self-titled - no. 2 - (Page 45) fire,” he explains. “At some point, you get used to people not liking you, and then it just becomes part of life. If you don’t like my music, that’s fine, but it’s like this modern Internet phenomenon that all of a sudden people want to [critique] your personality. Chuck Berry was a horrible human being, but so what? You don’t have to get personal. I never listen to a record and go, ‘I bet Dee Dee Ramone was a real asshole.’ I’m sure he was. Blogs have killed the mystery.” Which begs the question: Why does Reatard have one? “Initially, it was something I started doing when I realized I was going to be in this long process of finding a new label,” he says. “I figured I’d put up some new songs for free, just to entertain the few thousand people who might be interested. But the more I think about it, I’m not sure why I did it. It’s just another place on the Interweb for people to post hate notes.” R I V E R CITY RHIZO ME At the Lamplighter Lounge in Memphis, Tennessee, longtime bartender Miss Shirley enforces a no-cussing policy. You can order a beer here like they do in the movies—without specifying the brand—because Miss Shirley only serves two kinds: Pabst Blue Ribbon and PBR. Jay Lindsey, aka Jay Reatard, is a regular here. He exalts the virtues of the Lamplighter’s grease-caked cheeseburgers and swears he’s seen Miss Shirley throw people out for swearing. She’s a regular Memphis institution, it seems, in a city full of institutions such as Graceland, Beale Street, BBQ ribs, Sun Studio and Stax Records. Reatard has lived in or around Memphis for most of his life, excluding the few months he moved to Atlanta while writing and recording his first solo album, Blood Visions. Despite its reputation as a music city, Memphis suits Reatard because few people here seem to know who he is or what he does. “Around Memphis, half the time people don’t even know if I’m here or not,” he says. “I’ll walk into a bar and people will be like, ‘You’re home?’ I’ll have been home for a month. It’s cool, though. I can disappear here.” Moments later, a pitcher of Pabst arrives that neither of us ordered. Miss Shirley points to a man seated at the bar and tells us it’s on him. Reatard raises his glass in the man's direction. The man flashes a toothy grin, waves and then leans toward his buddy on the next barstool. “Do you know who that is right there?” the man asks. “He’s Memphis’s own version of punk fuckin’ rock!” Reatard pours himself a fresh beer. “This whole interview will be a series of contradictions,” he says, picking up right where he left off. “I’m always confident when I’m recording here that no one’s gonna care what I’m doing. And up until this point—the past year or so—it seemed like I was going to be successful in keeping no one caring. My worst nightmare was that if I signed with a label, I’d have to go to New York or LA to record and have some A&R guy sticking his head in.” As nightmares go, an all-expenses-paid trip to New York or LA isn’t exactly wake-up-sweating material. But Reatard is used to doing things his own way. He’s been recording and producing his own albums since he was 15. When LA’s In The Red Records released Blood Visions in 2006, the record quickly became the most lauded of his career and subsequently landed him a deal with renowned indie powerhouse Matador Records. It only took a decade-plus of slugging it out in low-rent garage-punk outfits like the Reatards, the Lost Sounds, the Angry Angles, the Bad Times, Terror 45 Visions, Destruction Unit, Nervous Patterns and the Final Solutions for Reatard to realize it was time to go solo. Even during those early years, Reatard’s reputation preceded him. “I was intimidated by him at first,” says In The Red founder Larry Hardy. “I had been told he could be a volatile character. The first time I saw the Lost Sounds, they were opening for the Dirtbombs, and I just thought they were amazing. Jay was very confrontational, but in a very funny way in that he was putting down the audience, which I’m a big fan of. But that sort of prevented me from going up and introducing myself. He seemed really unapproachable. So it wound up being funny when I ended up working with him and found out that he’s actually super nice.” Reatard’s career as a collaborator came to an end in 2005, when the other members of the Lost Sounds—including his then-girlfriend, Alicja Trout, currently of River City Tanlines—wanted to put him on antidepressants. “I guess I was hard to deal with on tour, and after years of putting up with me, as they said, they gave me an ultimatum,” Reatard says. “I did it because I didn’t wanna lose my band, but halfway through the tour, I started pretending I was taking them when I wasn’t anymore. The weird thing is, it was almost like they could tell. So I guess it was working.” Unsurprisingly, the medication wasn't exactly conducive to making music. “It was conducive to me giving over control of the band to whoever else wanted it," Reatard points out. "I didn’t give a shit anymore. I was taking these pills that took away any ambition I had to fight. And that band was a constant battle for seniority, like ‘Who’s the alpha rocker?’ ” “Jay and Alicja broke up while we were working on an album, and I kinda got stuck in the middle of a couple of blowups between them,” Hardy offers. “That wasn’t much fun, but usually it was just a matter of calming down one party or the other.” Reatard clearly doesn’t miss those days. “Music isn’t a group sport for me,” he says. “The Lost Sounds was a fun band musically, but it was a negative experience overall. It was unfortunate that we started out as friends and ended as mortal enemies, but I’d rather go back and listen to those records than have any of those people as friends. I’m cool with one person from that band, but if I had to sacrifice the rest of them to make music, it was worth it. It’s not good to be sitting in a van with a bunch of people you wanna kill.” His current touring band consists of bassist Stephen Pope and drummer Billy Hayes, both of whom were borrowed from fellow Memphis garage denizens the Boston Chinks. “I first started talking to Stephen at—his parents are gonna love this—a drug house that we always used to cross paths at,” Reatard says. “I think the initial idea of ‘Hey, why don’t you come jam with me?’ was one of those drug-induced, talking-too-much kind of situations. But then they came over, and we jammed. I didn’t tell them I already had a European tour set up.” Pope hadn’t played much bass before—he plays guitar in the Chinks— but he already had the essential chemistry with Hayes. “Stephen wasn’t so good at bass at first, but I wanted him in my band because he’s probably the raddest person I’ve ever met,” Reatard says. “And that was a lot more important to me than having [bass virtuoso] Jaco Pastorius in my band or whoever.” “I don’t know how shocked he was, but I had never even picked up a bass before,” Pope admits when we meet him later at his house in Mem- http://digital.othermusic.com/search/full.php?UID=11595&ref=17 http://www.myspace.com/bostonchinks http://www.intheredrecords.com/ http://www.matadorrecords.com/
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