self-titled - no. 2 - (Page 46) phis. “I learned the songs really fast, though, and we went to South by Southwest and then to Europe. But I still don’t really know how to play bass. I know how to play the songs we do, but I can’t improvise at all. Hopefully I’ll never have to jam.” Pope, who rocks an impressive Melvins-esque afro (Reatard refers to King Buzzo as Pope’s “long lost uncle”) and cruises Memphis in a purple Cadillac, has since taken on several additional roles in Reatard’s life, including tour manager, babysitter and driver. On their most recent US tour, Pope drove all 13,000 miles. “Yeah, I drive the whole time,” he confirms. “I keep Jay’s passport at my house. It’s fine by me. I know where the money is. And because I have to drive, I can’t drink too much, so I don’t feel like shit every day. And I get paid extra when we’re on tour.” The money isn’t just for the driving, though. It’s partly for playing good cop to Reatard’s drunk/angry/bad cop. “Jay’s reputation has worked to our advantage sometimes,” Pope explains. “When the whole Toronto thing happened, I was trying to figure out everything with the promoter. Jay was obviously already upset, but the promoter of the show really wanted to talk to him. I knew that was a bad idea, so I acted like even I was too scared to talk to Jay, like, ‘No, man—he’s too crazy. I don’t even wanna go near him, so you definitely shouldn’t.’” At 22 years old, Hayes and Pope are both younger than Reatard, which is likely a reason why the relationship works so well. “Billy’s kind of like me when I was a teenager,” Reatard says. “He spends a lot of time alone, and music is all he’s interested in. I dig that. A lot of people might say that’s lazy, but if you’re self-employed, you work when you wanna work, and that’s always been my goal. My dad never worked for anybody—he always worked for himself. If I don’t wanna wake up till noon, so what? That’s kind of the allure of it.” From Reatard’s perspective, Pope and Hayes constitute the best band he’s ever had. “We’ve played two hundred and fifty shows together in a year and a half, and we’ve only had one fistfight,” Reatard says. “We were in Serbia, and I was shit-faced at our bed-and-breakfast. They had this wall of empty Coca-Cola crates, and I made up some drunken game to see who could crawl up this fifteen-foot-tall pile of plastic crates. Billy used a chair to climb up and was teasing me, like, ‘I won! I won!’ And I was so wasted, I basically turned into a toddler and whaled on him over some stupid race at five in the morning. I felt so fucking terrible the next day. I was like, ‘Oh, my god, I just jeopardized the best drummer I’ve ever played with—and a friendship—over a childish game.’ Other than that, we get along pretty well, I think. But who knows? My perspective could be pretty fucked up after the Lost Sounds.” P OR T R A IT OF THE ARTIST AS A Y OU N G MAN CHEW ING ADDERALL With a back catalog that rivals musicians three times his age, it’s understandable that Reatard’s name is almost always printed with the word “prolific” in the immediate vicinity. At one point, he was writing a song a day. “I think Memphis has some great musicians, but it’s filled with some of the most un-ambitious people I’ve ever seen,” he says. “They just sit around and complain about why things aren’t happening for them. I want to be the opposite of that. I don’t wanna be poor anymore. I don’t wanna wake up and not have stability. At some point, it flipped in my head that 46 music was the only way to get that, so I started forcing myself to write a song every day. Even if no one cares, I could say I did it. I still get pissed off if I go to sleep at night and I haven’t recorded or written a song.” This self-discipline explains why Reatard’s Matador deal launched with six 7-inch singles, pressed throughout the past year. “The way I’m working with Matador, it’s kind of slowed down,” he explains. “I’m still working on a song every day, but I’ve learned not to put the pressure on myself to be that hyper-creative. I’ve learned to relax and realize that it’s not the end of the world if I can’t write a song for a week. Everybody says, ‘Oh, it must be so much pressure being on a bigger label,’ but man, I put more pressure on myself when no one was looking than Matador could ever put on me.” All this self-demand is the result of considerably less-than-auspicious circumstances. Reatard moved out of his house at 15 and dropped out of high school. At 16 he lied on an application to land a job at a stained-glass window factory. His parents moved away when he was 17. One day, his employer figured out his real age and fired him on the spot. From that point on, Reatard lived off of music by playing in six to eight bands at a time. “If I played once a month with each of them and made fifty or a hundred bucks each time, I’d get by,” he recalls. “I was a ‘dollar-menunaire,’ man. I was definitely a scumbag, but it worked out.” When we suggest he didn’t miss much by ditching high school, Reatard quickly ticks off a list of youthful pleasantries that far too many of us take for granted. “Only the finer things in life—like friends, girlfriends, being able to do fun things on the weekends. This was before the Internet, so there weren’t a whole lot of options for meeting people. That was crucial. People are amazed that I wrote all this music when I was so young, but I didn’t have anything else to do other than eat fast food and think about killing myself.” He may put slightly less pressure on himself these days, but Reatard is just as regimented as ever. He gets up around 10:30 each morning and lets his dog, Cola—a German shepherd mix—outside. Then he walks to the corner store to get an energy drink. (He’s not a coffee-drinker: “It just makes me too nervous, man. But a nice can of Pimp Juice doesn’t.”) He tries to buy a different brand every day because he thinks he might be developing a tolerance to them. He avoids Red Bull because he associates it with the taste with alcohol, and he doesn’t booze in the middle of the day—at least not on a workday. Then he’ll talk on the phone for an hour or so, making necessary business calls. By noon he’s hunkered down and recording until five or six, at which point he’ll grab a bite at his favorite Vietnamese restaurant before returning home to listen obsessively to everything he’s recorded that day. “Then I’ll try to go to sleep after all the caffeine I’ve consumed. Wake up. Repeat. It’s like that movie Groundhog Day. Sometimes I feel like Bill Murray.” Reatard generally doesn’t like to take drugs while making music, but this morning he popped some Adderall to enhance his recording mojo. “I went to eat at this restaurant the other day,” he says, “and when the waiter brought back my credit card, he’d charged me for, like, half of the stuff we ate and put a bunch of Adderalls in that little leather receipt-holder. I didn’t really know the guy, but we have a mutual friend in another city.” Adderall apparently helps Reatard focus. “I just chew ’em up like Flintstones vitamins,” he explains. “Snorting it’s useless. You just end up with orange boogers.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Osborne
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