Blood Visions: Remembering Jay Reatard’s final show
CJ Foeckler
Jay Reatard will be dead for one year as of next month, so it’s a little late to offer him career advice. Still, I wonder how his life would’ve been different if he was better known by his real name, Jimmy Lee Lindsey. Now’s there a moniker for a fire-spitting four-track genius (or a hell-raising hillbilly cat, or a serial killer). Lindsey made scores of records under his own name, but it was his first as Jay Reatard, 2006’s Blood Visions, that introduced him to people outside of the garage-punk audience. (In those circles, he was celebrated for his work with Lost Sounds and The Reatards, where he took his surname.) If you know him at all, you probably know Jimmy Lee Lindsey as a Reatard.
This inevitably has had an impact on how he is remembered, and it’s probably not positive. Looking back on 2010, Reatard’s death by cocaine intoxication on Jan. 13 comes immediately to mind as the year’s most heartbreaking lost opportunity. In terms of his genre, Reatard was making more exciting records than anybody in the last five years. As far as rock ’n’ roll in general goes, Reatard had matured into a major force, furiously producing a steady stream of consistently first-rate singles and albums whenever he wasn’t tirelessly touring with his band. Blood Visions, in particular, seems more and more like a lost masterpiece. A disturbing and frequently funny collection of catchy, mile-a-minute punk-pop songs exploring Reatard’s troubled home life, Blood Visions should’ve been the Nevermind of the ’00s, connecting with millions of misfits and voicing their collective refusal to stay silent behind long hair and pock-marked faces.
Blood Visions instead ended up connecting with thousands of people, which is no small feat, but it still doesn’t seem like enough for a man who in life (and now death) doesn’t get the respect that his musical output deserves. To many, he’s just the guy with the stupid name who used to beat up pinhead fans at shows. It’s a shame, though Reatard himself never cared all that much about what people thought of him.
When I interviewed Reatard in 2008, I found him to be easily among the smartest and most articulate musicians I’d ever spoken with. He felt no need to live up to his dum-dum image, giving thoughtful answers about his approach to songwriting and record-making, which he did out of his Memphis home. Reatard’s big secret was that his music only seemed dumb to people that couldn’t be bothered to pay attention beyond the break-neck tempos and confrontational lyrics. Dig a little deeper, and the experimental post-punk influence on his music—Wire was one of his favorites—suddenly seemed thunderously obvious. Melody was also omnipresent, with weird little micro-hooks imbedded inside main hooks, and then dispensed with quickly so he could get on to the next song battering the walls of his brain.
Reatard lamented his reputation for being “kind of abrasive or an asshole,” but he was defiant about going his own way musically and not seeking acceptance from others. “I think people are used to musicians looking outside of themselves for validation, and needing that, needing people to like them because they’re trying to fill some fucking void because Mommy didn’t give them enough attention when they were a kid,” Reatard said. “People can’t get over somebody making music because they enjoy it and not having some ulterior motive, like trying to get laid or trying to get the entire world to adore them.”
Reatard’s stick-to-itness was with him until the very end. Somehow, Reatard wound up on the bill at the Riverside Theater for a 2009 New Year’s Eve show with Spoon. I’m guessing that the Riverside was one of the nicest rooms Reatard ever played, if not the nicest, but he wasn’t about to change his act to appease his shiny new environs or a room full of confused Spoon fans. He plugged in and played in the same pedal-to-the-metal style that made his legendary 2008 in-store appearance at Atomic Records so memorable. For anyone that didn’t know Reatard’s records—I’d guess 90 percent of the audience, and even that seems generous—it likely sounded like a very loud, elongated fart punctuated by “1,2,3,4!” count-offs every two minutes. The audience was polite, but not impressed.
Reatard, on the other hand, appeared to have a blast in Milwaukee. You can still find the following on his dormant Twitter feed, dated Jan. 1: “In the van on the way home from the spoon NYE show! Just ate two lunches and I’m about to explode into a ball of flaming methane!” As he was inclined to do in life, Jay Reatard in death diffuses any and all attempts to talk about his music in overly serious tones. So, instead of thinking about his final show this New Year’s Eve and feeling sad, I’ll just turn up Blood Visions until I explode into a ball of flaming methane.
