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Jay Reatard, 29, a Force in Punk Rock, Is Dead Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., a prolific songwriter who, under the stage name Jay Reatard, was a force in the worlds of punk and garage rock, was found dead in his home in Memphis early on Wednesday. He was 29.

The Commercial Appeal of Memphis reported that a roommate had found him in bed, and the police have opened an investigation into his death. A spokeswoman for the Shelby County medical examiner in Tennessee said an autopsy had been performed but that a cause of death had not been determined.

With a discography of 22 albums and more singles than even he could keep accurate count of, Mr. Lindsey was a creative tornado. And while his aesthetic was deliberately rough — he favored corrosive blasts of guitar and simple smacks on the drums, usually recorded by Mr. Lindsey alone with the most minimal equipment — his facility with sweet melodies and his concise, economical songwriting style earned him wide respect among critics and fans.

Mr. Lindsey was born in Lilbourn, Mo., and moved with his family to Memphis when he was 8; his precociousness as a teenage noisemaker got the Lindseys ejected from more than one address. “We’d stay three to six months in a place, and they’d make us move ’cause he wouldn’t turn that volume down,” his father, Jimmy Lindsey, said. “They even said, ‘Don’t worry about the lease, just go.’ ”

With help from members of the Oblivians, a proudly sloppy veteran Memphis garage-rock band, Mr. Lindsey started his recording career at 15 and released music with numerous bands, including the Reatards, the Lost Sounds, the Bad Times and the Final Solutions. By the mid-2000s he had established a reputation in the rock underground for his songwriting skill and devotion to do-it-yourself production methods, as well as for a sometimes belligerent stage manner.

Mr. Lindsey began to reach a wider audience in 2006 with his first solo album, “Blood Visions” (Fat Possum), and in recent years he continued to produce music at a rapid pace. “Few indie-rockers have ever been on a roll like this,” Spin magazine said in a review of his latest album, “Watch Me Fall,” released in August on Matador Records, a trend-setting independent label in New York.

Jay Reatard Remembered By Fellow Musicians - News Story | Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV News

Jay Reatard (real name Jeremy Lee Lindsey Jr.) may not have sold very many records in his all-too-brief career, but he picked up plenty of high-profile and extremely talented admirers and collaborators. Many of those musicians took to the Web to pay tribute to Reatard, who was found dead early Wednesday at the age of 29.

The Pixies, who brought Reatard along as the opening act on several dates of their recent Doolittle tour, paid tribute to the late Memphis rocker via their Facebook page. "We want to express our condolences to the friends and family of Jay Reatard, on his sudden passing today," the band wrote.
Beck also tipped his hat to Reatard on his Web site. The singer posted Reatard's cover of "Gamma Ray," a single from Beck's album Modern Guilt. Beck originally commissioned the cover as a B-side to the U.K. version of his own "Gamma Ray" single, and in typical Reatard fashion, it takes the original tune's minimalist pathos and turns it into a loud, joyous, gutter-punk stomp.
Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox posted a lengthy tribute to Reatard on his band's blog. "Jay was what few people have the capacity to be," Cox wrote. "He created an undeniably classic album that contained so much pain transfered (sic) to tape in such an explosive way that it made you feel different after hearing it. He was transgressive and honest. His flaws were something he focused on and overdubbed and distorted until they made you forget who he really was: a person with feelings and a good heart. He loved music and worked hard from a young age to pursue it. He was a self-made and unmade man. I am truly sickened to see him go."

