jay bennett

A Week With Jay Bennett's "The Magnificent Defeat": Day 3

25 October 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Erica Parrott
A reputation precedes Jay Bennett. He’s got it like a piece of fluttering and torn toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe when he leaves the john (anyone else ever figured out why so many sight gags have revolved around the concept; probably the same reason farts get laughs?). He’s known as that shaggy, hard-headed nicotine-aholic who was edited in and out of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” and made to look like a real dickhead. He was the guy at the mixing board helplessly pleading with Jeff Tweedy that he needed him to understand him. How does that get anyone a reputation of being a real bull in the studio? How does that get someone the label of being a dictator. I have a strict policy of not reading anything about an record before I write about it first. Today, that got bent because I was just too interested in the short blurb about “The Magnificent Defeat” I stumbled upon. So it happened. Before I knew it, I was reading, crossing the short column row from left to right and realizing that reputation had struck again, bringing ill will to a record that doesn’t deserve it. From here on out, Justin Timberlake will always warrant mentions of his bringing certain things back, The Killer – Jerry Lee Lewis – is always the guy who married his 13-year-old cousin and fuckin’ Don McLean is forever driving his Chevy to the levy and finding it dry. Some of those might not be reputations, but it’s the same principle. Bennett’s always going to be known as the guy kicked out of Wilco during the beginning of its great ascent. And he’s always going to be pegged as a dude – a producer – who goes to make a record and gets all masturbatory in there. He admitted to us that sometimes he’s got all this stuff and he feels like he had to use it in his recordings just because he has it. That’s a sign, yes, but the real sign that he’s not like that anymore – despite what some have rashly concluded through little to no exploration – is this album. It has the perfect hour glass figure. It’s lush in all the right places and trim in the rest. There is absolutely no superfluous motion or effort, no matter what some people will try to feed you. He read these songs magnificently, kept the trinkets and sleight of hand minimal. He did away with the footnotes and the bibliography. Nothing’s cluttered and it’s amazing to see everything pruned to where it belongs. We could say, “That’s not like Jay,” but then we’d be no better than THEM – stupid reputation memoirists.

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