Our good friend Jay Walter Bennett left us this weekend. As news hits the wires so instantaneously these days, we thought it was important to share some thoughts about our friend and brother before any rumors got out of hand.
First, let it be known that Jay was in a really good place these past few years. He had returned to the area he loved—the “Twin Cities,” Champaign-Urbana—and resurrected his studio, Pieholden Suite Sound, with the assistance of many dear friends and allies.
Jay had also been busy making music. He recently had released an intimate record entitled Whatever Happened I Apologize, and he was looking forward to wrapping up his new work, Kicking at the Perfumed Air. Proud of finishing a trilogy of records, including Bigger Than Blue, The Beloved Enemy, and The Magnificent Defeat, Jay loved the balanced yet ironic album titles.
He was also looking forward to engineering and releasing Titanic Love Affair’s previously unreleased record, as well as starting work on The Palace at 4 a.m. Part II, the follow-up to his post-Wilco debut with Edward Burch. “Jay the Academic” had also reemerged, pursuing his umpteenth degree at the University of Illinois, and he was thrilled to be taking graduate classes again.
As many of you may be aware, Jay had finally found the courage to put his Wilco issues out into the public forum. After a long, four-year process (and therefore very much unrelated to his impending hip surgery), formal filings against Wilco were finally initiated. This task was very emotional for Jay. He was a “lover,” and this confrontation was not easy for him.
With the exception of his final period in Wilco, Jay looked back on his time in the band with great fondness and pride. While he was dismayed that some people may have formed a narrow perception of him via the “documentary,” all who truly knew him understood that with most entertainment media, editing is usually constructed for dramatic effect and presents only a small part of a larger, more complex reality.
So, please spend some time this week engaging in Jay’s favorite passions: listen to a Nick Lowe album, watch some Mythbusters on Discovery, play Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” rent Pay It Forward (one of his favorite movies), write a song with the TV on and the sound off, and focus on how Jay always concluded his communications: “Love, Jay.”
My most vivid memory of Jay is absurd, bittersweet and powerful, and somehow in its ridiculousness, exemplifies, for me, the qualities that made him a remarkable man. I held Jay Bennett while he wept in a Home Depot. This was about four or five years ago and my band had recently finished making a record at Jay’s Pieholden Suite Sounds when the studio was located in Chicago. I think we made one of last recordings there before Jay and Matt DeWine moved the studio down to the Champaign-Urbana area. Matt is an old friend and I had come by to lend a hand packing up equipment. It was an unreal scene. It will likely come as no surprise to learn that Jay was a pack-rat. There was gear everywhere—broken amps, loose cables, tape machines, crates of records, boxes of reels, compressors, all manner of musical ephemera…
Moving a studio 150 miles is a difficult task, moving Jay Bennett’s studio nears impossibility. But we were making good progress until Jay remembered the basement. With flashlights we discovered what was essentially another studio’s-worth of gear in the dank underground. Jay and I hustled over to Home Depot to buy a bunch of large containers to pack all that stuff in, and when, at first, we couldn’t find lids that fit, Jay lost it and began to weep. He hadn’t slept for days trying to get everything ready for the move and was just completely overwhelmed. I put my arm around his shoulders and as he pulled himself together, he kept saying “I gotta keep moving, keep going, just gotta keep moving”. And I realized that we weren’t just packing a studio. I was watching a man start a new life, trying, through so many hardships, to continue to do what he knew best and what he loved—making and sharing music.
The studio was moved, and I’ve been fortunate in the time since to have had the chance to record there. And Jay kept going, making terrific music and serving as a kind of older brother to a bunch of my friends and our bands. I can say with certainty, that I would have never had the chance to make the music I have made, if it wasn’t for Jay’s generosity. He and Matt offered their studio and Jay’s amazing collection of equipment up for astonishingly low rates and his supportive creative energy permeated that space and has imprinted every record made there, including my own.
I don’t know what happens now. And my heart goes out Jay’s family and his close friends. Jay and I were never more than acquaintances, but now I desperately wish I had told him how much his generosity affected my life, and how that spirit I glimpsed on moving day has informed my own decisions. When Jay said “keep moving”, what I heard and what I saw from him after, was “keep making”. I promise I will try. Goodbye friend, may you rest in peace.
I’m incredibly lucky to have known Jay. Like most folks, I was introduced to the man through his incredible arrangements and the “break your heart” movie.
I was shocked to get a huge, hearty, family-style hug from him when I volunteered to untangle cables at his peter-pan club house studio. It became my root temple, Pieholden Suite Sound.
