JAY REATARD, CHOCOLAT AND BRUTAL KNIGHTS PLAY SNEAKY DEE’S (431 COLLEGE) THU, OCT 16. $15 FROM ROTATE THIS,
TICKETWEB.CA. 9PM DOORS. JAY REATARD ALSO PLAYS SONIC BOOM (512 BLOOR W) THU, OCT 16. FREE. 7PM.
When we saw that Jay Reatard was coming back to Toronto following The Punch Heard ’Round The Music Internets thrown at the Silver Dollar in April, we figured we should sit him down with someone he’s already friendly with. EYE WEEKLY contributor Nick Flanagan — whose band Brutal Knights happen to be opening for Reatard at Sneaky Dee’s — called up Jay for a friendly, mostly non-violent chat.
Hi Jay. Are there any questions you would like me to ask?
Let’s talk about fighting!
Do you want to fight me?
No! You’re one of the very few people from Toronto I don’t want to fight.
That could change. What if I touch a pedal of yours or something?
As long as you’re touching it with love… as long as it’s not with liquids. Electricity doesn’t like conductors.
And that’s why sometimes when conductors do outdoor concertos they’re struck by lightning?
Absolutely! That’s the point I was trying to make.
You just played a Fred Perry party in Toronto on Oct. 2.
We played [Wrongbar] until we blew up the backline and really couldn’t continue. At first I thought, “does Toronto have a curse on me now?” Then I realized that, basically, every time we play through rented gear, it blows up anyway. It’s not on purpose. I would never do anything so infantile as to try to destroy gear. I’m a quitter.
Do you often get people speaking to you as if they expect you to behave a certain way?
That’s the magic of show business. You can be one thing, and you can be another. Anybody can be a pretty big butthead sometimes. You could be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and wind up doing something awful. I said it before though: give me a camera and a YouTube account, and I could probably edit together three seconds that would make a Canadian grandma look like an asshole.
Is it true you’ve been trying to stop drinking?
At the moment, it’s not a “trying” thing — I have. Every time I see [booze], the “trying” part kicks in. I think I finally decided to stop drinking after taking too much LSD one night. I’m trying to sober up so that I can revamp my Matador record as a straight-edge youth-crew album.
Is that inspired a bit by Vicious Cycle [a Sudbury hardcore band whose 7” was mixed by Jay]?
Yeah man, they had some of those lyrics going on. Those seem like nice dudes! I was listening to them, and the way the kid would scream “the bouncer!” was cool. They were youthful, and a crew as well.
Are you mixing or producing stuff besides your own right now?
I’ve been doing stuff for a couple of bands on In The Red Records. I went to Austin and was reading some local press, and me and the label learned after we’d put thousands of dollars into the album, [The Strange Boys] had actually decided not to use it. So I found that out reading the paper. Now I’m working on this album with these dudes The Barbaras, and it’s pretty easy to work with them, because they’re the guys in my band.
So will there be security at the Sneaky Dee’s show?
I would prefer for any sort of security situations to be as unobtrusive as possible. I wish there didn’t have to be such a thing as security, but that would mean the world would have to be idiot-free. People like to do dumb things when they’re drunk. It’s usually a good mix of a little vodka and a little excitement. In my week of sobriety, I’ve become pretty righteous. I’ve changed my ways. I’m hoping we can do some kind of straight-edge pileup, if security will let me do that.