Jay Reatard: "I want to be Amadeus"
by Noah Love
First published: Oct 2008


It was the punch heard round the world. Well, the world of indie rock anyway. Five months after it happened, Jay Reatard says a lot of things "happened that day behind the scenes" that lead up to his much-discussed performance on the night of April 17.
If you are unfamiliar with the incident or the widely circulated YouTube video that came out afterward, the story goes something like this: Reatard (real name Jay Lindsey) hit the stage at Toronto's Silver Dollar at about 11 p.m. He and his band were in the middle of their fourth song when one audience member sauntered on stage and managed to disconnect Reatard's microphone. Reatard swung the concert goer around by the shirt and landed a punch square in the young man's face. Then he promptly packed up his things and walked out of the venue.
In the days that followed, Reatard traded public barbs with Against the Grain promoter Jeff Cohen and Silver Dollar booker Dan Burke, with each pointing the finger at the other. Reatard returns to Toronto on Thursday for a pair of shows — a free "makeup" gig at record store Sonic Boom and a nightcap at Sneaky Dee's. But the sting of the last visit still clearly bothers the young yet prolific singer-songwriter.
"I could give you a million adjectives to describe it, but just 'disappointed' would probably be the most important one," he says over the phone from his home in Memphis during a brief break in an exhaustive tour schedule. "To have it be out of my control and go down the drain that way, it was so frustrating. I just felt like it was completely out of my control. And the whole punching thing is such a miniscule part of why that show didn’t continue and people don’t really seem to understand that.
"But I don’t feel a need to defend myself. It just happened. I didn’t feel like the audience was safe and I didn’t feel safe. If I’m a pussy for that or I’m not punk rock for that, so be it. I’ve never claimed to be a long, lost member of the Cro-Mags or anything. It kind of played itself out how it did and it really sucked. I really hope that next time we play that the amount of energy in the audience and the enthusiasm doesn’t cross the line into making it impossible to play."
Reatard couldn't have been the only one disappointed in the outcome. Though some in attendance probably smirked at the spectacle, everyone almost entirely missed the chance to see one of the most talked about singers of his generation.
After signing to Matador late last year, Reatard spent most of 2008 releasing a limited run of 7-inch singles. So limited were the singles in numbers that they sold out quickly (though, all of them were compiled on to disc and released last week). Reatard says it wasn't his intention to keep the vinyl out of the hands of the suddenly-clamouring masses.
"I guess limited is all relative to demand," he says. "It’s just, when you’re working with a label and they have a little more structure than your average boutique label that can just decide to change the number of pressings on the fly, it just didn’t work that way. I had to plan out ahead of time how many singles I wanted to do and I had this idea that originally they’d cut in half the quantities.
"So the largest quantity I could get Matador to do was 3,500, because keep in mind, at the time that I was coming up with this stuff, the most records I’d sold was 3,500, over the period of a year. I wanted them to chop that number in half, 3,500 to 1,750 and so on down from there. And they were like, 'Whoa, dude, we have to make a few more of them than that.' So I compromised on that end. But now people are kind of pissy about it. But I’m like, maybe it’s your fault. Maybe you should have been buying my records long ago and you would have gotten some of these because I would have made more."
Right now, Reatard finds he's even busier at home than he is on the road, which he deems a "vacation." There's constant media requests, things to fix around the house, not to mention his first official Matador full-length, which he is recording in his living room.
"I’m doing the entire thing at home," he says of a process through which he has recorded most of his previous work. "I had a budget, finally, to go into whatever studio I wanted to pick, but what’s more predictable than that? I just figured the best thing for me was to just keep working how I work."
It will be only his second LP under the Jay Reatard moniker, but between a number of other groups he's been a part of over the last decade — including The Reatards and The Lost Sounds — Reatard has released roughly 17 other full-lengths and countless 7-inches, 45s, EPs and compilations.
He is yet another member of a growing fraternity of new songwriters who are producing music in seemingly endless quantity, a group that includes Bradford Cox (Deerhunter, Atlas Sound), Nick Thorburn (Islands, Human Highway) and Chad VanGaalen. Where the music industry has always been cagey about over-exposing its stars, these musicians and a few others seem to bristle at the idea of burnout.
"Who cares if you burn out?" Reatard spits. "If you burn out, throw another f**kin’ log on, dude. I don’t care. I’ve had numerous people bring that up. 'Hey, man, are you gonna burn out?' You know what? I’m gonna fade away. I’m gonna be that person. I’m definitely not gonna burn out. To burn out, you have to have this big f**kin’ fire and this big explosion. It’s not gonna happen for me. I’m gonna slowly dwindle into more obscurity than I ever started off with. I want to be Amadeus [laughs]."
Before ambling on to one of the hundred other things he has to do on this day, Reatard issues a quick disclaimer to anybody who might show up to his Toronto shows looking for a piece of him.
"Hopefully people will come out and have a good time and watch a show and that’s it," he says. "I’m sure some lunker, some sausage head will show up and go, 'I heard about that guy! I’m gonna knock him out!' There’s always that guy.
"I’m not a tough guy, I’m no UFC fighter. Sure, knock me out. I hope you have a fat bank account because I will sue your ass."

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2010/01/14/record-label-confirms-garage-rock-musician-jay-reatard-has-died.aspx#ixzz0cf7X4F6G
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