Since then, I have come to know Jay as one of the most compassionate and empathetic people I have ever met. No rock star, no posture, pure love, pure art. Time and time again I waited to see this hard “fall-guy” portrayed in the movie, but that Jay never appeared.
What did appear was a brand new way of thinking about writing and recording music. Jay showed us a way to capture sound AND moment. He sculpted production techniques based on what could be vs. what has been.
I never heard him mention a bitter word toward any former band.
The news of Jay’s death comes at an unexpected time. I’d been speaking with him all Saturday afternoon about many projects.
Farewell my friend, you now pass into legend, your work echoes though the cosmos forever, your life has been troubled yet your mark has been made. Your love is endless, your gaze is steadfast and true, I told you yesterday and I still love you!!!
Kickstarter is this really brilliant new website that allows individuals to pledge small amounts of money to help see a creative project realized. Though the site is only two weeks old, there are already a bunch of cool projects (go here to see what I’m funding).
And we’re unbelievably pleased to announce our own Kickstarter project—an effort to raise funds to get Jay Bennett’s Whatever Happened I Apologize on vinyl. You’ve downloaded Jay’s record right? And you know how great it sounds? And just perhaps you can imagine how lovely it would be warm and crackling off wax?
Well, toss $15 in the hat, and if we raise enough dough, we’ll send it to you! Or we have a bunch of other fun incentives for our backers: posters, postcards, even a visit to Jay’s studio!
So pop over to Kickstarter and put a couple fins in the bucket.
In 1933, Harry Beck designed a map of the London Tube. It is beautiful and smart; a remarkable piece of information design. The conventions he established (no topography, equally spaced stations, straight lines) all now are so familiar to seem commonplace.
I was doing a little internet computer research for an upcoming street theatre project, and stumbled on a handful of coolness that doesn’t really fit together into a coherent blog post. But is cool nonetheless. The first, is this amazing bit of choreography and fashion from the 1966 film Pop Gear. After a little rooting around I discovered the lovely music was by Joan and John Shakespeare, who did a handful of film scores in the 60s.
That digging lead to Pregnant Rainbows For Colourblind Dreamers a collection of Swedish psyche from the late 60s to the late 70s. (Also to issuu.com which has a terrible interface but some pretty interesting bits of scanned magazines and ephemera). And that lead to this brilliant bit of 60s Stockholm bubblegum:
Blond — I Pick Up the Bus
And finally, while searching for an image to accompany this entry, I stumbled on the work of Sakurako Kitsa (and here), who creates unbelievable images with food:
And that my friends, is where curiosity and an hour on the wide world internet web can lead.
In last weeks Chicago Reader, Jessica Hopper mounted a brilliant take-down of the walking capitalist corpse that is Jane’s Addiction. She writes:
“They’ve lingered for 15 years, creating the appearance that we must for some reason want them not to disappear—as though they’ve done anything to renew their cultural capital since “Been Caught Stealing.” But in fact they’ve been reintroduced again and again not to satiate a public clamoring for their presence but rather at the whim of multinational institutions: major labels, megalithic festivals, VH1.”
And, she’s right. And there is something so depressing about it all. I’m so tired of watching the best ideas of my subculture borrowed, made petty, then sold back to us.
The story goes that in 1940, when ASCAP raised its royalty rate and the radio stations boycotted, Duke Ellington asked Billy Strayhorn (not an ASCAP member) to write a bunch of new tunes for his band. Ellington insisted Strayhorn work quickly, because of ASCAP’s copyright stranglehold, the band was essentially without a repertoire. Ellington gave Strayhorn directions to his apartment in Harlem so they could start working right away. By the time Strayhorn arrived he had written “Take the ‘A’ Train” and asked Ellington if that was quick enough for him.
So yesterday New York City celebrated the 110th anniversary of Duke Ellington’s birth by hooking up old ‘A train’ subway cars from the 30s and inviting the Duke Ellington Orchestra to perform on-board as the train made regular stops through-out the city picking up passengers. How totally brilliant is that? Check the slideshow and the article in the NY Times. So beautiful, what a tribute.
Uh, this doesn’t have anything to do with music or the internet or copyright laws, but is still a mind-blow. GOOD magazine posts about a new study that suggests that simply painting outdoor surfaces light colors could “delay the effects of global warming for 11 years.” According to the scientists involved in the study, “Painting 100 square feet of roof space white offsets the effect of one ton of CO2 emissions.” Crzy.
Rock Proper provides free album downloads from a select group of indie rock artists. We embrace the technology of today in order to connect our music to the largest possible audience. Please also visit: The Jay Bennett Foundation and Pieholden Suite Sound
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