LIVE FROM MEMPHIS

So E.J. called me last night to talk about Jay Reatard. He said he had found out about it at the Willie Mitchell memorial. I heard it from my wife, who saw it on Twitter. I couldn't believe it. I thought the Goner Records site had been hacked by one of Reatard's internet stalkers. But no, it was true.

E.J. and I talked for a good half-hour, a meandering conversation about Memphis music and Jay's place in it. We kept coming back to the same theme: As Memphis music bloggers, we felt a duty to write about Jay's passing, but neither one of us knew what to say. Here I am, the next day, writing this, and I still don't know what to say.

I first met Jay Reatard in 1996 when The Reatards opened for my band Pisshorse at Barrister's. He was 15 years old, and already leading a band. For years, I had remembered that as their first show, but just Tuesday morning, while researching a documentary I'm making about the Antenna club, I found this flyer promoting The Reatards' actual debut:

I've written here about the Barrister's days before. The scene, which included The Grifters, The Oblivians, Impala, Audios Gringo, Cornfed and a host of others, was extremely fertile and extremely competitive. In researching this documentary, I now realize that it was a revival of the same scene that started in the mid-70s with beer-soaked record parties; the Sex Pistols playing the Talisyn Ballroom; The Randy Band discovering that The Well would let bands that played original music play there, because the punks were less violent than their regulars; the founding of the Antenna as a New Wave video bar; and the rise of Angerhead and Metro Waste—the great, lost hardcore bands that made hard and fast the default mode for Memphis punk, and epitomized the fuck-off attitude that made Jay as much infamous as he was famous.

At its core, that punk attitude is about honesty, so I'm not going to insult the memory of the guy who wrote "Greed, Money, and Useless Children" by pretending he was a saint, or that I was his best friend. He wasn't, and I wasn't. In many ways, I could never get over the petty jealousies and bucket-of-crabs drama that swirled around Barrister's. I will never forget boiling with anger at a Final Solutions show when Jay mercilessly berated the bassist for breaking a string. Strings break, and unless you're Mike Watt, it takes a while to change one on a bass. But Jay, he just wanted to keep playing, and so that boundless anger that made him great got misdirected at someone who was supposed to be on his team. I gather this was a recurring problem with him—and a frank self-examination suggests that I have no right to throw stones at anyone in this regard.

A rocker's prickly arrogance is his or her talisman against evil, yet, as an audience member, it can be extremely off-putting. It is a contradiction that has always existed. I remember a show Pisshorse and Cornfed played in a Downtown loft that was later demolished to make way for AutoZone Park. Very few people showed up, but there were a couple of new faces in the crowd. We were total dicks to the newbies, and they never showed up again. Yes, this was fantastically counterproductive, but that's how we thought we were supposed to act. And when you've been a shit-on outsider for years, it feels good to turn the tables. From the outpouring of love on Facebook, the images of Jay's deep smile that so many of his friends have posted, and the undercurrent of pretty pop melodies that was always there in his music but which grew more pronounced in his later work, it's clear that there was a lot more to him than just anger. That you should direct your anger toward the people who deserve it is an insight that hopefully comes with age.

Maybe Jay had come to realize this, which brings me to the big problem, and the thing I'm probably going to get in trouble for saying. From where I'm sitting, it looked like there were two Jays: The musician and the freak show. Make no mistake, he was one of Memphis'—and thus, the world's—great songwriters. He was utterly devoted to music in that way that makes it impossible to explain to anyone—your parents, your peers, your significant other—why. It just is, and you can't ignore it any more than you can ignore the urge to breathe. It is a sickness that seems to live in the ground in this city the way anthrax does in Wyoming. You can see it in Alicja Trout, Jay's partner in the Lost Sounds, and in so many others who we take for granted here.

Jay the musician showed up in July when he rolled through the Hi-Tone with one of his idols, British punk pioneer TV Smith. The show was incredible, one of the best I've ever seen. There were no audience assaults or bratty behavior, just perfect punk played in front of a hometown crowd that responded with much respect, but not hysteria. Contrast that with September's Reatards reunion at Goner Fest. Jay knew people were there to see him go nuts, so he obliged. And the audience went absolutely crazy for it. And it sounded like shit, because the music was secondary to the freak show. And when LFM and Rocket Science finish the DVD and Goner releases it, a whole bunch of people are going to buy it just to see the Reatard piss on the crowd.

That was where Jay found himself at the end: trapped between the mask that made him famous, and the music that drove him. What does it do to someone when the worst aspects of their personality bring the success that they have devoted their entire lives to achieving?

But still, isn't this the same dynamic that we have seen play out a dozen times before, with Jim Morrison, with Janis Joplin, with Jimi Hendrix, with Bob Stinson, with Jeff Buckley, with Kurt Cobain? Why do we have to go through this again? Why should we care so much about a single, self-destructive punker when tens of thousands lay dead in Hati, with tens of thousands more sure to follow? To paraphrase Stalin, a million deaths is a statistic, but a single death is a tragedy. We knew Jay, we rooted for Jay, no matter how hard he made it. Like it or not, cliche or not, he's a martyr now. So maybe that's why E.J. and I were so dumbstruck and numb about it all—because, despite the flashes of brilliance and glimmers of hope, everything played out according to the script.

Jay Reatard photographs by Don Perry

Flyer photographs by Laura Jean Hocking