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ith each new year in music, a seemingly endless stream of artists finds new ways to capture our attention. For better or worse, 1978 was no exception: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols had just been released in the US alongside one of the most controversial tours in rock history; The Bee Gees mistakenly saw 1978 as a golden opportunity to turn The Beatles' Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band into a feature film starring themselves and Devo greeted the world with Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo.

1978 also saw Jandek, one of music's most reclusive artists, release his debut, Ready For the House. But who is Jandek? No one knows. His music has been described as haunting, desolate, naive, atonal and aggravating. He's released 32 albums—at least one a year since 1981—has never performed live and doesn't give interviews. His records have no liner notes, credits or clues, featuring only a Houston P.O. Box address for the Corwood Industries label. Are people listening? Yes. Spin magazine proclaimed Jandek as one of "the ten most interesting musicians of the 1980s." Kurt Cobain famously remarked, "He's not pretentious, but only pretentious people like his music," and a tribute album, Naked In the Afternoon, was released in 2000 boasting renderings by Low, Thurston Moore and Bright Eyes.

In 2003, a documentary titled Jandek on Corwood will help shed light on the many questions surrounding the mysterious Texas-based musician. Chad Freidrichs and Paul Fehler have taken on the gargantuan task of chronicling the life of Jandek without ever actually speaking with him. Through his music and his fans, Freidrichs and Fehler are piecing together a tapestry that explains the man through myth.

What were your first reactions to hearing Jandek's music?

Paul Fehler (Producer, Jandek on Corwood): Most people hear about "the legend of Jandek" before hearing the music. Chad and I were not an exception… I remember being "prepared" for what I would hear to some degree.

Chad Freidrichs (Director, Jandek on Corwood): Well, I should preface this by saying that Paul had hyped the whole thing up a bit before I'd heard my first Jandek song. We had had several discussions and I had looked over Seth Tisue's website and mailing list before I finally listened to the music. After all that buildup, I suppose I was a little let down. I expected something more… well, insane. I'm sure that my response to the first Jandek song I ever heard was one of mild disappointment… but that would change.

PF: You can't instantly fall in love with the music, and it might not be all that important what someone's "first impression" is. Most people will instantly hate it; a much smaller group of people will be driven to listen to more, perhaps becoming engrossed because of the extraneous details of the Jandek Legend. Of course, for those who do dig deeper into it, who immerse themselves in it even to a small degree, there can be a tremendous significance borne of the music itself… completely free of any corrupting influence from speculation about the artists.

The music is very good, and it is very important. Some people seem like they would like to make Jandek into a Marcel Duchamp or an Andy Kaufman, delivering an arbitrary and inconsequential art to advance some larger conceptual piece of Art. I have a lot of respect for Duchamp and Kaufman, but this is very clearly not what Jandek is doing. The music is a very important thing… there are times that there seems to be a conflicted message, where this may not seem to be the case, but I am absolutely sure of it.

Do you have any favorite albums? Mine's always been Six and Six; it's so dark.

CF: My favorite albums are ones of transition. I like Blue Corpse because of what goes on in the previous album, Modern Dances, and the transition that seems to take place between them. As with many of Jandek's fans, I have an elaborate back-story that connects these albums with the successes, failures and predispositions of the man singing. I believe Paul is a You Walk Alone fan.

"Back-story"?

CF: While the back-story has great personal significance, it's probably wrong. There are enough random interpretations of Jandek material floating around out there without me adding another one.

I read that you got the initial idea for the documentary in 2001. How long was it until work on the film got rolling?

CF: "Rolling" meaning "cameras rolling"—four months. But we had started preparing long before that.

How did the interviewing process go?

PF: We had a very open policy towards interviewing people. We made every reasonable concession to find anyone who thought they had something to say about Jandek. We had some initial misgivings about this, thinking that because of the obscurity of the subject the signal to noise ratio would steadily approach zero as we interviewed more people. But I'm very happy to report that the opposite was true, and that Jandek fans, to a person, were always accommodating, intelligent and generous with their time.

CF: We traveled all across the country and performed around two dozen interviews. Most interviews lasted two hours or more… this is pretty extraordinary when you consider how little is actually known about Jandek.

PF: The interviewees were always amazed when we told them how much tape they had used; they would always underestimate the time spent, significantly.

CF: Paul and I talk frequently about how easily the words came to the people interviewed, and I remember a comment Paul made after a particularly long interview. He said something like, "You can write what's known about Jandek on an index card… and that guy just talked about him for three hours." I can't think of any other person whose biography is so cobbled together and incomplete, yet has a fan-base that can talk for hours about their perceptions of him.

PF: Jesus… maybe?

CF: [laughs]… Yes, I suppose that fits for Jesus.

Shakespeare?

CF: Yeah… he works, too.

PF: uh… King Tutankhamen…?

CF: Tutankhamen doesn't have a fan-base in any conventional sense. The first two were good… now you're just stretching it.

Anyone our readers would know about, any of indie music's best and brightest?

PF: No indie musicians, no… Most of the indie musicians we approached were pretty standoffish. We did get some very good interviews from Steven Tyler, Donald Fagen… uh… Izzy Stradlin was great… let's see…

CF: None of those people are in the movie. We had a productive interview with Calvin Johnson from K Records; we should be interviewing Thurston Moore here in the coming month. We shot an amazing interview with Phil Milstein, who is probably better known for his writing than his music. We also interviewed Dr. Demento, more of a "music personality" than a musician… but a very obliging and intelligent man.

PF: We're still trying to get in touch with Matt Groening, who is known to be a Jandek fan, and Beck Hansen, who has to be a fan if his music is any indication.

