Caught in the Carousel

JAY WALTER BENNETT (1963 - 2009)

By Rob Roberge

Jay Bennett

I was a fan of Jay Bennett's a lot longer than I was his friend. And I don't want to overstate our friendship. One of the things I hated in the wake of David Foster Wallace's death last year was how many writers came out of the woodwork calling him "Dave" and taking a stance of intimacy that seemed designed to celebrate themselves and elevate their statue by using the death of a more famous acquaintance. This, of course, doesn't apply to all of the pieces on Wallace, but some, and it's something I want to avoid here.

Jay Bennett

Jay and I weren't life-long, incredibly close friends. We got to know each other only over the last couple of years via email. I had contacted him with something like a fan letter for The Magnificient Defeat, and, from there, we ended up finding we had a lot in common and stayed in steady touch until his recent hip replacement woes made our contact less frequent. I owed him an email—his last to me had been a kind and generous one, and I was thinking less than a week before he died that once this busy time of work was over, I'd drop him a long catch-up email. It's one I, very sadly, will never get to write.

Jay Bennett

Jay and I talked about a lot of things. We shared a passion for music, for writing, for education and we were both gear geeks and electronic tinkerers on our equipment. We talked about various modifications on tube amps. We talked about tones we loved and songs we loved. About how we liked Gibson acoustics better than Martins. We talked about recording and how plugging in the guitar bothered my cats and not his. We talked about staying sober, which we were both trying, successfully, to do. We talked about our drugs of choice that we were not doing and about how it was harder to stay away from them during the holidays. We talked about quitting smoking, which I was doing when we first became friends. Jay had cut down to five a day.

"If I can keep it at five a day, that's quitting for me," he said. I agreed, saying if I could keep it at five I probably wouldn't have to quit.

Jay Bennett

Jay was one of the brightest, funniest, and most mentally active people I've ever met. He had a restless, intense intelligence that was a pleasure and an honor to get to know. Aside from the music we know him for, Jay had, I'm pretty sure, two school degrees and was working on a third. He talked, often, of plans for the future.

At one point, I told him, while praising "Phone Book" that he should do an Elvis Costello-styled Get Happy type album. His reply was typically ambitious (though not in a bragging way, but more in his endearing child-like enthusiasm): "I SHOULD do a Get Happy album, but first, I'm going to do a sort of American Pogues album and a Tom Waits style album." This, of course, after he finished the album he was then working on, Kicking At The Perfumend Air and the next Bennett-Burch project.

Jay Bennett

It's a testament to Jay's greatness that he left us with one of the most impressive musical careers of his generation—from his work with Titanic Love Affair, his years for which he's best known with Wilco, and his own stellar, criminally overlooked solo (and with Edward Burch on the beautiful The Palace At 4AM) career of five (six if you count the Bennett-Burch Palace 1919) diverse and impressive albums from 2001-on—and there was still so much more to come. I can't think of a more prolific artist who still had so much more to do. And it saddens me deeply to think of all the music we are not going to get now.

Jay Bennett

But that is the professional side. It saddens me even more to know that we are not going to get more of Jay himself. And I selfishly feel bad that I won't hear from him again. His joy and passion were infectious. We had talked about a design for a single-ended tube amp for studio use. I had recently modified a circuit for an amp and he casually mentioned that he was going to make his own for some new recording. Along with all of this, he was a gifted painter. My plan for next year's holiday season was to send him a single-ended studio amp I'd build as a gift and see if I could pry a painting out of him in trade.

I was looking forward to sending him my next book of stories, which, in one story, references a song off Bigger Than Blue (he'd gotten kick out of the Bennett-Burch references in my last novel). I was looking forward to sending him more CDs—as we'd traded some music. I was waiting for some promised demos of his and I now wish I'd been more of a pest about getting them from him.

Jay Bennett

Jay had a great sense of humor. He once sent me a disco song he'd made, seemingly just because he got a kick out of it. "Listen to how cheesy it is!" he'd written to me. And, sure enough, it was cheesy. An authentic late-70's disco instrumental done only because it amused the guy who'd written it—the guy who had the wit and talent and studio chops to make an authentically cheesy disco song just to make himself laugh.

I still have it. It's the worst song I have ever cherished in my life.

Jay believed in heaven. He wrote about seeing his grandparents again in the liner notes of The Beloved Enemy. On this, we part ways. I don't believe in any afterlife, thinking we only get one go around, and nothing more, on this "blighted star" as Thomas Hardy called it in Tess. But Jay believed in it. And, while I'm a stickler for being right, this is an argument I'd be happy to lose. For Jay. For all of us.

Jay Bennett