I want you to take a look at the photo on the left (full-size here) for a second, because it is blowing my mind. It was taken at an overcrowded Jay Reatard show which took place in Toronto last week at a venue called the Silver Dollar. It’s compositionally important for a number of reasons, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Jay Reatard has been creating garage rock, punk, and electronic new wave/industrial mayhem for the better part of the last decade under a variety of guises–the Reatards, Lost Sounds, Angry Angles, Bad Times, Final Solutions, and any number of production credits (most notably the Reigning Sound’s landmark Too Much Guitar album)–that had found him entrenched deeply into underground music, and enjoying his stay. It was never too hard to locate one of his projects if you dug deeply enough into those scenes. If you’re one who pays attention to names, venues and labels, you would have come across him as well.
At the end of 2006, Reatard released a solo album, Blood Visions, and spent much of 2007 watching it rise up as word slowly spread on its own. People got excited because they felt like they discovered this guy with minimal help from the press, and more from record store clerks and live gigs. It showed a musician careening right at the edge of control, whipping out hyperactive, aggressively tuneful punk rips like eggs thrown from a moving car. It was nothing the Adverts didn’t do in 1977 (or the Futureheads in 2004), but there will always be a place for the artist out there who can do right by this sort of sound, and right now, that place is all his, and he’s claiming it as quickly as he can.
He’s been out of his native Memphis on and off for a few years on tour with his backing band, the Boston Chinks, or as a one-off with another project. The first of his six new projected 7” singles on the Matador label has been released. To stoke demand, each successive release in the series will be pressed in a smaller quantity than the previous single, starting at 2500 copies of the first one, “See Saw” b/w “Screaming Hand,” and ending with only 1000 of the final single.
Now, the public is learning what to expect from Reatard in the live setting–chaos. That chaos is turning into a demand, as he posted in his blog about their show in Toronto last week. And here’s video of the incident in question.
I watched this several times in a row, and my opinion changed from rubbernecker to moral outrage, then to a sort of amazement that we’re all able to see this, together, en masse. But I was more drawn to the act than anything else, and the photo above sealed it. Reatard was so deflective of a highly unstable environment that he did what, in the moment, he very might have felt had to be done. And premeditation aside–its presence here is debatable–what is really happening? That someone’s reclaiming rock and roll from the spectators, and catalyzing the force of sound into a physical manifestation? Or that he’s sucker-punching some hapless kid who knocked out his guitar cable?
Either way, the photo clinches a moment just before contact. Young girls in the crowd look on with elation. The recipient of Jay Reatard’s fist is proud and amazed: Hartford Whalers cap on askew; Locust tattoo an earlier reminder of what might have been a lifetime of jumping on other people’s bandwagons–from trip-hop to “the return of rock,” from electroclash to no wave to nu-rave to nu-disco. Jay Reatard’s fist, his gesture, summarizes his entire experience with performing up to this point, and does so by annihilating the one in front of him, symbolically ending ten years of cultural flip-flop in one violent display. This is where punk rock clobbers the hapless bystander; where realism pummels idealism; where not everybody is a star anymore.