Jad Fair

There are plenty of performers who rock critics compliment by using the label "primitive," but few if any can hold a candle to the greatest American rock primitive, Jad Fair. With his fantastic and increasingly influential band, Half Japanese, or as a solo performer, Fair has constructed a prolific and extremely interesting career. He writes and records songs that display an uncomplicated emotional directness, unselfconscious (almost hokey) charm and warmth, and a genial simplicity that is simply beyond words. Although Fair's later recordings are certainly more accessible -- in some ways resembling those of another great American primitive, Jonathan Richman -- his stock-in-trade is still the ability to compose and play music without any discernible (i.e., traditional) musical talent. Although he has "played" guitar since the mid-'70s, Fair, according to past and present members of Half Japanese, still can't name a chord, plays riffs almost by accident, and wouldn't have it any other way. Fair's career as a solo artist began in 1980. It wasn't that he was particularly upset or unhappy with the direction in which he and brother David were leading Half Japanese, but rather that he needed another outlet to satiate his obsessive desire to make music. The first efforts were tentative and, in terms of the noise-versus-music factor, more noise than music, akin to early Half Japanese records. But by the mid- to late '80s, Fair's solo records were becoming more accessible due to the contributions of celebrities and huge Half Japanese fans such as Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis, NRBQ's Terry Adams, and Gumball mastermind Don Fleming; with the members of Yo La Tengo, he even cut an album, Strange But True, which was released on Matador in 1998. And while the records got a little more...