AN OPEN LETTER TO JAY BENNETT, FROM THE PRUDENT BEAR

 

Dear Jay,

 

How’s it going?  We know that you’ve never met any of us, and that if you had, you probably wouldn’t think twice about it.  You’d see us as just another pathetic bevy of devoted male Midwestern musical would-be-acolytes.  You’d see us as an obsequious bunch of wanna-bes who saw I Am Trying To Break Your Heart at our local pretentious art house movie theater and decided that if the (forgive me) unphotogenic dudes from Wilco could make great, interesting, mature music in the face of a calculated and uncaring and imagistic music biz, that we too could find ourselves (one day) basking in the throes of a nifty Chicago loft, making noise until 3:00 A.M. or running up a $1000 per day bill at an expensive Chicago studio with anonymous effeminate-haired audio geniuses tweaking knobs in a businesslike manner while we members of the band bitch at each other about eq and the muting of outro tracks.

 

But that would not be a true picture!  We assure you that that is not where we’re coming from.  We are not fanatics, Jay, but fans.  Big ones!  And we think you got screwed by that D.A. Pennebaker-wanna-be filmmaker.  And maybe by Jeff Tweedy—although we still love him and haven’t yet gotten to the point where we are able to cast any kind of negative judgment upon the composer of “Kamera” and “Poor Places”—although we know, believe us we know, that you had a hand in writing the music and lyrics to both of these brilliant songs.  Heck: that Tweedy is something else, but he sure does travel far and wide to find brilliant collaborators, doesn’t he?  From Jay Farrar to Jim O’Rourke to…gulp…Woody Guthrie…to you, Jay.  Makes you wonder if he’s really got the wherewithal to do it himself, doesn’t it?  You know something, we don’t think he does have the chops and the audacity that it takes to make a miracle like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot happen unilaterally.

 

Sure, he could come up with a sweet-sounding melody, but is that all that YHF is really about?  Hell no!  It’s about the ejaculatory slide guitar breaks on “Pot Kettle Black.”  It’s about the noisy shit that overtakes the mix during the endings of “Poor Places” and “Ashes of American Flags”…and probably two or three of the other songs.  It’s about the psychedelic keyboard sounds during “Heavy Metal Drummer” after Tweedy all-too-cutely intones: “beautiful and stoned.”

 

Let’s get off the topic of Tweedy, shall we?  The Palace at 4AM proves that you can do it all by yourself.  The bothersome presence of that “Edward Burch” character (who quite frankly strikes us as a bit of Jay Bennett wannabe with his purported facility on myriad musical instruments and his Jay Bennett-esque thick-framed specks and his shared propensity for transparently ostentatious and self-aggrandizing sleeve notes) notwithstanding, you really proved what you could do.  NOT THAT WE DOUBTED YOU FOR AS MUCH AS A SECOND.  (Track six is especially good.)

 

So, Jay.  Now we have your attention, consider the following:

 

1.     When our lead singer was in Rush-mor Records on the south side a couple weeks ago, the tastefully mutton-chopped proprietor of the institution told us that you have been producing a Milwaukee band.  He (our lead singer) didn’t remember the name of the band, but we’ve heard about this before.  Not only are we excited that another Milwaukee group has been blessed with the honor of working with you, but we are excited about the idea itself of hearing some of your handiwork, without a mixer like Jim O’Rourke to come along and change the vision.  Not knocking Jim, mind you (hi, Jim, we love the new Sonic Youth record)!  Just…you know.  We heard you weren’t around for the mixes, and that’s a fucking shame.  Maybe had you been around you could have brought the keyboard shit up in the mix a bit during “War on War”?

 

2.     We know that you like helping out people who hand new sounds and new ideas and who care about the music as opposed to looking like pretty boys.  We’re covered on the non-pretty-boy front!  Take a look at the pictures section of our ugly web site, pretty boys we are not.  Not naming names, I would say that in those pictures, one or two of us look downright ugly!  Now, of course, in real life we’re not ugly (ugly is such a strong word), but pretty boys WE ARE NOT.  And music, Jay!  Trust us, we care about the music.

 

3.     Though we’ve got strong ideas of our own, we are open to new ones!  Say, for instance, if we had a song in the key of C or something, and you suggested changing it to Eb to better fit our singer’s vocal range, hell, we’d oblige faster than you can say: “I, Jay Bennett, played the mellotron on ‘She’s A Jar.’”  In fact, Eb is our keyboardist’s favorite key.

 

4.     We’ve heard that you like to…ahem…party from time to time, and hey!  So do we!

 

5.     We think your dreadlocks are fucking awesome!

 

So we think there really should be no doubt about it.  We’re the next band to work with.  THIS IS NOT A JOKE, SO please take us seriously, Jay.  We have so much to offer and the mp3s on our mp3.com site, those are just jokes.  We sound easily 10X better than that!  We don’t always give our bass player access to a microphone!  We’ve got good taste!  We didn’t really listen to that much prog rock when we were teenagers!  We’ve been to fewer than 10 Phish concerts among us!  We’re not posers.  Please please please please please record with us, Jay.  Not a single one of us possesses so much as an mp3 from that Jeff Tweedy solo record!  PLEASE RECORD WITH US JAY!!!

 

Respectfully,

The Prudent Bear

 

 

        Bizzack