CREATIVE RESISTANCE: JAY REATARD IN RETROSPECT

CREATIVE RESISTANCE:

JAY REATARD IN RETROSPECT

by STEPHEN JANICK

although it has been a few years since the passing of wayward visionary Jay Reatard, the phenomena of his music and persona have outlived his physical existence. Jay, whose real name is Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., was an eminent and controversial creative figure in the garage and punk rock scenes of the 90s and 2000s. Born May 1, 1980 in Lilbourn, Missouri, Jay spent most of his life in Memphis, Tennessee, after his parents moved there with him when he was eight. Having already developed a passionate affinity for raucously expressive noisemaking by his early teenage years, Jay dropped out of high school at 15 to write songs. A volatile home life, loneliness, and a self-described incapacity to learn in a school environment imbued in Jay an unfathomable alienation that only riveting garage punk could temper. His immoderate passion for music was not inhibited by a lack of formalistic training, and during Jay’s first two years of songwriting he played with a guitar that he had unwittingly tuned to his own alternative standard. Of course, he would come to learn that he needed to adopt a more conventional tuning to play with other musicians in a band.

The Oblivians, a legendary local Memphis lo-fi act that was known for sensorial noise rock, inspired the adolescent Jay with their new-wave sound. Jay recorded a tape of homemade punk demos on which he played all of the instruments that added a biting twinge to the spirit

of the fuzzed out, lo-fi vibe of The Oblivians. The tape caught the ear of Eric Friedl, a member of the group and owner of Goner Records, and he signed Jay to the label under the name The Reatards, despite him being the only member of the band. In 1997, Jay released his first 7” EP Get Real Stupid and, shortly thereafter, his debut LP Teenage Hate, which he recorded with a full three-piece band. The album is evocative of traditional punk and hardcore songwriting, with lyrics expressing unmitigated angst and short, high-energy songs. Sonically, the music denotes traditional rock and pop influences fused with Jay’s own experimental production techniques, involving densely layering the mix with a variety of filters, reverb, distortion, delay, and other effects. The particularity of Jay’s sound derives from his masterful production. Unlike most producers today, who use software to record their tracks, Jay used a digital four-track machine along with guitar pedals. Instead of producing a sound that is clean and polished, the interactions between such hardware results in a dirtied-up mix with a washed-out yet piercingly distorted aesthetic that bleeds each layer of instrumentation into the others. Jay would come to perfect his style of sound design in time, but the avantgarde dimension of his technique is already present in tracks like “I’m So Gone,” in which the guitar tone nods back to punk acts like the Buzzcocks or Hüsker Dü while preserving a pop sensibility that foreshadows the sort of noisy stoner rock made popular in indie spheres today by acts such as Wavves or Harlem.

Quickly gaining a local following with The Reatards follow-up record, Grown Up, Fucked Up, and a growing all-or-nothing reputation about his live performances, Jay’s popularity compelled him to refine his style. Even after The Reatards had established their presence on the Memphis garage scene, much of the focus of the group was Jay’s demoralized self-enclosure, consisting of breaking things and throwing naked tantrums. Under pressure from his bandmate and girlfriend at the time, Alicja Trout, Jay was able to compose himself and set about writing songs in the style of synth-heavy postpunk with electronic dance influence. Thus, The Reatards naturally transformed into the Lost Sounds, marking a transition in Jay’s artistic development from the defiantly charged immediacy of his garage punk sound to a formally developed sound that channeled his cathartic ardor in the direction of traditional hard rock and pop. Lasting from 1999 to 2005, the band released four fulllength albums and a sizeable body of unreleased demo material. The Lost Sounds broke up bitterly in 2005, but their mostly forgotten legacy lives on in the influence they had on current post-punk acts like Liars or Les Savy Fav.

