Nick Cave’s new record, 'Ghosteen’, has been unusually well received. Among the copious appreciative reviews, Alexis Petridis, writing in ‘The Guardian’, said that it ‘sets desperation against empathy’ and that its songs are the most beautiful Cave has ever created. The album has been widely perceived as a response to his son’s death, and Cave himself has talked about how this tragedy altered his work, explaining that he found a way to write beyond the trauma, moving ‘beyond the personal into a state of wonder’. The other day, browsing in the ‘Red Hand Files’, a website on which Cave answers all kinds of questions from people who write to him, I was struck by his response to a remark, predictable enough given the record's title, about how ‘Ghosteen’ seemed haunted. ’Perhaps the songs became a kind of free-floating conversation with the spirit world’, Cave replied,’buoyed up by the absence of the ones we love. Perhaps the ghostly forms of the departed are all around us, magnetised toward the act of creation. Perhaps they see that to be alive and upon the earth, at this time and against all the odds, is the most rare and coveted of things, and to be making art such a singular and fortuitous privilege, that they just wanted to come along for the ride’.
As they so often do, my thoughts began to make associations and connections, and I was reminded of Jandek, the outsider musician. He had recently come up in conversation, and Lars Iyer, in the text that he wrote for the small book the Douglas Hyde Gallery published to accompany Jandek’s exhibition and performance, makes reference to the Buddhist idea of the ‘Hungry Ghost’ - a term, coincidentally, that was also the title of a group exhibition that we had held some years before. I looked through my LPs, searching for ‘Ready for the House’, its softly blurred colour sleeve depicting a drab living room with a yellow blind pulled down over the window. Beside the plush sofa there is a small side table bearing a vase of red flowers, and perched carefully between the two, at the foot of the blind, is a paperback edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan plays. Released in 1978, at first attributed to a band called ‘The Units’ and subsequently to Jandek, ‘Ready for the House’ was the creation of Sterling R. Smith, then an unknown musician from Houston, Texas. There have been many heightened responses to the album, most of them dwelling on the darkness of the songs and Jandek’s debt to the acoustic blues tradition, but one of the most evocative is the observation that the album ‘started nowhere, went nowhere, and ended up nowhere’, and that listening to it was like hearing a posthumous recording, a recording that was made after the musician had died. During the following years, as a stream of albums became available from the artist’s website, almost nothing was revealed about his identity, and the mystery became something of a cause célèbre and the subject of a full-length documentary.
On Friday, June 13th, 2008, Jandek performed at the gallery. This was a rare event, as he had only played live a few times before. In 2004, when he actually did turn up for the first gig in Glasgow, there was some uncertainty as to whether or not it was actually the man himself. In a sense, perhaps, it wasn’t, because Jandek, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist as a person but as a musical project, even though the artist, now known to be Sterling R.Smith, is usually referred to by that name. When you correspond with him, and when identification is required, the performer chooses to call himself as ‘Corwood’, or sometimes ‘a representative from Corwood Industries’. This isn’t as arch as it sounds. From the very beginning a strange kind of anonymity was at the heart of the project, and although a large proportion of the photographs on the album covers are presumably of the live Sterling R. Smith, they all look ghostly, spectral, as though they are images of a revenant. This quality, combined with their odd, naive quality, as though the photos had been taken by someone who didn’t know what a camera was and what it did, is what made me want to exhibit them.
I first saw the representative from Corwood Industries through the window of a moving car. Jandek - as I’ll call him now, for the sake of convenience - was walking slowly along an unfashionable and unremarkable street in Dublin, wearing a long black overcoat and hat. As I wasn’t driving, I couldn’t stop to greet him. The following morning, when I arrived at work, I came across him again, looking intently at the Gallery’s sign on the university’s railings, and when I introduced myself he was slightly taken aback, although cautiously friendly. Later that morning he went off on his own to hire a good guitar for the gig, and before long the gallery received a telephone call from the shop, enquiring about the man who was hiring the instrument in our name, as they were concerned that he couldn’t play it 'properly'. Then, at lunchtime, I found him alone in the small gallery where his album covers were displayed, gazing at the modest exhibition. He seemed pleased and surprisingly abashed. ‘Who would have thought it?’, he said when I joined him.
In the evening, Jandek invited me to dinner. We went to a vegetarian restaurant that he had discovered the day before, and straight away he ordered a bottle of rosé wine, which he said was his favourite. In the course of an easy and intense conversation he began to tell me something about his early life, although not in great detail, and as he said the following morning that he rather regretted what he considered to be his indiscretion, it doesn’t seem appropriate to repeat much of the conversation. I gathered, however, that he had experienced some difficulties in early adulthood and that he currently had a comfortable occupation. He occasionally took time off, he said, to record and play music, wryly adding that many of his colleagues would be surprised to learn of his moonlighting. I enjoyed his company greatly.
The following evening Jandek performed to an audience of about a hundred seated people. With the lights dimmed, he walked formally to the front of the gallery, sat down with the guitar, placed pages of lyrics on a music stand, and began to play and sing, using unconventional tunings. The music was as difficult and weird as ever, a handful of people walking out after a few minutes, but the vast majority stayed to hear the long eight-part composition. I couldn’t make much sense of it, but the occasion was nonetheless compelling, and I wondered afterwards if the piece had some connection with Goethe’s ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’, which he had sent to me without comment a month or two before the gig. In any event, he sent me a very appreciative letter when he returned home, and a few years later he produced a CD and DVD of the performance, entitled ‘Dublin Friday’, which are still available on his website. We corresponded intermittently, usually after he sent me new releases, but eventually our communication came to an end.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/uplifting-jubilant-record/
https://tisue.net/jandek/
https://corwoodindustries.com/