Jay Reatard: 1980-2010

We here at eMusic join those who are mourning the passing of Jay Reatard, a veritable punk-rock force of nature and one of the most vital presences on the indie scene; Jay passed away in his sleep last night at the chastening age of 29. There are no words, really, for this sort of thing, so we’re choosing to simply run the interview he did with Andria Lisle, in advance of what is now his final record, 2009’s Watch Me Fall. If you haven’t listened to Jay Reatard, here are links to the albums on eMusic:

Singles 06-07
Matador Singles ‘08
Blood Visions
Watch Me Fall

Q&A: Jay Reatard
By Andria Lisle

When he released his 1998 debut, Get Real Stupid, on Goner Records at age 18, Missouri-born, Memphis-raised Jay Reatard staked his reputation on a primitive punk rock persona that eschewed melodies in favor of raw power. In groups like Lost Sounds and Final Solutions, he dabbled in dark, synth-driven pop and British influenced punk. Now, after inking a deal with Matador Records, the ever-prolific Reatard has delivered Watch Me Fall, a tongue-in-cheek, and thoroughly modern masterpiece that expands on a wide range of influences, from Dinosaur Jr. to New Zealand pop-punk god Chris Knox. Some fans might complain that Reatard has sold out. In reality, he’s just grown up.

Listening to Watch Me Fall, it seems as if you’ve evolved into a deliberate provocateur — your lyrics are so pessimistic, yet the music sounds so bright and happy. Is that a calculated contrast?

Absolutely. I’m always interested in people who contradict themselves. Everything I’ve done, post-Blood Visions, is a juxtaposition. You hear a song and think, “Oh, yeah.” Then you listen to it a second time and you realize it’s about hanging yourself or something. People always think the Beach Boys were the happiest band in the world. That’s important to me — I think it’s really boring when musicians have a dark lyrical content and then their band just sounds like Joy Division. That all matches, that’s how it’s supposed to be. I’m just playing with my audience’s perceptions on a really basic level.

The idea of being on a label like Matador where I’m seen as drastically different from the rest of the roster is important to me too — I don’t want to seem like another spoke in the wheel. I want to be the gold-plated rim with diamonds all over it. I want to stand out and be a freak. It’s pretty easy to seem a lot more radical than you probably are when you’re lined up next to a group like Belle and Sebastian, you know. I just wanted a place where I fit in, but not really.

Tell me about the melodic break at the end of “Hang Them All.” It sounds like you’re shooting the proverbial middle finger to anyone who’s ever bought a Reatards album.

I had to write, record and have that song ready for a split release with Sonic Youth in two days. I wanted to put a waltz beat on it, and I had these string parts written, but I couldn’t find anyone to play violin in the time frame I needed. I had originally sung what was supposed to be the strings, and planned to remove the voice, but when I ended up with just cello, I left the violin part as these falsetto vocals. The song sounds really dark and aggressive, and it just switches moods when the silly a cappella part comes in.

Those are just accidents, you know. I’ll come up with the guitar chords, then I’ll sing nonsense words into a shitty little tape recorder. I’ll strum the chords and sing the melody. I sound like Guitar Wolf when he tries to sing in English — maybe every fifth word is actually real. I edit that until I get how I want it, then I’ll go back and record all the music. The words come last. I’ll try to fit words into the music that have the same amount of syllables as the fake words I’m using. I don’t really imagine that Joey Ramone sat around stressing out with a pen and pad for days trying to write lyrics, either. Nor did the Monkees or Herman’s Hermits or groups like that.

With this album, you’ve perfected the unexpected, whether it’s employing a string section, or serving up a jangly pop song. Do you have any musical boundaries?

Even when I was a kid, I was using an acoustic guitar. I just didn’t let anybody hear it. My new confidence level allows me to go, “You know what? Fuck people and their sense of artistic entitlement.” It took a long time to get that kind of courage. Being an adult, you develop that ability. I don’t care, really, what my audience thinks. So what if I’m 20 pounds overweight and I want to play acoustic guitars. The only thing that limits me is my skill as a musician.

I definitely use the acoustic guitar as an antagonistic tool to rebel against the garage rock crowd. Any time a large group of people comes together and has a collective opinion on something, I think it stinks. They’re just conformists on another level, whether they’re people who like every record that’s on a particular label, or people who only listen to one kind of music. I felt like the kind of people who were latching onto my music were still latching on to a particular aspect of it: “Why aren’t you bleeding every night?” and “Why aren’t you screaming at the top of your lungs?” and “Why aren’t you breaking all your stuff?” Pissing my pants onstage and all of those antics — which weren’t antics when they originally happened. I had to clean house, and I figured the easiest way to get rid of those idiots was to do exactly what I wanted to do.

I just had a mental image of you pushing your fans off the back of a train.

Yeah, well, every milestone in my life has come from completely alienating the people around me and then putting all the pieces back together. Every time I’ve done that, I’ve grown as a person. I think I was getting very pigeonholed. I still think that, in spirit, the record I made is completely a punk rock record. I just don’t think there are rules, exactly, on how something should sound, or whether it’s punk or not. I made the record I wanted to make, and I guess it’s the first time I didn’t worry about what people were gonna think about it.

I like to think I work backwards. Most bands come up with songs together, develop them live, and then record them. I record them, and then I teach them to the band, and then we develop them live. They end up sounding different than the recordings, because I don’t think it’s fair for me to try to replicate what I’m doing on my own — in what is a really self-indulgent process — and bring it to two other people who have their own personalities and styles and tell them to fit into my mold. We change parts, and as long as it resembles the song, I’m fine with it. It’s also funny to see the negative reactions I get from people at shows. They get really angry — “you took my money and you didn’t even play the song right!” It might be entertaining for the audience, but for me, it’s Snoozeville.

