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If you ask Jay Reatard what he’d be doing if he wasn’t playing music, you get the verbal equivalent of a blank stare.
“There is no back-up plan,” is something you hear from a lot of teenagers with single-minded ambitions, but not from too many 28 year olds. Plenty of kids think that they can fuck around playing music or poker or basketball for their entire lives, but what most don’t realize is that talent isn’t enough to make you successful. It takes a whole shitload of hard work and nearly literal torture for years and years, especially if you’re as unwilling to compromise as Jay.

He started out at 15 befriending the best band in Memphis, the Oblivions, and dropping out of high school, and in the decade since then has never stopped playing exactly the kind of rock and roll he wants to, without too much regard for the current winds of fashion. When he released his first solo record in 2006, he may not have realized that it would be such a break-through into the world of indie-blogs and top-ten lists, but he undoubtedly knew that it was a revelatory summary of his career to date, combining the Devo-jittery 70s synthesizers of his last band Lost Sounds with the garagey Teengenerate broken-amp punk of his youth in The Reatards. The result is everyone rightly going apecrackers over him, but without much understanding of where he’s come from. I saw an interview he did recently with an Australian TV show where the interviewer said, “You’re touring the world and you’re only 20 right? Mate?” Jay took it in stride, just as he’s taking the newfound attention to his work as more of an inspiration to move forward rather than a hindrance or a call to self-indulgence.

He signed to Matador, but with a special project in mind—release a bunch of singles over the course of a year before collecting them on a record—a concept utterly standard for 80s hardcore punk, but pretty innovative in these days where bands upload their records directly to Itunes from the studio before the last note is done ringing. The first one, See/Saw, has a warm, almost Dinosaur Jr acoustic guitar underpinning combined with his cutting high faux-British voice into a perfect update on the Buzzcocks or Magazine’s punkpop craftiness. His powers as a songwriter are only getting stronger, along with his ability to whip a crowd into a frenzy, sometimes even beyond what he expects (scroll down for details of the near-riot that drove him from the stage in Toronto). He’s dealing with some of the obnoxious backlash of hype at the moment, and if he really was 20 years old it might overwhelm him. Happily he’s got a veteran’s ability to look past the bullshit into the heart of what he’s supposed to be doing, playing music for folks that want what he’s putting out—connecting. Maybe he’s lucky to have made it this far, but you make your own luck sometimes, usually by doing everything the hardest way you know how. You may not do it right, but at least then you know who to blame, and these days Jay has no-one to blame for success but himself.

We spoke to Jay before this DC visit this Saturday

BYT: I wanted to ask about this singles project you’re doing with Matador. How often are you going to release 7″s?
Jay Reatard: Well the first one just came out on April 8th. And the second one comes out May 19th so that gives you an idea of the order, probably about every 5 weeks or so. By October they should be comped all together on LP and CD, be available kind of to the masses that way as opposed to the collectible things we’re trying to make right now.

BYT: Are you going to record them in different places or…
JR: I’m doing them at home. I’ve never cut a record that I haven’t recorded myself. Just kind of keeping the same thing, you know?

BYT: Are you playing all the instruments again?
JR: I think I’m going to mix it up and record some singles with the band dudes.

BYT: So what will the album be like?
JR: It’s supposed to not really feel like an album. It’s going to be a little more schizophrenic than a normal album that I make.

BYT: So you’re not going for the unified attack of Blood Visions …
JR: Definitely not! That was a concept record, with the cover and the songs and everything tied together. The singles are six completely separate ideas.

BYT: Will each single have a specific feel or genre in mind?
JR: Definitely. They’ll have a totally different sound. It’s still hopefully going to sound like me, but I am stylistically mixing it up a little bit.

BYT: It seems like a lot of people who started with garage, or attached to the garage scene are branching out or leaving it behind, like Greg Oblivion with Reigning Sound…
JR: I don’t know, man. I’ve never felt that garage…I’ve never felt that attached to it. That was just one of the things I did, I’ve always stylistically been jumping around. Somehow or another that got attached to what I’m doing. It’s really kind of unfortunate because I’m really not much of a garage fan. It is one thing that I’ve tried out. I get bored pretty fast. I was doing that, but then I was on to the next thing.

BYT: It’s pretty ridiculous when someone comes to a town and they automatically get that one-word description in the local alternapaper, “Garage-rocker so-and-so playing at the Black Cat tonight,” like did this journalist even go to your Myspace page and listen for a second to the songs?
JR: It’s just tied to the first band I put out records with. Like a lot of things, the first thing that puts you out there is kind of what you’re going to get associated with, for a while. It’s a lot easier to build a reputation on something than distance yourself from it…it’s ten times more work to distance yourself from it. That’s why my goal was never to say, “Fuck Garage Rock, I’m going distance myself from that stuff.” But it’s not necessarily what I do anymore.

BYT: You’ve said you’re on a sort of endless tour this year, coming from Australia and Europe to here. Is it wearing on you?
JR: You get tired and there’s strips of tour when morale gets low and then something exciting happens or you see someone you want to see and everything’s fresh and new again. On this tour, this last leg we decided to tour with three different bands, open for one and bring two to open up for our own dates. So having different people around kind of changes the whole dynamic too. There’s ways to keep it interesting.

