Jay Bennett Gets His Documentary Due With Some New Records Too

In the last episode of Wilcopedia (The Blog), the focus was on the coverage of the 20th Anniversary of the release of Wilco’s breakthrough masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but there’s an important sidebar to the story that wasn’t given ample space.

That would be that the album’s co-creator, former Wilco member Jay Bennett (1963-2009), is sharing the same anniversary as his collaboration with Edward Burch, The Palace at 4am (Part 1), was released on the same day (April 23, 2002) as YHF, and the multi-instrumentalist is the subject of a new documentary, Gorman Bechard and Fred Uhter’s JAY BENNETT, WHERE ARE YOU?, which dropped on DVD/Blu ray on April 19.

Bechard and Uhter’s film is a thorough portrait of the life and career of Bennett from his upbringing in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, to his time in the power pop group, Titanic Love Affair, and then onto his defining role in Wilco, mastering various instruments, and collecting all kinds of vintage gear along the way. Bennett had joined Jeff Tweedy and company too late to be a part of their debut, A.M., but just in time to be a touring member, and his influence in the studio was big on the band’s still rootsy, but much wider-ranging second album, Being There, and even bigger on the orchestral pop of the follow-up, Summerteeth.

As the legend goes, the sessions for YHF were where Bennett and Tweedy’s once infectiously fruitful collaboration fell apart, which resulted in Bennett’s departure. The filmmakers have assembled a rich roster of interviewees to take us through these sometimes uneasy background beats including Bennett’s mother Janis, his musical partner, Edward Burch; Greg Kot, who wrote the first book on the band, Wilco: Learning How to Die (2004); original Wilco drummer Ken Coomer, former Wilco production manager Jonathan “JP” Parker, British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, and Nora Guthrie. Tweedy declined to be in the film, so he’s represented by excerpts from the audiobook of his autobiography, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.

Of course, some of the ground well trodden in Sam Jones’ I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART - i.e. Bennett and Tweedy’s awkward, edgy argument during the YHF sessions – is trodden over again, but it’s really affecting to hear phone recordings of Bennett trying to cope with the sad situation, and to get his friends’ takes on how damaging his portrayal in that documentary was to him.

Bennett followed up Palace at 4am, which got its first ever vinyl release last year, with five solo albums, the last two of which, Whatever Happened I Apologize (2008), and Kicking at the Perfumed Air (2010), were released on vinyl together on Record Store Day, in gate-fold packaging that makes it look like the soundtrack to the documentary, but very little (none?) of the music is actually in the film. No matter, it’s a cool double album that captures the last chapter of the man’s immaculately tuneful career. And the 2LP set comes with a DVD of the documentary too.

JAY BENNETT, WHERE ARE YOU? is a loving doc depiction of a man who lived for music, and left a large stamp on the sound of Wilco, and in the hearts of all the rock ‘n roll lovers who came into his orbit. With hope, the abundant passion within Bechard and Uhter’s portrait will help to keep the master musician from fading into a footnote. I believe it will be greatly beneficial to Bennett’s legacy, and I’m not just saying that because a quote of mine from Wilcopedia appears in the film. Well, maybe a little.

Extras: The five hours of bonus material includes full interviews with Coomer, Bragg, Jay’s mom, Janis; Deleted Scenes, Q&A with Directors, World Premiere Tribute Concert, and more (including something called “Ketchup, Ketchup, and More Ketchup,” which I obviously haven’t watched yet).

For more about Bennett, and this documentary, please check out my epic three part interview with Edward Burch: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

More later…

Edward Burch: The Wilcopedia Interview Part 3

This is the third and final part of my conversation with Edward Burch, a St. Louis-based musician who works at the Animal Protective Association of Missouri. In the first entry, we talked about Burch’s collaboration with his friend Jay Bennett, a member of Wilco from 1994-2001, on their superb 2002 album, The Palace at 4am (Part 1), which will make its vinyl debut tomorrow, on Record Store Day (September 26).

