Chris Herrington already caught up with Jay Reatard earlier this week — so I thought I’d do a run-down of Reatard’s most recent album and promotional artwork, just in time for tonight’s show with British punk legend T.V. Smith. Rather than analyze his colorful, yet stark (and occasionally gruesome) photographic choices myself, I decided to go directly to the source — Reatard, who spent a half-hour of his sojourn in Nashville on Thursday on his cell phone, happily dissecting his public persona.
2006’s Blood Visions, released on In the Red Records:
Matthew Melton, a Memphis kid, took that. We took it at MCA. He came very unprepared. It was large format, and because he was broke, he only brought two pieces of film. He didn’t need more than that, because we didn’t have access to a shower after we used the stolen raspberry syrup from Young Ave Deli, where I worked at the time. We cut the top off, and I had to get a girl to dump the whole thing over me.
We used the first photograph — the second one is just too gory, although I think Matt’s gonna have it up in an art show in San Francisco next week. Afterwards, I needed to shower, and he told me there was some sort of mop sink that I could get to. I was walking around in bloody underwear, and I got lost. I bumped into a very large gay guy who squealed like a pig when he saw me. He got really scared — “What are you doing?” He thought it was blood. Yeah, that was a fun picture to take…
