Connected at the Follicles

Since he first emerged as a solo artist in 2002, my sole exposure to Ben Kweller was relegated to backseats of cars in high school and the rare occasion when my girlfriend would put on a song of his on a long road trip. From what I could tell, his songs were tight, charming, and catchier than Ozzie Smith in 1994, which would seem like a perfect match for my love of toothache pop and shaggy roustabouts. I just never really paid much attention to him personally because his first album featured a precocious-looking boy (Kweller at 20 years old) with chipmunk cheeks brushing his teeth, and that sight threatened to blow my cute fuse.

This past Saturday, I watched that same precocious ragamuffin put down the toothbrush and pick up a six string for a concert at Lincoln Hall. After a brief pandering to the delighted Chicago audience, Kweller and his bandmates kicked things off with the crunchy, Fountains of Wayne-aping "Mean to Me," and though the lighting was dim (possibly to hide any signs of aging on the forever-boy-rocker's face), I could see that Kweller's new longer, wavy locks bore a stunning resemblance to those of another young, prodigiously talented singer of a much more aggressive variety: the late, brilliant, punk goliath Jay Reatard.

I saw Reatard at his last Austin, TX show in 2009 while he was promoting what would be his final album, "Watch Me Fall." That show was certainly a different beast from Kweller's intimate, inviting set on Saturday night. Whereas Kweller performed at the new Lincoln Hall in all its perfect-sounding glory, Reatard's show was at Emo's, the legendary punk club with legendarily awful sound. Kweller's hour-long set was interspersed with charming anecdotes about his attempts to quit smoking and how much he missed his wife and children; Reatard broke the sound barrier by playing nearly twenty songs in his forty-minute performance, saying nary a word during breaks. Kweller proved himself to be the ultimate good sport, having friendly back-and-forth banter with his fans and returning promptly for an encore during which he played one of his biggest hits, "Wasted and Ready;" Reatard's set ended with two fans throwing firecrackers on the ground, running onstage, and trying to punch Reatard in the face while he fought them off with the mike stand and eventually left the stage with his middle fingers raised. It was the very coolest.

You may wonder what, aside from their hair, the two guys in these pictures have in common. Quick answer: gnarly Gibson guitars. Real answer: they represent a fascinating case study in the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate. Kweller and Reatard were born within a year of each other ('80 and '81, respectively) and grew up in Southern towns with exposure to music at very early ages. They both released their first albums when they were fifteen years old and both tinkered around with several bands and side projects before achieving great acclaim with solo debuts that each had iconic covers.

If those covers weren't clear enough evidence, Reatard has a much darker worldview than Kweller (Sample Kweller lyric: "I'm in love with someone who's as pretty as a flower;" Sample Reatard lyric: "To me, you see, you always were a cunt.") Both singers have world-class ears for melodies and hooks, but they're utilized in entirely different ways. Kweller surrounds his quirky observations of teenage angst and young adulthood with either sparse guitars and pianos or crisply arranged rock and roll. Reatard, however, sings almost exclusively about the failures of society or the human body to the accompaniment of crashing cymbals and mega-fuzzed guitar or in-the-red new wave synths and disembodying reverb. While Ben Kweller is constantly inviting his audience into his wonderful world through clean vocals and lyrics rife with details from his personal life, Reatard seems to be searching for a way to alienate himself from his audience by hiding behind a goofy voice and sedimentary layers of distortion. And by punching them in the face.

It's entirely possible that these discrepancies in style can be attributed simply to the fact that people have different tastes, but I think this has more to do with their respective upbringings and lifestyles. Kweller was born in San Francisco, but grew up in the sleepy town of Greenville, TX, of which he is a "Notable resident and native," according to Wikipedia. Kweller's father, the first doctor in the history of Greenville, taught him how to drum and play guitar at age three . Kweller then began to write songs of his own and pursue them professionally from the time that he was eight. By fifteen, Kweller and his friends from school formed a nationally recognized buzz band, Radish, whose first album was recorded and released by Mercury Records. By twenty he had moved to Brooklyn and gotten married. He has two kids who are both unsettlingly precious, and all-in-all seems to be a pretty together guy.

Reatard (Born James Lindsey) grew up in North Memphis, which is the setting of the recent documentary tour de force Undefeated and is notable for being a tourist destination for those who can't afford to visit Haiti but would like to see a place of equal societal disarray. In the film Better than Something, Reatard describes falling asleep to the sound of police sirens and gunshots. He gets his unfortunate nom de plume from the fact that his grandmother ran a home for adults with intellectual disabilities and his only friends growing up were the 40-year-old women who lived there. By the age of fifteen, Reatard had also recorded his first album, but not before dropping out of school. Also, that album was recorded in his bedroom and the drums consisted of Reatard banging on a bucket by himself [full disclosure: this is not a very good album].

I'm not saying necessarily that privilege automatically makes you sweet and sunny, nor that a childhood in poverty makes you into a bitter, cynical punk rock misanthrope. However, there is a sort of confidence that comes from growing up comfortably. To wit, The Strokes won our hearts back in 2001 because of their cockiness and brash nonchalance about success; this nonchalance and high self-evaluation came from growing up with guys like fashion mogul John Casablancas as your father. Initially, that charm wore off as The Strokes took years off at a time and then released records that appeared to be written and recorded in a week's time because The Strokes never needed to be work hard to be successful.

Fortunately, Kweller doesn't seem to be going that route. Since his critically acclaimed debut in 2001, he's been diligently putting out workmanlike albums of the exact same quality every couple of years, touring behind them, and then spending the rest of his time with his family. While he may change up the instrumentation from time to time (adding a pedal steel on Changing Horses, adding the occasional strings on Ben Kweller), he doesn't seem to be interested in putting out anything dramatically different than what he's done before. But that's ok; he doesn't need to. Kweller writes a specific type of song that very few others can pull off with sincerity, so he’s made a career of doing just that. However, it seems that spending time with his family is now much more important than breaking barriers artistically, which probably was never one of his goals in the first place.

Reatard, on the other hand, left behind an impenetrably large discography for such a short career. In interviews he claimed to write songs every day and record them every week. In 2010, he put out a new single for Matador every month, and was constantly changing his style, eventually even experimenting with psychedelia, folk, and calypso. This kind of drive can only come from a man who has little else going in his life, who needed with every fiber in his being to be constantly creating new music. He talks in Better than Something about wanting to be able to buy his mother a new house--not a big one, just something in a neighborhood with fewer gangs. It was unlikely that Reatard would ever have been a huge success commercially, but the fact that he had to think that way was clearly what drove him to create such angry, vital work.

Ben Kweller probably won't ever write anything as visceral as Reatard's "My Shadow," or as epic as his "Always Wanting More," but he'll always be able to cook up a fresh batch of perfect pop, and it seems like he's got a pretty fantastic life. For that, I respect the hell out of the guy, and not just because he has fantastic, flowing rock-star locks.