On the evening of December 31, 2009, Jimmie Lee Lindsey Jr., known to most readers as Jay Reatard, was doing something he loved. It was what he had fine-tuned and used to convert thousands of people to his music over the previous 13 or 14 years. Lindsey was performing live. From the vantage point allowed by a YouTube clip, this performance appears to be as exhilarating, breakneck, and heartfelt as any one of the approximate thousand Lindsey had performed up to this point. The band was new, parsed from the Useless Eaters and Cheap Time. On this night, they had been asked to open by headliners Spoon, in the cavernous Riverside Theater in Milwaukee, Wisc. Jay blasted ahead, safe in his special cocoon of noise, riffs, and hooks, separated from the largely indifferent audience by what looks like 20 feet of stage. This show wasn't terribly special on the surface, until the realization hits that this was Jay's final live performance. He died 13 days later, at 3:30 in the morning on January 13th, 2010, in his sleep, at his home in the Cooper-Young neighborhood of Memphis.

Britt Daniel (Spoon): I think maybe we had to run it by the promoter in Milwaukee, but it was our idea. It was wild. His shows always were. We only ever hung out at shows really, but it was great being around him. Every time I saw him he was talkative and charismatic; sometimes he'd get on funny tangents and sometimes he was kind of chaotic, which was actually fun to be around. He was always friendly. At the New Year's Eve show he actually seemed calmer than I'd ever seen him. He seemed happy and chill and excited about playing. I think they'd driven a long way to get to that show.

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Jay Lindsey would have been 30 years old on May 1, 2010, yet he is responsible for more officially released music than most established musicians in their fifties or sixties. Jay literally spent half of his life building a massive discography of home-recordings spread out over approx 100 7"s, EPs, and full-length albums. He was born in Missouri but moved to Memphis with his parents at age 8. Mom and dad split from one another, and Jay moved around a handful of different homes, the unifying element being that all were located in Memphis' more economically challenged areas. During his third tour of eighth grade, Jay acquired the nickname "Retard" because that's what the other kids called him. It didn't help that he would quite literally impersonate a common stereotype in response to the berating.

I don't remember when or if I formally met Jay. He was just around. A lot. Working Sundays and the occasional Saturday at Shangri-La Records during the second half of the 90s, I would watch Jay being dropped off by his father, then watch him quietly dash through the entry-gauntlet of the store to spend hours looking at records, processing heavily. An hour or two or three later, he'd approach the counter with a 7" chosen with more care than most people reserve for the purchasing of a pet or automobile. After all, money wasn't flowing freely during the hours that Jay wasn't in a record store, but there's another reason such trepidation and thought went into the purchase of a $3 7". It was, more often than not, utterly paramount to the plan he already had worked out in his head.

Before long, Lindsey had won the friendships that would work as a very loose parental presence that assisted in distancing him from the tumultuous home-life that was holding him back. A handful of these folks provided various musical help and accompaniment to Jay's vision, specifically a large section of Memphis' garage-rock core in Eric Friedl (aka Oblivian and Goner Records founder), Greg Cartwright (aka Oblivian and future founder of the Reigning Sound), Jack Yarber (aka Oblivian and future founder of the Jack O & the Tennessee Tearjerkers), Scott Bomar (bassist in surf rock exports Impala and future music supervisor and composer for Hustle & Flow, $5 Cover), Nick Ray (member of '68 Comeback and founder of Viva L'American Deathray Music), Jeffrey Evans ('68 Comeback, Gibson Bros, transplanted Ohio legend in his own right), and Zac Ives (then a rabid Oblivians fan, future co-owner of Goner Records, singer in Final Solutions).

Jay released his first records with Eric Friedl's nascent, tiny Goner label. Two 7"s and a full-length album under the name the Reatards. Jay played all of the instruments; that includes the paint bucket he used as percussion on his first 7". To say Jay had "the fire" or was a driven individual is to make an understatement for the ages. He took the Reatards on tour for the first time at age 17 then toured Europe a year later. He worked shit jobs and played out whenever a stage would have him. Recruiting a couple of more age-appropriate band mates for live purposes, Jay pushed the Reatards first-phase concept to its logical conclusion.

"I think the first time it really hit me was right before my first tour of Europe. I was 18, and paying a thousand dollars to get on a plane to cross a giant body of water so I could do some shows in Europe, playing music in front of people who didn't know who the fuck I was. At that point I knew that I was INVOLVED in this, that I was no longer simply making recordings for Andria at Shangri-La Records to hear, or for Eric [Friedl] to hear and possibly release."

--Jay "Reatard" Lindsey, March 2009

The Reatards' second album, Grown Up, Fucked Up (released on Empty in 1999) ranks alongside Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos and His Hero Is Gone's Monuments to Thieves as one of the most terrifyingly-bleak records to come out of Memphis. It's also the most intense Memphis release to be associated with (or embedded in, as was the case) the garage scene. Way too over-the-top and nihilistic for fans of retro-robots like the Woggles or the Makers, and way too disturbing and chaotic for hardcore audiences, Lindsey's phase-one kiss-off had much more in common with the Dwarves' Sugarfix or the Cheater Slicks' brilliant but garage-alienating Don't Like You*.*

I co-edited/co-published a zine with David Dunlap Jr. (now a lawyer and writer for The Washington City Paper*) called* The Cimarron Weekend*, which was in its fourth year at the time. Mr. Dunlap wrote the following review of* Reatards' Teenage Hate:

Readers familiar with The New York Times piece on Jay (mid-2009) may recognize this publication as the "local press" from which the "Little Lord Punkleroy" reference originated (one from which Jay seemed to derive endless entertainment).

Zac Ives (Goner Records co-owner): It is all a bit hazy, but I met Jay at an Oblivians show-- pretty sure it was at Barristers. There weren't that many people there-- and we wound up talking somehow. Maybe I even gave him a lift home that night. This must have been in 1996. He couldn't get to shows, so I wound up picking him up a lot of the time from his Mom's house.

One day-- this would have been spring 1997-- I got a call from him and his Mom had kicked him out of the house. I went over and picked him up and he crashed at my apartment. At that point he was doing Reatards with Scott Bomar and Jeff Goggans from Impala. We did a couple of gigs with me singing background vocals from a chair at the side of the stage-- then going nuts singing a cover of the Pack's "Looking for Danger" at the end of the set. He also recorded my crappy pre-Final Solutions band, the Jack Monkeys. We used an empty frat house on the Rhodes campus for both band practices. There was even a split tape we made with Jay playing with Greg Cartwright (aka Oblivian, future founder of the Reigning Sound) on drums-- recorded in Jay's bedroom, I think. The plan is to put that stuff out in the reissue of "Teenage Hate". It's good.

He was this tall goofy kid going nuts playing Chuck Berry and Fear covers and his own brand of Oblivians knock off originals... I loved it. He was a musical sponge-- he soaked up whatever he was into and vomited it back up in his own way-- usually with great and very unique results. He was incredibly talented-- learned things immediately and completely on his own. But yeah, from the start it was fun-- we liked similar music-- and all he needed was a bucket and a guitar to have a good time. That always blew me away.