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There is No Seed for You TodaySeptember 20, 2006... The person otherwise known as Jandek has self-released forty-seven albums since 1978. During this time, he has participated in one-and-a-half interviews. Reluctantly. Before making a surprise appearance at a festival in Glasgow in October 2004, he had never performed live. Sunday night, I saw Jandek play at a Toronto theatre called Centre of Gravity. Jandek - Falling Down DeepThree local musicians (Nilan Perera, Nick Fraser and Rob Clutton) walked onto the dimly-lit stage. Jandek, a tall, gaunt stick of a man, trailed behind, his face partially obscured under a wide-brimmed, black hat. Wordlessly, he sat down at a bank of keyboards and began playing. As best as they could, which was really quite well, his accompanyists played along. For the next hour and forty-five minutes, Jandek led the foursome through several similar-sounding, fifteen-minute-long songs, alternately sing-speaking and howling abstruse, disjointed lyrics. At one point, the image that came to mind was "the Beatnik episode" of Happy Days, wherein a character intones "Little birdy / In the pet shop window / There is no seed for you today / Only death," while his fellow Beats snap their fingers in appreciation. Is Jandek a pretentious twit, I wondered? Or, is Jandek making fun of pretentious twits? A theatre full of fanatics, absorbing his every sound in rapt silence, even though his lyrics are not particularly creative and his musical palette is limited?
Yet, I persisted in trying to take Jandek at face value. Identity seemed to be a major lyrical concern. "I don't define myself," he sang/spoke in one song. "I could be anyone / I could be everyone / In this room full of alone." (Or words to that effect.) In many songs, he sang/spoke of conflict between himself and another person, most likely his bad self. I found myself wondering if he was struggling with multiple personality disorder or some other mental illness... At the end of the gig, I had been well-entertained, but was none the wiser about why Jandek does what he does. Still, I'm glad he does it. I hope he is, too. Permadink | | |
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