A lot of people don't know who Jay was, a lot of people know exactly who he is. Jay was 45. He was one of the many lead guitarists / multi-instrumentalists to play with the band Wilco. Jay wrote many of the songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (my favorite record) along with Jeff Tweedy. Earlier this year he was trying to sue Tweedy and the band, he needed a hip-replacement that he couldn't afford, he had fallen out of the bright lights that had been his home for so many years.
A mad scientist of a musician, often linking multiple tape machines only he knew how to control through out the vast Wilco loft to create the massive bed of sound that gave the records he worked on the lush bed that made them so special. His work with the band on Being There, Summer Teeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the Wilco/Billy Bragg record Mermaid Avenue was amazing. He played guitars, keyboards, pianos, everything. He's famous for buying and learning to play a Mellotron while recording Summerteeth and adding the famous Beatle keyboard to nearly every track because the band was so in love with the sound. His amazing lead work complimented by his sense of space and texture gave the band the sound I grew to love listening to the records as a senior at Pulaski County High School, it changed my ears. I had been listening to Rockabilly, Grunge, and Punk, but now here was music that spread out like a table in front of you with so many levels of sound to grab onto. It sent me into looking for sounds and no longer listening to the band in college. Bennett left the band in 2001. When I started to listen to wilco again after college, they had changed, I still like them but not for the same reasons.
Jay went on to make music. I saw him at a smallish showcase in Austin, TX a few years back. Last year he offered up his new record as a free download. Some things are magic, they work, fit together in a way that doesn't make sense but is perfect; that is what I think of the tension that existed in Wilco, bickering makes for good music and lousy relationships, which in turn makes better music and more intense lyrics.
I hate I never got to see play with Wilco. I saw the band play at Madison Square Garden on New Years Eve a few years ago with my girlfriend Vani, it was awesome, it renewed my love for a band I had stopped listening to. Shortly after that I bought the Wilco documentary I'm Trying To Break Your Heart as well as tracked down the documentary on the making of Mermaid Avene, and there it was the band that helped change my ears, being amazing, evolving, creating, and finally breaking up. All things end. I just wish they didn't have to.
While living in New York, I've met and hung out with Jeff Tweedy at a guitar shop in midtown, he was mixing Sky Blue Sky. He would tell me about the record, I'd show him the gems of Rudy Pensa's collection, and eventually he called me his "escape hatch." Just a few months ago bassist John Sirratt bought a vintage bass amp from me. Life is so precious and as we go through it, making connections, and letting people leave their finger prints on us, we change. We become everything we ever feared and loved in our fathers, we hear our mother's words tapping on the shoulder as we go into the darkness. Things we've seen, heard, and touch make us how we are. So Jay, wherever you are, you helped me become who I am. It may not to much, I'm sure you don't remember shaking my hand after you got off stage... but I do. I always use to think and pray that if I died, I'd die in my sleep; so I hope it wasn't too bad, and I hope you come back to Earth as a beautiful blue songbird.
My prayers go out to Jay's family and real friends who knew him.
sorry for the rant
Post-op 2nd surgery & beginning therapy
15 years ago