How pleased are you with the footage so far?

CF: Very pleased. We've gotten a great range of responses, but there is generally a central core of belief with most things relating to Jandek. Going in, I wasn't expecting any sort of consistency. I was very surprised at the uniformity of some of the answers; on several matters there seems to be a consensus. Of course, there were plenty of puzzling responses as well, which were fun.

Any problems?

CF: There are always problems, but I can't recall anything that amounted to more than a minor inconvenience.

PF: Washington State didn't sell hard liquor in grocery stores… but come to think of it that was more "hassle" than "problem."

Has filming ended yet?

CF: We have a few interviews remaining… once those are completed, we will have enough footage to make a compelling documentary. The door is still open, though, to anyone who absolutely must say something. I started the preliminary edit about a month ago. All told, I'll be paring down about 35-40 hours of footage.

Is a February 2003 release still within your grasp?

CF: A February 2003 completion date is definitely our goal. The details of the release will be trickier. We're committed to entering this project in major festivals, and as such we have to be careful to maintain eligibility. We will try to get copies of the film to the members of the Jandek community as fast as we can.

I hear that you've had help from Jandek's label, Corwood Industries.

PF: Corwood's help has been significant. Our communications with them have also been a tremendous boon to our morale.

How cooperative have they been with providing necessary materials?

PF: Anything that Corwood sent us became necessary, anything not sent was by definition unnecessary. We bristled initially when we thought that a reasonable request for insight was refused, but our attitude changed quickly. When we changed our mindset we had no more problems.

I think it's in my nature to want to "dig deeper" into anything I'm researching, but to extend that analogy, "digging deeper" doesn't help if you don't know what you're digging for, or if you don't know if you're even digging in the right spot. We stopped thinking of Corwood's omissions as being obstacles or… as perforations in our understanding. Part of it is blind faith; part of it is undoubtedly a justification.

Many fans have tales about receiving cryptic messages from Corwood as replies to letters.

PF: We've heard this, and I think we've experienced this to some degree. As a single document, an individual Corwood reply might seem cryptic… but if you look at several of these messages you begin to realize that they're not as cryptic as they are abrupt.

Did you have any initial goals or guidelines in beginning this project?

CF: We have wanted to give the subject of Jandek the most even-handed and holistic treatment that we could. We found ourselves in the unique position of having to acquire as much information as we could, and yet recognizing that following the sparse information to its root would have been counterproductive. If we had gone the Hard Copy route and knocked on Jandek's front door with a camera, the movie would have suffered… it would have failed, because we would have shattered the distance that is so essential to Jandek's mystique. The interest in Jandek lies somewhere in this improbable and indefinite gestalt… a situation created just as much by the fans as by Jandek himself. When you get down to it, Jandek on Corwood deals with nothing more or less than the divination of the forces that created that mystery.

Are you familiar with Katy Vine's interview with a Jandek-like person? What do you make of it?

CF: Paul and I talked with Katy Vine on several occasions and interviewed her very recently. We found that Ms. Vine was very personable and insightful and was wonderful to work with.

PF: I am very convinced that Katy Vine had no exploitative intent when she wrote the piece. She's pleasant to talk with and a very good writer. That being said, I'm not entirely convinced that writing and publishing this story was entirely morally defensible. I am not questioning her professional ethics in any way… but I'm not sure that it was right to go about investigating the story in this manner. Researching Jandek by going out to "find" "Jandek" is sort of like conducting an archaeological dig with a backhoe.

It's important to note that this is just my opinion, and it's not worth all that much. In one of our first letters from Corwood, they mentioned that they wanted us to meet with Katy… it wouldn't be very hard to interpret this as Corwood giving Ms. Vine's interview their "stamp of approval."

Also, what do you think about Irwin Chusid's writing on him? This was my first introduction to Jandek. In particular, referring to Jandek as the "original disconnect." Do you find it interesting, sensationalistic, condescending? I've always wondered what his actual stance on Jandek is.

PF: I'll tell you our bias on this question upfront, so that your audience can gauge their reaction to our response accordingly. Irwin Chusid cancelled an interview with us on very short notice, giving no reason other than that he had "…said all that [he] wanted to say about Jandek, and [that he didn't] want to talk about Jandek again." I'll go on record as saying that I disagree with almost everything Chusid has ever said or written about Jandek. The perception that we got from the outsider music community was that they were, almost to a person, "tired of his shit," and of the condescending attitude he has towards many of his subjects. However, I do respect him as someone who paid attention to Jandek during a time that most other people would not.

You've joked that viewers won't learn anything new about the people behind Jandek… understandably so. But what will we learn about the music, mystique, fans, etc... ?

CF: The film will reveal at least something to even the most die-hard Jandek fan. Most of what you'll learn will be from digesting the aggregate of Jandek's fans' opinions. It may be the populist in me, but I think that this is the best way to learn about anything… to sift through the wheat and chaff of public opinion and find what resonates with you.

You'll also find an amazing "paper trail" of reviews of his music and writings in various magazines and publications. Most of these articles had been lost for years in storage lockers, in pressrooms of college radio stations and in file folders in the back of closets all over the country. Many important components of my understanding of Jandek were formed after seeing how perceptions of his work had changed over time.

PF: …and you'll learn that the fourth letter of the first song of Jandek's first eleven albums (not counting Later On whose first track, "You," has no fourth letter) makes a perfect anagram that can be transcribed into "Tenth Ruler"… which I'm sure has some significance to someone.

Ronald Andryshak
January 6, 2003