I have little games I’ll play to force myself to think differently. Otherwise I’d get stuck in creative repetition, relying on scientific formulas that are based on what’s worked in the past. Everybody does that in every job, everywhere. You end up going through the motions, and it gets stale. I have to set limitations for myself. Sometimes, that’s just what I do: I’ll sit down and start recording, and if I have to get out of the chair to grab something, I’m not allowed to use it.

Some of these songs, like “It Ain’t Gonna Save Me” and “Rotten Mind,” are so simple, that they sound like they’ve been around forever.

There’s a weird, mysterious thing about simple pop music. All of the elements, if you separate them, have all completely been done. Like cooking, it’s just how you put ‘em together. I’ve always liked simple things, and I don’t want to think a whole lot. Rock and roll is not an intellectualized art form — it’s much more guttural. It’s in your groin and in your heart, not in your brain.

When I was a kid, everybody told me to buy the Ramones’ records to learn how to play guitar. “That’s what everybody learns from, if you want to play punk rock.” So I bought Ramones Mania on CD at some crappy chain, but the songs actually sounded way too together. I found the Ramones intimidating, and too professional. I couldn’t copy them. Then I saw the Oblivians, and they were drunk and completely out-of-tune. The first thing that went through my head when I heard them was, wow — this is completely achievable. I can do this. It’s weird how, even though I was already listening to bands like Dinosaur Jr. and the Meat Puppets, my biggest influence was found right in my own backyard.

Do you feel a bond with the larger Memphis music community, like you’re part of the lineage that begat Sam Phillips and Ike Turner, or the Sun label and Stax Records?

The one thing that ties all of it together is that this community shouldn’t have been, that shouldn’t have worked or actually happened, because all the odds were stacked against it. In that sense, I feel like, yeah, I’m connected to Memphis music. I’m aligned with that angle of the underdog.

It’s the attitude — I realized at an early age that I should not be trying to replicate blues or hillbilly music. I shouldn’t be trying to make higher-class versions of lower-class music, but I could take the feeling from it. What I play today could be considered blues music, in that it’s about the bad shit that happens.

I feel most aligned with Big Star — all of this great stuff might happen, but then it inevitably gets fucked up. That’s how it might turn out for me. We’ll see — as long as I can be as fiery as Alex Chilton is when I turn 60, it’ll be okay.

I got a Twitter in which you proclaimed yourself the next Ryan Adams.

I don’t know if I am or not — why don’t we call and ask him?

Do you use Twitter solely as a goading device?

I use Twitter when it’s late at night and I’m bored. It’s like texting myself, except that it ends up on Pitchfork. I’ll make a joke, and the next thing I know it’s on 150 blogs. It’s just another way to pick at people. I’m not an internet bully, but I guess I like to bait people.

Is it hard to remember that so many people are paying attention to you these days?

It’s uncomfortable. I joked about Ryan Adams because I became friends with that guy. We met in New Zealand. I found this skate park, and there he was, just skateboarding in New Zealand. He and Mandy Moore, his wife, came to my sound check. We hung out and exchanged telephone numbers, and now we talk every now and then. You know, he quit music after this last tour. It’s good to talk to people who have dealt with the same thing. He told me about getting hung up on a trajectory that you don’t even feel comfortable with. How when he first started getting attention, he melted down. He compared it to snorting lines of drugs and staring into the mirror. Nothing good is gonna come out of reading blog posts everyday and worrying about what people think of you. Actually, it’s going to hurt you.

Judging by the altercations you’ve had with a few of your fans, it can be tough walking around with a moniker like Reatard.

Their perception of the name, which I think of as being just mildly offensive, is what puts those negative thoughts into their heads. They anticipate something completely different from reality, and they react that way.

When I first started the Reatards, I just wanted to get to make a record. As long as I could survive until then, I could make that one and then survive until I made the next one. A lot of that early work was focused on being youthful and ignorant — feeling immortal and thinking I could get away with whatever I wanted. After I turned 26 years old, I started thinking about things a little differently. I started to realize I’m not going to live forever, my heath is going to fail, I need a place to live. So either I grew up, or society broke me down. Either way, I started thinking more about my future, which was the opposite of everything else I’d ever done.

At this point, it would be easier to get to certain levels in the music industry if I wasn’t called Jay Reatard, because it’s an immediate turn off. I would definitely be playing to larger crowds, and have more money. Everything I didn’t care about when I first called myself Jay Reatard, I could have more of now. But I’m fine with it — I look at it as a litmus test for assholes. If you can’t get past the name, then you can’t afford the price of admission.

Had you not moved to Memphis as a kid, would you have still acquired this persona?

I’d probably be riding a four-wheeler, dressed in fatigues right now. Realistically, I’d probably be smoking meth right now. That seems to be what everybody in my age group from the town I’m from does. Lilbourn, Missouri, population 800.

Your music has always had this nihilistic, devil-may-care attitude. At what point did you decide, to continue the Memphis music analogies, that you were born under a bad sign?

My mother says I was an incredibly happy, positive kid until I was about nine years old, when I went to Sunday school and got kicked out for asking too many questions. I remember that they had a two-sided chalkboard, and they drew heaven on it. Then they flipped the chalkboard over, and they had already pre-drawn hell on the other side. It fucked up my whole worldview: if there was any possibility that things could turn out that way, then there was no way that I was following the rules, because in the end, I’m probably going to burn anyways. So at that point, I became a really rebellious kid. When they said that most people would burn in hell, I said, “I’m going to do something to deserve it. I was going to be punished, so I might as well be bad anyways.”