He was almost a rock’n'roll legend and he wasn’t even 30; unfortunately – as often happens – his status became godlike when he unexpectedly died less than two years ago, on Januay, 13 of 2010.
We’re talking about Jay Reatard (alias Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr.), punk rock and rock musician extraordinaire.

Jay started making music and releasing records in the Nineties, when he was a teenager (15 years old, actually), at first in the super punky and trashy band The Reatards, then also with the synth punk band The Lost Sounds – a side project that rapidly became a huge underground favourite of critics and fans.

By 2005 both the Reatards and the Lost Sounds had broken up, and Jay assembled a handful of side projects, working with and releasing material as Terror Visions and Destruction Unit. After he began focusing on his solo career in 2006, he said he had no desire to reform his previous bands: “I’d just feel like I was going backwards if I worked on anything else”.

His discography is long and rich, despite his young age and his premature death. But his best legacy is in the form of a rock documentary called Better Than Something: Jay Reatard, by filmmakers Ian Markiewicz and Alex Hammond.

As Markiewicz explained, the documentary was a bizarre operation: “Jay was getting kind of pissed at the press. Any time anyone would do a story on him, it was just about how fucked up he was, and going down to Memphis and getting messed up with him. Jay had an idea: Let’s do a film. He wanted to somehow clear the ear or tell his side or whatever it was. They looked at a few different filmmakers, but for whatever reason, when he met with us he said, ‘This is it’“.

And Hammond added: “One of the things he said during that interview was that he didn’t want a fan to make the film. He wanted someone from the outside, to drop in and get an honest picture of his story. Two weeks later we were flying down to Memphis“.

The documentary is being screened at various film festivals and it’s getting rave reviews.