During his time with the Lost Sounds, Jay expanded his musical horizons with a fistful of side-projects like Bad Times (a three-piece featuring Eric Friedl), Final Solutions, Angry Angles, Terror Visions, and Destruction Units. Each project represented another stylistic dimension of Jay’s creative persona. For instance, Final Solutions was an artpunk act that gained popularity in the Memphis garage scene for wild live performances that incorporated a sci-fi aesthetic into a manic rock show, while Angry Angles was more of a post-punk act that focused on Jay’s songwriting abilities and incorporated synthesizers like the Lost Sounds did. Jay’s solo work in Terror Visions reflected furiously dark dancehall rock with progressive rhythms and heavy, synth-based melodies. In 2004, Jay and Alix Brown, his ex-girlfriend and bandmate in Angry Angles, founded an independent record label, Shattered Records, that focused largely on vinyl releases. Jay’s ubiquity in the garage punk scene during these years reflected his incessant drive for self-expression and his mercurial need to escape into music.

This middle period of Jay’s musical career marks his gradual shift from the riotous racket of his garage punk roots toward a relatively calmer style of songwriting that mimicked traditional pop and rock songs. The interplay between Jay’s nihilistic chaos and his exceptional proficiency as a songwriter and a musician shines through on gems like the Bad Times tune “Listen to the Band,” in which Jay inhumanly bellows, “I ain’t got anything to love!” over wretchedly distorted guitar riffs. This track, like most of Jay’s material, is embedded deep within the traditional punk sound, yet Jay’s fractured charisma explodes through the standard tropes of punk to ignite them with his own existential austerity. It is in pieces like this that the essence of Jay’s genius shines through—simply listening to his strident vocals evinces his tortured soul, whose irrepressible nature drove him away from conventional society and towards a life absorbed in music.

Jay broke out as a solo artist in 2006 with the release of his record Blood Visions, his first release under the name

of Jay Reatard and a milestone in the embellishment of his already profuse sound. Harkening back to the days of the Reatards, Jay recorded all the vocals and instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums) himself. Unlike the Reatards material, Blood Visions is an expression of a more self-actualized Jay inasmuch as his virulence is not reduced but controlled. His guitar work remains obtrusive but with a crisp tonality that maintains a distinctness from the discordant opacity of his earlier material. Jay’s drumming is erratic, yet constrained to momentary smacks and simple rhythms. The result is a massive sound so evocatively fresh that it insinuates that homemade garage rock and punk are not yet dead. The tenacity with which Jay managed to blaze a new trail through old sonic terrain speaks to the neglected potential within the medium of DIY-rock. Jay’s supreme sense for the new is apparent in tracks like “Death is Forming” in which adrenalized guitar riffing blends with sporadic drumming and macabre lyrics.

Blood Visions discreetly remained on shelves upon its release, and Jay toured exhaustively to make up for it. With him on guitar, Stephen Pope on bass and Billy Hayes on drums, the Jay Reatard band drew crowds with their might and immediacy, playing shows of about 18 songs in around 25 minutes. Jay would play his songs two or three times faster than the recordings and announce the next song before the last was over, affecting a catharsis of ruthless consternation. In time, the group’s reputation grew as a novel indie phenomenon and Jay was signed to New York independent label Matador Records in 2008. Throughout 2008, Jay released eight singles in the eight months between April and September of that year with Matador and continued to tour ceaselessly at larger venues and festivals throughout the world. His growing popularity brought both mass appeal and controversy. In 2008, Jay was the focus of bad press regarding his punching of a fan who climbed onstage at a show in Toronto, and during a gig in Austin in 2009, he was reported to have swung the microphone stand at two fans who attacked him. Having estranged himself from the world in favor of his music, Jay’s volatility would lead to eruptions of desperate rage.

