Jandek, Wesley Willis, and The Shaggs.

[cactusflinthead 27627]

Outsider Music?

Fair warning. This is not music that's pleasing to hear. It's discordant, atonal, and if you don't listen to the end I don't blame you.

The Shaggs have a known history and are willing to be interviewed. The Ticket, or more accurately Gordo, played them one day and I... couldn't really grasp how they could exist. Someone paid for that? Got a record made and they did shows?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs

I heard Rock n Roll McDonalds in the same way. Gordon Keith sharing it with unsuspecting listeners.

During his many tours and live appearances, Willis became "famous for greeting fans with a headbutt"; this left him with a distinctive permanent bruise on his forehead.^[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Willis

 

He's from Houston. At least that's what is reported because nobody knows much of anything about him.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/jandek-and-me/

He doesn’t grant interviews, has never been professionally photographed, and refuses to communicate with the public. All this secrecy gives rise to fascinating theories: that the name of Jandek’s record label—Corwood Industries—somehow incorporates his real surname, that he’s a mental patient, that he works in a Houston record-pressing plant, that his father works in a record-pressing plant, that it’s all a practical joke.

----

There is a greater than zero chance that someone here has seen him. I don't know why I find wild ass music like this fascinating. It's not bad on purpose. It just is bad. Wesley Willis was beloved in Chicago. The Shaggs have, at least in the past, regrouped and performed publicly. But, Jandek remains a mystery. Is he even alive?

 

Stuff like this is compared to Ornette Coleman. But, he knew what he was doing. 

Leo Ornstein also knew what he was doing. Even if it was pissing people off.

 

Wesley did not know. The Shaggs were doing what their dad told them to do. 

Jandek. Well, I don't know. Is it all a bit? Does the creative urge run so strong that he has to get it out? 

The world may never know.

[stc 1500]

saw jandek in 2005 at the scottish rite theater in austin. read about him in college and one of my buddies ordered like 50 albums for $50 and we still listen to 1 every year on a roadtrip to colorado. most of it really isn't even music. the live show was exactly what you would expect, fucking weird. i read an account from the backing band at one of his gigs and they basically said they didn't even meet him until right before the show and he just told them to improvise. 

[trubbaman 36]

I was at that Jandek show as well. It was pretty interesting especially given that the mythology was reaching its peak. The Austin show was his first US performance and it included at least one very highly-regarded avant-garde musician who is really big in the improvisational music world - highly trained in that Ornette Coleman style of breaking down keys and playing only wrong notes and tearing at meter and such. Jandek walked on stage, put a book of lyrics on a music stand, pulled a guitar out of a case, put it on and then played for 60 minutes on the dot and stopped, put the guitar up and left. He only sortakinda acknowledged the audience once briefly but never spoke or looked up except for a couple of glances at the musicians playing at/with him. 

The concert had that quality that Brian Eno used to experiment with, beginning with dissonance and mismatched meter but as time went on every once in a while this discordant noise would lock together and it produced these incredible crystalline moments that stood out wildly apart from the noise, these bright bits of wonder and beauty that were almost immediately lost again in the noise.

At the time, it was fascinating and exciting because no one knew anything about him other than a couple of murky images and some guarded articles with hesitant ‘interviews.’ Now that he’s played so often and has been seen and I guess, figured out to some degree he’s lost a lot of his cachet and mysterious appeal. I haven’t thought much about him in a while, maybe I should check back in and see where he is on the radar these days.

Edited November 3, 2023 by trubbaman

[stc 1500]

looks like he played a couple of concerts this year, lafayette and fayetteville. and there's this: 

https://www.pbs.org/video/hardly-sound-jandek-preview/

 

 

[yoladu 4190]

The Shaggs album - after the initial shock, it definitely grows on you.

Wesley Willis - I find boring and uninteresting.

Jandek - Never heard him, but going to dive in.

• (my teenage son has probably heard of him - he is way cooler than his dad ever was).

[Chad Fuck 18134]

Rock over London!  

Rock over Japan!

[CooterBrown 18287]

I would guess that a disproportionate number of serial killers own at least one Jandek album.