In the second entry, we talked about Bennett and Burch’s tour for the album in 2002-2003, and also touched on Bennett’s solo work that followed The Palace at 4am, and the years leading up to his death in 2009.

Here, we talk about the Gorman Bechard’s upcoming documentary about Bennett, our shared love of The Replacements, a few of the Wilco songs that Bennett co-wrote, and I tell a story about meeting Bennett after one of their shows in 2002.

Daniel Johnson: “Now, the documentary about Bennett, WHERE ARE YOU, JAY BENNETT? – have you seen a cut of it?”

Edward Burch: “Yes, in fact Gorman (Bechard), the Director, is sending me the color-corrected copy probably in the next couple of days. I’ve seen what is the locked picture print, and it’s coming together very well.”

DJ: “So you like what you’ve seen?”

EB: “The film is doing its best to tell as broad of a portrait of what Jay was about. Not just that the fact that he was a member of Wilco, but looking at his life before, looking at his life after, and I think it’s going to be a really great film. I’m grateful to have contributed what I could to that process.

Neither Jeff Tweedy nor John Stirratt, current Wilco members who actually worked with Jay, agreed to do interviews for the film. So Gorman is using snippets of Jeff’s audio from reading his book. So Jeff’s presence in the film is from either those audio clips, or both Jeff and Stirratt end up appearing from previous interview footage from other sources. But Ken Coomer (Wilco drummer 1994-2001) did agree to talk for the film, as did Max Johnston, Daniel Hurbst who was the road manger, and Jonathan Parker, who was the road tech guy/stage manager. So a lot of previous Wilco-related people appear in the film. But Jeff and John only appear from previous sources. We reached out to them many times.

I sent Jeff a note saying ‘We’re not going to ask you any hard-pressing, controversial kind of things, we just want you to speak of what was it like working with Jay when things were going well. Just let him talk about that. You don’t have to talk about the dissent into drug abuse, or even the decision to let him go. You can pick and chose what you want to talk about. And he wasn’t even really interested in that, which is unfortunate. Because I was around when their creative partnership is at its peak, and they really got along, and they enjoyed each other, and as we know from the records we have from that period they collaborated on some really great music.”

DJ: “I like Gorman Bechard’s films, but had mixed feelings about The Replacements documentary (COLOR ME OBSESSED), but maybe that was more of a personal thing as they are my favorite band. His approach of not actually having any Replacements stuff in it, I don’t know if that went over as well as the concept.”

EB: “Well, I will tell you – the reason we approached Gorman to do the film was precisely because of the Replacements documentary. I’m with you though – the first time I saw the film, I was just kind of like ‘meh’ and not quite getting it. The second time I watched it, I was like ‘oh, now it all makes sense.’  The conceit of the film is here’s a band that does not give a fuck about publicity, or any of the machinations of the music industry, or all of that kind of stuff. So to have a documentary where there’s no footage of the band, there’s no music of the band, all it is is people who have been around at different times in the band’s career just telling their stories.”

DJ: “I definitely need to watch it again.”

EB: “There was something about the Replacements that the way that you came to them. You came to them because somebody that you knew, said ‘oh, have you heard this record? Oh, have you seen them play live?’ It was a band that found its audience because the people who had first seen them or heard them found something within it and they were like ‘this is amazing and I’ve have to share this with other people.’ So, for me, the documentary is all these people sharing and reminiscing about how that particular process came together to help them find their audience. I’m not a fan of idol worship, but certainly when I was in my mid-late 20s, when The Replacements were doing their thing, I was like ‘I fuckin’ love these guys!’

Certainly, part of that was listening to their records. But part of it was friends who would go with me to shows, or the friend who initially turned me on to their records. So the documentary is taking a very non-standard approach, and letting the people who love the band tell you why they love the band. Here, I’ll throw this out to you, and you’ll probably agree: if Bob Stinson never recorded anything except for the guitar playing he does on ‘Nowhere is My Home’ he would still be one of the greatest rock guitarists that the world has ever produced.”