Despite a strenuously taxing lifestyle of touring and partying, Jay managed to write and record songs for his LP Watch Me Fall in the final months of 2008 and during the winter of 2009. The album marked a melancholy turn for his sound, with much cleaner guitar tones and a comfortably pop composition. The entire record, barring “I’m Watching You,” was recorded in his home by Jay on every instrument, excluding Billy Hayes on drums for “I’m Watching You,” “Rotten Mind,” “Hang Them All,” and “Wounded,” and Jonathan Kircesky on cello for “A Whisper” and “Hang Them All.” More melodic than any of his previous material, Watch Me Fall combines Jay’s unremitting riffing, catchy melodies, and estranged, paranoiac lyrics in the medium of pop music with influences from classic artists like ABBA.

Watch Me Fall was Jay’s ingress into a more mainstream current of mass culture, but sadly, it would be his last major release. In October 2009, his band quit on him in the middle of a Shattered Records tour he had orchestrated, and he was forced to finish the tour with members of a Danish band, Cola Freaks, he had played with in Europe. Upon doing so Jay returned home to Memphis’s midtown, where he was found dead on January 13, 2010. With the cause of death initially unknown, an autopsy revealed that Jay had died in his sleep from cocaine toxicity and alcohol consumption. His funeral was held on January 16, and he was buried near the grave of Memphis soul singer Isaac Hayes.

At 29, Jay’s abrupt death was a tragedy in the profoundest sense. He had dedicated his whole existence to making, performing, embracing, mastering, and living music, but his untimely flight from this world prevented him from observing the impact he had on others. A reactionary misfit from the birthplace of traditional icons like Elvis, Jay was an anguished soul who yearned for authentic self-expression. There is a scene in a memorial documentary about him entitled Better Than Something made by filmmakers Alex Hammond and Ian Markiewicz in which Jay, reflecting upon his life, says:

“What I do is not about being comfortable with the world. I was tossed into this place, and I’ll be tossed out. All this stuff in between—it’s a big fuckin’ fight.”

The quote resonates with his music to the extent that a tossed-off angst-ridden attitude becomes the background on which Jay expresses his struggle to fit in and to be a modern human while never compromising his freedom to express himself and above all be the

prolific force that is Jay Reatard. His tirelessness and passion jostled the garage rock scene with a momentary shock to its system. Jay may not stand out as the most technically progressive artist, but his sheer commitment to music as a medium through which he expresses reflections upon his own humanity stems from an artistic attitude that far exceeds the colorless, mellow tunes of today’s garage pop. Serving as an inspiration for indie acts like Deerhunter and Arcade Fire, Jay’s influence is unquestionably prevalent in the pertinent bands of the contemporary rock scene. Nonetheless, to today’s listener and lover of indie music, Jay’s repertoire has gone largely untouched. His vast taste for ruggedly energetic garage rock and pop led him to span the genres of postpunk, dance punk, lo-fi, noise, industrial rock, and even the new-wave inspired darkwave. Jay’s memory is still waiting to be fully recalled.

Though Jay’s emotional turbulence made him a controversial figure readily comparable to Kurt Cobain, his legacy ought not be regarded as that of a depressed figure who could not stand the limelight. Jay was reactive by his nature, remarking in various interviews that he would rather not talk about music because he does not listen to much—he is more directly inspired by his environment and a yearning for transcendence. His instability did not go unknown to him; Jay was well aware of his compulsion towards chaotic eruption. His lyrics convey his consciousness of the inescapability of his limits. However, his awareness of his uncontrollable despair does not ease his passing for the contemporary music appreciator whose insatiable lust for stimulation was complemented by the existential longing that permeated Jay’s music. One is nevertheless left with a rich canon of 22 full-length albums, more singles than Jay himself could keep track of, and demo work for around 15 bands. Preserved in these artistic works, Jay’s voice will continue to trigger empowered tendencies to resist convention and grasp the potential of one’s freedom. In pop cultural memory, Jay’s influence will be that of a phantasm whose conjuration of unearthly sounds and demonic presence make us question the expressive integrity of the cozily uniform standards of contemporary indie pop and rock.<

STEPHEN JANICK

thinks.