BYT: Was there ever a point early on where things sucked so bad, sleeping on floors and playing in empty basements, that you thought, “This is the lowest it gets, if I make it through this, I can make it through anything…”
JR: Definitely. There was points where I wanted to give up numerous times along the way with touring. Actually I kind of did for like two years. I did sporadic touring, a couple European tours and a couple tours of the states, but there was definitely a period where I was enjoying being home more. It just wasn’t worth it. And then I thought I’d give it one more stab and I went out and played some shows on the west coast doing the solo thing and that was the first solo tour. And slowly I could see that things were getting better. Since then things have been a lot more comfortable. I mean, I want to tour but I’m not really into the idea of sacrificing my quality of life to do it. You know? I want to be able to sleep in a bed like a normal person, eat what the hell I want, that sort of thing. As long as I’m able to say that it’s not a big deal for me to be on the road endlessly.

BYT: I kind of have to ask since we’re talking about low points of tours, what happened in Toronto? People were fucking with you and you ended up leaving the stage after a few songs…
JR: There was just a overexcited audience…a few people had this fucked-up sense of entitlement that like, “I paid ten dollars so it’s OK to throw beer bottles and pitchers of beer all over your gear.” It took me twelve years of playing music to where I could finally afford a guitar that costs 1500 bucks, a solid real guitar. So it took me twelve years to get that and it took five minutes for some asshole who paid ten dollars to take it away from me. I’m just not going to deal with it. I like punk rock music, I like having fun, I like bouncing off the walls, but I don’t like breaking people’s shit anymore. I had a reputation for doing that when I was a kid, but, give any 18 year old kid a fifth of vodka and let him drink it in five minutes and he’s probably going to break shit like I did.

BYT: Do you think they didn’t even know how much damage they were doing?
JR: I’m sure, man. In a situation where there’s a ton of people in a place and you’re an establishment, a business, a bar, and people keep giving you booze and there’s no-one there to draw the line, because there’s no security hired, they’re not doing anything wrong in the eyes of the bar because the bar didn’t have anyone to go “Hey chill out.” It doesn’t take a fucking genius to figure out that…you don’t go to a movie and jump through the fucking screen. You don’t go to a play and throw bottles of wine at people. I’m all for crowds being super into things but I’m not a big fan of the whole Minor Threat thing of breaking down the walls between the audience and the band. There’s obviously a line you don’t fucking cross when someone’s trying to play songs for you. I’m just there to try to play songs and connect with these people and if they disconnect me from them there’s no reason for me to be up there.

BYT: Well, the big difference to me is that back in the hardcore days if you fucked with a band the crowd would kick the shit out of you themselves…people jumping on the stage were part of the act, not in opposition to it. Now in DC there’s this opposite effect where you’re not allowed on the stage or you can’t stage-dive or whatever. So when kids get to a show without stupid rules they have no idea how to behave.
JR: I don’t mind kids going nuts, you know? But if people don’t allow you to play then you can’t play. I would have much rather finished that show than how it turned out…I worked playing Toronto for the last ten years so I could get a modest 350 people to a show so of course I want to play for them.

BYT: For sure. You’re in your late 20s, but your current band-mates are like six years younger or so right? It struck me how you started out playing with guys in the Memphis scene who were older than you…is this part of a mentoring program for rock and roll? Save the Youth?
JR: Nah, it’s comes down to like…a lot of people in their late 20s are a bit boring. I don’t know if it’s the way I act, I guess I’m pretty immature, but it’s better for me to play in a band with younger dudes than someone my own age who may not be down for some of the shit I want to get into.

BYT: This isn’t a real interview question, but I love the fact that you covered a Go-Betweens song from their first record [Don't Let Him]. My dad randomly bought me that album in australia, otherwise I never would have heard it, and it’s basically the best thing ever. How did you hear that joint?
JR: I think this girl I was dating downloaded it and we broke up so it was on my computer and I came across it and was like “Wow that a killer song.” I always thought based on interviews and stuff that the Go-Betweens were just some lame indie band, and maybe they got turned into that but, at least the first albums and first singles were pretty impressive stuff. I played it to a friend and he wanted to put it out…it just kind of turned into a record.

BYT: You’ve often been one step ahead of whatever the next big thing is…playing garage in the late 90s before the White Stripes explosion, then synth-punk with Lost Sounds before that became a scene…what’s the next annoying trend…or rather, the next good music to get absorbed by the mainstream music media?
JR: I think it’s been a few years since punk’s been co-opted, it goes in like ten year cycles. Every ten years it’s going to come around again. I think people are so sick of emo crap that maybe that’s the next thing.

BYT: I’m holding you to that because I hope that’s true, actually.
JR: I think it’s going to be like, “This is Real Punk! CRAZY, Rockandroll!” You see a lot of people interested in that right now.

BYT: It can’t be that bad if that’s the focus of the trend…
JR: No, man, I just hope it doesn’t take the piss out of the poison.

Get sick this Saturday at the Black Cat. Just don’t step to the gear or else you fitting to get knocked-da-fuck-out.

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