Jay Reatard: a self-penned tragedy in the blogging age?

“All is lost, there is no hope/All is lost, you can go home/All is lost, there is no hope for me.”

Those are the last lines of Jay Reatard’s last single, It Ain’t Gonna Save Me, and this is, no doubt, not the last time they’ll be printed. Jay Reatard’s death at age 29 yesterday may not have made headlines on major news services around the world, but there can be no mistaking that it was to rock music history what the passing of a musician embraced more widely by media and audiences, such as Amy Winehouse, would be to pop music history.

Jimmy Lindsey Jr’s was arguably the first music life played out in the blogging age. His every move was monitored by rock tabloid sites such as Brooklyn Vegan, Pitchfork and Exclaim! (whose last entry on Reatard, dated 12 January, the day before his death, is a ‘news’ piece based on Reatard’s own last Twitter post from the day before, of his “beef” with New Jersey band Liquor Store, which read: “I will give anyone a hundred bucks per tire that they pop on the band liquor stores van ! Yes I'm serious”); by promoters eager to get their side of the story out on Reatard’s contract-warring penchant for a little stage destruction; and by audience members with camera phones. The last was to the point where, as identified in an article in Self-Titled magazine and reprinted in the Best Music Writing 2009 compendium (available through Da Capo Press), there was a time when the first clip on YouTube of Reatard that came up was titled “Jay Reatard punching kid at the Silver Dollar”, a clip of Reatard hitting a stage invader shot from the crowd.

Perhaps the biggest online monitor of Reatard’s actions, however, was Reatard himself. A serial blogger and ‘tweeter’, Reatard could often be easily quoted in reports on fan run-ins, gig troubles and band bust-ups (all of which were frequent and many) via his own online rants and retaliations.

It’s this last fact that should be remembered when the story of Reatard is told. Because it will be, and it will no doubt be a story heavy on tragedy and irony – the artist who built himself up from a working-class Memphis background; whose prolificness seemed to counter his commercial success; whose lyrics were admittedly often founded in revenge; whose last album was his first on Matador, titled Watch Me Fall; who left those final lines with that final single; whose temperament, at least in the press, appeared to be calming with his new band; who, in that same Self-Titled article, said of his future recorded output: “I’m getting introspective… I’m starting to figure out how I fit in. I feel like I’m part of a bigger picture.” More to the point, however, the artist who struggled with and derided the constant stream of attention and criticism he received.

In a documentary titled Waiting For Something, released on the internet in August 2009, the owners of Shangri-La Records in Memphis, Reatard’s local record store, recalled Reatard as a teenager whose desire for attention far outweighed his musical ability. In the film, Reatard also admitted he sent money home to his family, saying, “I have to keep working for a lot of other people’s sake than mine.” Yet, the documentary also includes a snippet of an interview with French press in which Reatard expresses his anger at having to answer the journalist’s (excruciatingly dumb but fairly benign) questions.

Elsewhere, it was reported that a team of staff from Matador worked closely with Reatard to choose the tracks for Watch Me Fall; this following years of loose-leaf releases of almost everything he wrote. There’s little doubt Reatard welcomed and was even chasing success, if only to create some monetary stability. It may be this that explains why, even as they appeared to be self-sabotaging, the blogs and ‘tweets’ ran on, not only feeding the media attachment that caused him grief but acting as his own media attachment, run by his own hand.

Reatard’s death is tragic, but if that tragedy is to be the tale of Reatard’s life, then it should be noted that Reatard was, largely, its storyteller. He lived but also painted his own tragedy, an act no less – and perhaps even more – significant than his musical output.

From January 2010