Attention Crowd Crashers: Jay Reatard <i>Will</i> Hurt You

anthonyjmiccio | April 21, 2008 2:30 am
Thursday night was not a good one for aggro rocker Jay Reatard: damaged equipment, overcrowded venue, rowdy assholes. So hopefully it was cathartic when he ripped the shirt off a drunk dumbass, spun him around and clocked him in the face. Damn!

Last night’s show in Toronto got completely fucked up. The Silver Dollar holds 190 people but Craig Laskey the promoter let 350 people in there. That’s cool if there’s some sort of security or crowd control – we don’t need people getting so wild they jump on stage and smash our gear – but that’s exactly what happened. Right when we started playing someone pushed the monitors right on top of Stephen and on to his pedals – breaking them, people were throwing beer bottles at us, a someone jumped onstage and smashed my pedals, another guy took a full pitcher of beer and dumped it all over the rest of my pedals, and then threw it right at my Flying V, breaking the pickup and the input electronics. After three songs all our gear was smashed and unusable.

…I’m getting really sick of shit like this happening. We’ll come back in Toronto soon and do a free show to make it up to the real fans in Toronto. And we’ll steer away from greedy promoters who don’t have any control of their shows and who don’t care about doing right by the audience.

“Shit like this” does seem to happen to Reatard more often than, say, to Cat Power. You can see him kick a guy in the chest twice at the end of this clip.

I doubt violent YouTubes like this will keep jerks like this away from his shows, so he might want stick to clubs with taller stages.

Jay Reatard [blogspot.com] Jay Reatard punching kid at the Silver Dollar [YouTube] Jay Reatard – Kicks a dude in the face in Vegas! [YouTube]

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