Moving Around in a Space That Is Free

Slack? Jackie-O Motherfucker? Well, yeah, group leader Tom Greenwood
will admit to being slack. While many bands and listeners place a
premium on being “tight” (this is one of those ultimate adjectives that
many people reserve for musicians), the Portland collective, by
contrast, operates with the opposite impulse in mind: This
ever-­morphing, mostly improvisational unit’s work can be very
loose and seemingly shapeless. Even the more structured
pieces—essentially folk songs with their roots in deep
space—have a lackadaisical air about them, languidly spooling out
as if we weren’t living in the accelerated 21st century and
miraculously had more time than we knew what to do with.

“We get repulsed by things being tight,” a jet-lagged Greenwood
states via e-mail from Japan, where JOMF are just starting a four-date
jaunt in Tokyo and Osaka. “For me, it’s a physical reaction. It’s
always been like that. We build it to break it apart, and sometimes we
can’t even be bothered to build it very well. The structure needs to be
at least slightly off for it to work. I know it doesn’t make sense. But
it’s not lackadaisical. It’s part of the intent, the will, the
volition… we want to move around in a space that is free. For me that
is a premium; maybe that’s too much for rock ‘n’ roll… although I’m
betting that it’s part of the soul of the art form.”

If JOMF’s music is loose, their lineup may be even looser. Greenwood
is the lone original member, and one of his key creative foils, Honey
Owens (who also records haunting space blues as Valet), comes and goes
like a wraith. Sadly, she won’t be accompanying JOMF on this tour
supporting Yo La Tengo, but guitarists Brian Mumford and Nick Bindeman
and drummer Danny Sasaki will be.

“Honey is busy with many things… she is a woman of mystery,”
Greenwood notes. “We work with her on her own terms, and that has
provided us with a long working relationship—and a great
friendship!

“For better or worse, JOMF is a ship adrift, and we prefer to work
this way; we don’t gather internal resentments, and the band is
stronger for being more flexible. That might not make sense, but it
works for us.”

This MO works for many psychedelically inclined, free-spirited
listeners, too. JOMF’s best latter-era songs from Flags of the
Sacred Harp, Valley of Fire, and Ballads of the
Revolution arise from a template that runs in the lineage of such
sprawling yet tuneful compositions as the Velvet Underground’s “Oh!
Sweet Nuthin'” (Loaded‘s valedictory last song), Mercury Rev’s
“Car Wash Hair” (a swaying sike-pop single by these now-domesticated
hellions), and the spectral-blues sigh of Spiritualized’s “Shine a
Light.” This material is shot through with a breezy bliss yet freighted
with a profound yearning and sadness.

JOMF’s more conventional leanings surface on tracks like “Lost Jimmy
Walen” (off The Blood of Life), a trad ballad played straight
and forthright. Earlier full-lengths like 2000’s Fig. 5 and
2001’s Liberation find JOMF in more fiery
free-jazz/improv/musique-concrète mode while also retaining
their predilection for slow-building, spaced-out trance jams—see
especially the 14-minute “Ray-O-Graph” and the 19-minute “In Between.”
Though not technically “good,” Greenwood’s voice is an effective vessel
of pathos—slightly foghorny and nasal, but not Stipe-ifically
so.

Besides being an artist who’s comfortable with spontaneous creation
and honed songcraft, Greenwood has developed a rep for being difficult.
Even JOMF’s Wikipedia entry notes this trait: “The group has had more
than forty members, most of which have quit due to Greenwood’s
impulsive behavior.” Hmm. Why have so many members come and
gone in JOMF?

“Sometimes making good art is messy,” he says. “We’ve been very
actively producing music for 15 years, and I’m extremely proud of what
we’ve done. That said, I can also accept and face my own failings and
flaws—which are many. I don’t care about that description, to be
honest. It’s fair, I guess, but I’m involved in this because I’m
committed to the creative impulse, and process.”

Process even a modest chunk of JOMF’s vast and elusive discography
and you’ll notice a gradual drift from freewheeling, jazz-inflected
improv to structured folkadelia.

“That’s true, to a degree,” Greenwood admits. “We are more and more
working as two bands in one these days. For a long time, we tried to
present totally free music to rock audiences, and it got really weird
sometimes—people really hating on us. So now we have learned to
use some structure to our benefit and come up with some nice songs in
the process. We are presenting this material more for club and festival
audiences. We are still involved in our more free/improvisational
activity, but we are trying to direct those efforts in a more precise
way, through cinema and so on. We’ve been really heavily involved in
this sort of transition of our process this year… hoping to see some
results from it with a film score we’re working on now.”

Maybe Jackie-O Motherfucker aren’t so slack after all.