Jay Reatard live at Rob's House (revisited)

Photo credit: Photo by Chad Radford

For Jay Reatard and Co. it was a round of pre-gaming before playing a show at the Drunken Unicorn later that night, and a makeshift recording session for a “Live at Rob’s House” 7-inch that sadly never happened. Brad Hurst of Hoss Records was tagged to record the session, and has been sitting on the files for nearly a decade. Now, in an attempt to document the vast archive of material he has recorded over the years — everywhere from Atlanta, Washington D.C., and Baltimore to his current home in Brooklyn — Hurst has unearthed and posted seven songs from Jay Reatard’s Rob’s House Records show. It was a tumultuous set, and an especially aggressive performance that ended with microphones kicked over, cables unplugged, and heart-pounding renditions of “It’s So Easy,” “My Shadow,” “Hammer I Miss You,” and more — cut short by a squelching pop. The heckling from the crowd, the manic speed with which each song comes alive, and the ultra distorted sound all capture a moment in time — perfect chaos. If you were there, once you press play, it’s difficult to not get a little emotional about reliving that day. Hurst took a few minutes to talk about recording the show, and the myriad factors working against him.

I specifically remember Jay leaning into the mic and saying: “Sound guy, we’re going to start now."

The first song, "It's So Easy," starts about five-seven seconds in, and the last song, “Hammer I Miss You”, cuts out about 20 seconds too soon. At the beginning of the set, Jay and his band started quickly without warning, as you recall: "Hey sound guy, we're starting now,” or whatever he said. At the end, someone in the house upstairs disconnected the computer-to-audio-interface connection while I was in the basement trying to wrangle and correct all the recording microphones that Jay and his band were kicking around, constantly moving, and generally being intentionally incorrigible-toward during most of the set. Hence the loud digital distortion and pop at the end of this abbreviated version of “Hammer I Miss You.”

As to the sound quality: The microphone placement and functionality were constantly in flux. So I did the best I could to even it out, and used a large amount of brickwall limiting, a mastering effect that I usually try to avoid. Hence the extremely squashed and in-your-face quality. Since the recording itself was inherently distorted and fucked-up sounding, I decided to retain and push that quality rather than try to polish a turd, so to speak. Same for the abbreviated beginnings and endings, which I left purposely abridged to present the truest document of what I captured that afternoon.

Also, as you might notice, before “Hammer I Miss You” (the final song here), Jay says, “We have two more songs," so obviously a song was lost in the technical meltdown that ended the recording.

You recorded this for a 7-inch that Rob’s House never got around to releasing?

This was recorded for an intended 7-inch to be released by Rob's House which never happened. I was hired to record it. Jay’s overall belligerence toward me and being recorded was, in retrospect, amazingly comical. And it seemed he was, at the very least, less-than-stoked and most likely actually-determined to undermine what was happening.

You're just posting this as a streaming release for archival purposes?

Yes, this is a Soundcloud-streaming-only, not-for-sale bootleg live EP. I want to put that out there so that no one thinks I’m trying to profit off of this. It’s purely documentarian. I’m hoping to use this Soundcloud bootleg thing as a series/repository of unreleased archival recordings.

I guess the thing to take from the series is that I have a pretty huge archive of unreleased stuff from acts that I’ve recorded in-studio and, less often, live over the past 10-12 years. I’m attempting to unearth some of that stuff, which will likely lean toward more rockist/“band”-centric material than what Hoss as a label tends to do these days.