self-titled - no. 2 - (Page 48) When we ask the odds of that becoming the actual title, he says he simply doesn’t know, then explains its origin in a bring-it-all-back-home kind of way that most journalists live for. “A lot of people think that I’m contrived, that I’m playing a character,” he offers. “I’ve read things where people say they thought I paid that kid in Toronto to punch him so there’d be a media blitz or something.” But that’s a little too tidy. trophy.” Do you still have the skull? No, but that’s when I realized I was a weird kid. I was so angry at this raccoon for eating my oatmeal. But I grew up in the country, so life’s pretty disposable out there. I grew up in a farming community. Now it seems kind of inhumane, but at the time, where I grew up, animals weren’t the most important thing. Were you into hunting? I’d go hunting with my dad, but I could never bring myself to shoot a deer, so I missed a few times, on purpose. My dad wasn’t so happy, but I’m not gonna kill Bambi, dude. But if my dad kills him, I’ll eat him. Have you ever considered revenge the motivating factor behind the music you make? I never even thought of that until you mentioned it last night, but it was pretty apparent when you brought it up. Almost every song I’ve written in the last three years seems pretty spiteful and based in revenge. The constant theme is the underdog creep who prevails in the end. It sounds so petty, I guess, but I’m actually not that kind of person in my daily life. That’s how you express it, though—through your songs? Yeah, I guess so. The last Matador single [“Trapped Here”] has a mantra that repeats the line, “To watch them choke, it makes me breathe.” I’m still pretty immature. I’ve got that teen angst, but it keeps me young somewhat—at least my attitude. You know, there’s a saying that if you gave a baby a button that would destroy the world and you could explain to them what the button would do, they’d push it immediately. That was my idea when I started a punk band. I wasn’t worried about small goals like putting out a seven-inch. I wanted to destroy everything. Now I just write about that instead of trying to physically do it. How would you physically do it in the past? I got really into smashing disco balls for a while. Every time we’d be on tour in Europe, the show would end and a disco ball would drop down and the place would turn into a techno dance club. So I thought, “What would bum these dudes out more than if somebody smashed all their fancy lights?” So I smashed one every night on our European tour. I ended up spending over two thousand dollars on disco balls. The last one I broke was actually in the states, at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, and they made me buy it. It’s in my house. I told the guy, “If I’m buying it, I’m taking it.” It cost me a hundred and fifty bucks. After that, I refused to play the Empty Bottle. But recently, the guy said if we played there, he’d give me the one-fifty back on top of whatever we make. So sometimes being stubborn works out. But I don’t know what the void is in my personality that makes me get satisfaction out of stuff like that. Is revenge the motivating factor for what you’re working on now? It’s probably revenge on myself, for wasting time. I feel like I spent so much time in my youth worrying about trivial bullshit. I wasted so much energy and time on things that didn’t matter. 48 We’ve played two hundred and fifty shows together in a year and a half, and we’ve only had one fistfight R E V E NG E , REATARD STYL E “It is therefore a precept of the law of nature, that in revenge we look not backwards, but forward. — Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 1641 Believe it or not, Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk is on the turntable at Jay Reatard's house. Above the sofa hangs a framed poster for the 1981 Canadian horror movie The Pit. The plot, according to IMDb.com, is as follows: “Twelveyear-old Jamie Benjamin (Sammy Snyder) is a misunderstood lad. His classmates pick on him, his neighbors think he’s weird, and his parents ignore him. But now Jamie has a secret weapon: Deep in the woods he has discovered a deep pit full of man-eating creatures he calls Trogs and it isn’t long before he gets an idea for getting revenge and feeding the Trogs in the process!” The Pit is one of Reatard’s favorite movies, which might be one of the most telling details we’ve uncovered about him so far. Blood Visions was, after all, a revenge record. But in hindsight, it was merely a culmination, the apex of a psychological and behavioral pattern that started years ago. When Reatard was 13, for instance, he shot a raccoon with a bow and arrow. “Archery was my big deal,” he says. “I was terrible at it, but something was breaking into our pantry and eating all the dry goods. We lived on the outskirts of Memphis at the time, out near this state park. It was a little bit more rural. My dad was like, ‘Kid, I’ll give you fifty dollars if you can kill whatever it is.’ So I stood outside with my bow and arrow all night until I saw the fucking raccoon go in. I had a friend of mine scare it out, and it ran right up a tree. So I aimed and shot it. I kept pumping arrows into it—I think I shot it eight or nine times. It finally fell out of the tree, and I was pissed because when it fell, it broke about fifty dollars worth of arrows. So I cut its fuckin’ head off, boiled the skin off and saved it as a http://www.matadorrecords.com/store/index.php?catalog_id=319 http://www.IMDb.com
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