Ready for the House

Ready for the House is the debut album by Jandek, and was released in 1978 by his own Corwood Industries label, with the catalog number #0739. The artist has said in letters that the number was meaningless. The album has been reissued three times on CD, first in 1999, then sometime in the early 2000's, and again in 2005.

[edit] Overview

The album was not originally attributed to Jandek at all, but rather to "the Units." This seems to embody the artist's philosophy that the recording entity is an "anonymous collective" consisting of whomever happens to be there. That said, this album is obviously one man playing and singing every note on this album. The name Jandek replaced that of the Units on all future releases after a California new wave group gave Corwood Industries a cease and desist order; all subsequent reissues of Ready... now bear the Jandek name.

The music on the album consists of Jandek's wavering voice and the pick gently plucking the very oddly tuned guitar strings. The guitar playing, which many refer to as "untuned" is in fact tuned to what the artist has referred to in letters as a "black key sound." Eight of the nine tracks largely repeat the same slow, slightly bluesy tempo with similar vocal delivery.

The lyrics range from the types of curious couplets found in the opening track to those of religious piety, to those that seem more personal and even vicious ("They Told Me I was a Fool" starts "You got real fancy instincts/ but your mouth is so large/I think I see a hundred people in it/I guess you like it that way/because you’re a flop"). The opening track, "Naked in the Afternoon," begins with the lyrics "I've got a vision/a teenage daughter/ and she's growing up naked in the afternoon." The song continues, "You are a cowboy/when you wear those boots." This leads to lyrics about a cow who gave poison milk and varied phrases on death and beatings.

On the ending track, "European Jewel (Incomplete)," Jandek switches from the acoustic to a more standardly tuned electric, strumming a Velvet Underground-esque rhythm until, after the lines "there's bugs in my brain/I can't feel any pain" you hear "just a shaky sha-" and then the song cuts off (it would be finished, on Chair Beside a Window and revisited three more times on the album The Rocks Crumble).

Ready for the House received no reviews until two years after its release, when Phil X Milstein wrote about it in Op magazine issue L. Shortly after, outsider DJ Irwin Chusid (of WFMU) began corresponding with Corwood Industries (a label that has held the same PO box since this release, and which releases nothing but Jandek records). Through this attention, the artist - who says he printed a thousand copies and sold only two - was encouraged to return to music, and Jandek returned to releasing his recordings in 1981, putting out at least one album (and as many as six) in every year since. Those albums would vastly expand on the sound of this one (and many album titles would be taken from the lyrics of this one and the follow-up, Six and Six).