Trivia / Jandek

• Colbert Bump: Jandek got big profile boosts from being mentioned in Richie Unterberger's book Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll, then having an entire chapter devoted to him in Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z, the book that codified the concept of Outsider Music. Chusid has openly expressed that, while he finds Jandek's artistic profile fascinating, he doesn't like Jandek's music, so Chusid is not very well-liked in the Jandek fandom (but is still important, since he was one of the first people to interview Sterling Smith).
• Doing It for the Art: It's impossible to hear music this willfully off-kilter, and this consistently recorded and released, and think of it as anything but this. That said, the Jandek On Corwood documentary has a bit from Phil Milstein, a curator of the American Song-Poem Music Archive, where he discusses being among the first to ever write a review of Ready For The House. Whatever Milstein said in that review must've struck a chord, because he got a letter afterward that was signed simply "Corwood," saying that his review was "the inspiration and force behind continuation of Corwood LP releases," and Milstein was given 25 copies of the album as a thank-you. So there is at least some kind of hope from the artist to have an audience, even if it's firmly on Sterling Smith's own terms.
• He Also Did: In one of the weirder left turns of his career, the Corwood Representative starred in a short film called kooken—a one-act play, aired on PBS in 2014. It's basically what you'd expect a Jandek movie to be like: Deliberately Monochrome, and extremely cryptic, consisting of the Representative and his frequent musical collaborator Sheila Smith having a long Seinfeldian Conversation.
• Reclusive Artist: For a long time Jandek was the absolute epitome of this trope, releasing albums with no liner notes or promotional material, performing no concerts, and refusing interview requests. Which is why it was such a shock when news broke that the Representative from Corwood made an unannounced appearance at the Instal 04 music festival in Glasgow in 2004, marking his first live performance in a career that was already more than a quarter-century old at that point. While he's performed quite a few live shows since then, he still only occasionally gives interviews and refuses to give out any personal information.
• What Could Have Been: In one of the few details he's given about his life prior to his musical career, Jandek mentioned in his interview with Irwin Chusid that he'd written seven novels, but burned the manuscripts after they were rejected by publishers.

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