DJ: “I wanted to ask you about ‘My Darling.’ It’s credited to Bennett and Tweedy, but Bennett said he had the song a long time before that, and there was a deal where Magnet Magazine had this review of Summerteeth which said that despite that the album was bright, and sun-shiny sounding, there was a lot of darkness there. They pinpointed the line in ‘My Darling’ that was ‘we were a family,’ and Bennett wrote them saying ‘that’s not dark,’ that it was a positive song about looking back, so it makes me wonder – does Tweedy actually have any song-writing credit in ‘My Darling?’ It seems like it was fully formed before it got to Summerteeth.”

EB: “Here’s what I can tell you. Jay wrote the song. It is his song. I think he, as a courtesy gesture, gave Jeff supplemental writing credit because there are some slight differences musically, or even a couple of lyrical substitutions, or whatever that happened in the Wilco version. I think he did it as a gesture. I would say also that the version that appears on The Palace at 4am – our version credits it as me and Jay, but it’s really mainly Jay. My only contribution to the song was to say, ‘let’s do this descending line like the Big Star song – ‘Lord, I’ve been trying’ – whatever that song is. ‘Try Again.’ That was my writing contribution to the song, which is obviously very minimal. It’s 100% a Jay song. I got a gratuitous writing credit on Palace; Jeff got a gratuitous writing credit on Summerteeth.”

DJ: “It’s interesting to me because Wilco did the song every night on the Summerteeth tour, and they even played it on some TV show, but when Bennett left the band, it’s like he took the song with him. Wilco didn’t do it for years, until a run of shows in Chicago at Riviera Theater in 2006 where the deal was they were playing every song they ever done so, of course, they had to do that song too. Tweedy – I found the bootleg of the show – didn’t give any credit, he just said to the audience – ‘do you want to hear a lullaby?’ Since then, they’ve done it maybe once or twice, but it’s kind of an outlier in the Wilco catalogue.”

EB: “Same goes for ‘Pieholden Suite.’ In the whole of their career, they’ve only done it seven or eight times.” I certainly hope that nothing I’ve talked about this evening is in any way bad-mouthing Jeff. I think he’s a very talented person, and like any human being, he has his own issues. I might wish that he could’ve found within him the strength to deal with Jay especially in the post-Wilco world at a more empathetic level, and it didn’t happen that way. I know that Wilco have done good and interesting work post-Jay, I personally never chose to follow it. That was my own thing.”

DJ: “When you look at a list of the songs that Bennett and Tweedy co-wrote together – that is pretty amazing. Those are the songs most Wilco fans most hold dear. Even if they like later stuff, those are the core of Wilco love. The fact that the last song they ever wrote together was ‘Jesus Etc.’…that’s pretty freaking amazing.”

EB: “Oh, and by the way, just so you know, the lyric ‘Turning your orbit around’ – that is a Jay Bennett lyric.”

DJ: “Oh, I love stuff like that. That’ll probably make the next edition of Wilcopedia! So I have a story – When I saw you and Bennett play at Go! Studios in Carrboro in 2002, I met Bennett and talked with him briefly, and you weren’t around. You guys had been onstage so long that most people had left, and it seemed like you were doing more stand-up comedy than even you were doing songs that night.”

EB: “That happened sometimes.”

DJ: “I loved it though, but then afterward I was about to leave, and my friend said ‘you said you wanted to get the CD, you haven’t bought the CD, why don’t you go and buy it and get it signed? Jay Bennett is right over there.’ So I was like ‘okay, you’re right.’ So I go up there, and I feel like an asshole doing this, but I said ‘hey, I love that band you used to be in.’ And Jay’s eyes glazed over and I said ‘you know, Titanic Love Affair!’ And he laughed. But what’s funnier is that he signed the CD, ‘Thanks for tolerating us!’

EB: (laughs) “What would have been better is if you had a copy of Steve Pride and His Bloodkin*, and said ‘Oh, and I love this band too!”

* Bennett performs on Pride on Pride (1999)

The new vinyl re-issue of Jay Bennett and Edward Burch's 2002 release The Palace at 4am (Part 1) goes on sale on the September 26 Record Store Day Drop at participating independent music retailers.