Shop our Big Takeover store for back issues, t-shirts & CDs
Follow The Big Takeover
So what do you think of when you think of America’s birthday? Hamburgers and hot dogs grilling, cookouts, watching fireworks and drinking lots of beer? Well fair enough, but we decided to spend our July 4th the punk rock way, going to a late show at Johnny Brenda’s featuring one of my favorite current musicians, JAY REATARD. To paraphrase one of the four questions asked at the Passover Seder, though, you all may be wondering how this night was different from several other Jay Reatard shows at Johnny Brenda’s in the past few years. Well, simply put, he brought along a living legend, TV SMITH, to open for him on this short tour and we were lucky enough to see it.
Because we were coming from a previous engagement, we couldn’t make it to see TV Smith’s solo set, which is unfortunate. When we walked into the club, he was walking offstage. Twenty minutes later, though, Reatard and his band proceeded to play their usual apocalyptic, face-melting, slam bam crash boom, playing about a dozen songs in the course of 25 minutes. Everything they played was old, including many selections from the modern classic 2006 Lp Blood Visions and some from his single releases on Matador from last year (“See Saw” and “Trapped Here” were particularly great and we got the nasty “I’m Watching You”, the bonus track on the CD release of Matador Singles 08, a track I’d never seen him play before). While I love much of this material, I was hoping to hear previews of a few new songs from his forthcoming Watch Me Fall (which he was selling copies of on vinyl). Still, I wasn’t surprised, because I’d seen a setlist from a show in New York a few days before (this can be found here).
What truly made this show special, however, came during the encore. Normally, Jay doesn’t do encores, but again this tour is not like other tours before it. TV Smith proceeded to come out with Jay and his band and they proceeded to play a mini-set of four ADVERTS songs, all from their classic first Lp Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts. Starting with “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” and also featuring “Bored Teenagers,” “We Who Wait” (a song covered on Blood Visions but which I’d never seen Jay play live before; what a great occasion to do it, with the person who wrote it singing!) and finally, “One Chord Wonders”. It was nice to see the crowd enthusiastically singing along to both Jay’s material as well as the Adverts classics. Smith maintains a frightening level of intensity, especially for someone in his 50s, as he manically held the mic (normally, his solo sets, he’s just up there with a guitar and since I’d never seen him backed by a band before, I’d never seen this) and spit out lyrics full of intelligent and (this is often left out of the discussion) quite humorous (albeit in a black humor sort of way) disdain for fashion, trends, conformity and boredom.
All in all, this was a great night and both Jay’s main set and the encore only lasted 40 minutes!
The photo of Jay Reatard was taken from nyctaper.
The photos of TV Smith with Jay Reatard were taken by RANDAL HAECKER and are used with permission. They can also be found here.
