Interstellar Discussion, Part Ten (FINAL!)

There’s Bugs In My Brain, I Can’t Feel Any Pain

For many Jandek fans, the myth has become the central feature of his appeal. While some fans adamantly maintain that they do not want to know who Jandek ‘is,’ others devote many hours scouring public records and examining lyrics to find any clues that will reveal some sort of ‘truth’. It has become apparent in my research, however, that no matter what fans find out about Jandek, the ‘truth’ will never be satisfactory.

Today, it is well accepted in the Jandek fan community that all of the records are created and distributed by Sterling R. Smith, who owns and operates Corwood Industries. He is based in Houston, Texas, and has been writing and recording music for a good portion of his life. For a good portion of his life, he has or has had a day job that pays enough for him to independently record, release and remasters nearly 50 original works and allows him to travel internationally. He values his privacy, but will accept and return calls and mail regarding orders, and occasionally responds to fan mail. When he plays live, he is billed as ‘a representative of Corwood Industries,’ and is usually the first person out of the venue.

In their imagined subjectivities, quite a few fans believe that Jandek has created a myth himself, and they are merely trying to uncover what is unknown. As a fan wrote in 1999, ‘he's definitely interested in creating a mythology around his records…regardless of how few people know or care about his music or his history’ (mailing list, May 5, 1999). A 2004 discussion about Library of Congress records on Jandek revealed that Sterling R. Smith held copyrights to all the songs, and also revealed his date of birth. One fan replied to this discussion, ‘I personally think that Jandek is cleverer than that... I don't think if he was going to such lengths to conceal his identity he would himself register the copyrights...’ (mailing list, January 21, 2004). Another fan responds to this hypothesis by illustrating that it is fans who create the myth: ‘Jandek has never said you COULDN'T find him… Rather, with Jandek it's that he doesn't WANT to be found. Leave the man alone’ (mailing list, January 21, 2004).

Riddles Riddling Me

Jandek fans provide a glimpse into a world of unmediated fandom, in which the object of devotion rebukes and avoids any dissemination of his art outside of the records themselves. Even Jandek’s current live performances are comprised of original pieces, none of which have reappeared except in the recording of their performance. Each Jandek album is a self-contained artifact that still manages to reference other Jandek works and almost never the world outside. His fans’ penchant for scouring public records in search of his ‘real’ identity is perhaps indicative that we feel entitled to a certain amount of information in our hyper-mediated age.

While outsider music fans are not the only fans who define their identity based on the music they listen to, the activities that they engage in are unique to outsider fandom because of the lack of information surrounding their artists. Jandek fans cannot discuss the finer elements of Jandek’s personal life as Bruce fans can, nor have they been able to engage in the community atmosphere of Jandek concerts until recently – and that is still a bit of a stretch. Instead, Jandek fans engage in an endlessly deferred narrative in which they frequently project their own lives and feelings onto Jandek only to absorb them again. Fans distance themselves from other music listeners, but also fans within the Jandek community, as a way of intensifying their personal connection with Corwood Industries.

As with other fan communities, the Jandek mailing list provides an opportunity for fans to share their admiration and speculation for an artist they admire – or, at the very least, are curious enough about to discuss. The myth that surrounds Jandek, largely created and perpetuated by the fan community itself, will continue so long as records appear from Corwood Industries. Whoever the man in Texas making the music happens to be, every fan on the list is quite sure who Jandek is.