Crack a Smile

In Austin to play with Jandek

Oh boy. So much has happened since the last time I wrote to you. I’ll start with yesterday, and leave it there for now.

I spent the afternoon in a Rocky-esque training sequence preparing to play freeform music at an unusual show: walking frontage roads in a no-man’s-land suburb in Austin¹, sweating through my black jeans (stupid), listening to Jandek’s records, not learning material but just soaking in them. Vultures circled overhead, no doubt expecting the pasty panting northerner beneath them to croak any minute. Why not listen indoors? Because I did not want to pay la La Quinta Inn $20 to be able to access my already-cleaned, unoccupied, and uncontested room early. And I wanted a huarache from a food truck two miles away. (Sometimes you pay for convenience. Sometimes you thumb your nose at the convenience held over your head.)

I’m told this show is the twentieth anniversary of Jandek’s first-ever performance in the US, to the day. I don’t know who else is in the group, and I don’t know exactly what to expect, but I do know we’ll be free (as in art, not as in beer), and that I’m honored to do it.

Thinking about this show, I realized the first record I ever played on was a Jandek tribute album, Down in a Mirror, in 2005. The details are hazy—I was nine—but I remember Mark Greenberg’s dimly lit studio, my dad and I playing a timpani together (me with a mallet, Dad working the pedal), and recording drums while the two of them listened. Feeling so happy.

But maybe even more important than the experience of playing drums with/for them was hearing what they overdubbed after I left (and went to bed at a reasonable, nine-year-old-appropriate time). They kept working late into the night and when I heard the song later, they had grown it into a full garden: there were bells and xylophones, background vocals from the bottom of a well, and a swarm of Mellotron strings picking you up by your shoulders and carrying you out the window like Snow White’s birds. All those sounds, putting across Jandek’s already-haunting melody, felt transcendent. It was the first time I was aware of “recording as a medium” giving rise to something else, grander than human performance alone.

Like I said, a lot has been goin on—Last Missouri Exit is out, Twilight Override is almost out, and Avrom Farm Party 2025 came and went, wetly—but I’ll leave it there for now, tucked in my La Quinta quilt.

Gratefully,
Spencer

1. Weirdly, I’ve walked these same not-really-walkable streets before, back in March. And all these subdivisions are pretty similar.