This isn't just a debut album; it's a life's work. Or at least a decent chunk thereof: 42 songs – whine-and-whiskey country moans, flinty back-porch blues, full-throttle rockers, acid-mantra ballads, pithy chunks o' punk – recorded in fits and spurts between 1985 and 1993 and culled from an even greater Logan library of more than 600 mostly home-recorded tracks dating back to 1979. Even by the standards of high-output, low-fi auteurs like Sebadoh and Guided by Voices, those are heavy stats.

Bulk, despite its literal weight (listening to this double-CD set all the way through takes more than two hours), also glows with a rare purity of motive. These days every new indie band with a half-finished thought feels compelled to rush it out on record. Logan, an auto mechanic by profession, made these tapes for the sheer joy and fraternal what-the-fuck of it, to get the words and melodies out of his head and into the hands of a few musician friends, including members of the Georgia band the Dashboard Saviors. This is music originally made not for immediate consumption but for safekeeping and personal satisfaction.

Logan's blithe modesty and budget-sound recording style are a big part of Bulk's formidable charm. Listening to the Stonesy murk of "Love, Not Lunch" and the Slim Harpo-at-CBGB snarl of "Underneath Your Bed" is like eavesdropping on a neighborhood band grappling with chord changes in the garage next door. "Shipbuilding Blues" is no-frills, hoot-and-holler, late-'60s-style, white-blues bliss. At the end of "Optimist," a roughly sculpted folk howl with wavering harmonies and the odd stutter in tempo, you half expect Logan's voice to come over the mike, shyly asking, "Well, whaddya think?"

Actually, I think Logan is a treasure that has been buried far too long. As a singer he has a raw, warm, world-weary tenor that suggests a less serrated and less ironic Paul Westerberg. His aching groan in "Fuck Everything" puts an especially effective spin on the song's blunt lyric thrust (it's actually about living and loving for the moment – in the most desperate and literal sense). In the compressed, droning psychedelia of "Sometimes It's You" and the twisted love cry "Chloroform" ("I'll be in your dreams down on bended knees/I'm a gentleman, you see.... Put you to sleep with chloroform"), Logan's voice is a scary double for the bent-mind howl of Oar-era Skip Spence.

It's also no idle coincidence that the only big-name cover version on Bulk is Neil Young's "On the Beach." There is a strong Younglike streak running through Logan's storytelling. Many of Logan's songs are, in fact, just snapshots: a waitress stranded in a small town and a shitty job ("15 Years in Indiana"); a John Doe fished out of the Pacific Ocean ("Floating Cowboy"); a pastor craving the spiritual succor he dispenses so freely to his flock ("The Parishioners," co-written and sung with Vic Chesnutt).

But like Young, Logan writes with tart humor ("Shit for Brains," "Aloha-Ha") and a surgeon's eye for detail – "Just a little pain inside his chest/He wasn't worried/He saw fantastic dreams/Reached for the phone, was gettin' scary" ("Heart Attack on the Prairie") – that animate these small tales with an unaffected and believable poignancy.

It's hard to know, on the basis of Bulk, how Jack Logan might fare in a "real" studio, making a "real" record and starting a "real" career. But he has already got the right attitude about success. In the basement-tape beauty "Would I Be Happy Then?" Logan daydreams about the ideal car, house and girlfriend. "Would I be happy then?/I went so long without it," he muses in the chorus. "Would I be happy then?/I might, but then I doubt it."

Jack Logan has enjoyed a long and, in its own way, fruitful career in music. Bulk is the story so far. (RS 691)

DAVID FRICKE