so easy
from the inside," and that's sentiment worth of
reiteration. Some sentiments verge on the
bald—"Disarm yourself," sings
guitarist George Michael, brave enough not to change
his name, "nobody's out to get you," but
backs that up with "You quote a holy book
through a devil's grin/And out of your mouth pops
another sin."
The Puddle prog part does mean
you get a few elves and princesses, but doesn't mean
eighteen-minute organ fulminatings—the twelve
songs jump and crackle with melodies fed often by
Rick Vartian's mandolin, which I suppose brings us to
the folk part. And frankly, on most of these skyblot
days I don't mind a little baldness, a little
weirdness, and since I in all honesty finally woke up
a little while back and allowed Rush into my life,
let's say the occasional elf is colorful and the odd
princess fetching. Jandek struggles toward making his
world make sense to himself; the Puddle Jumpers
struggle imparting good sense into others; both
ponder with less pomo or irony in the kit than, say,
the otherwise-subversive work of Jenny Holzer; and
both, in their converse vectors, dig the listener
under modern armor layers in the direction of simple
intimacy.
http://www.cs.nwu.edu/~tisue/jandek/
http://www.puddlejumpers.com/
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