The Chicago Sun Times reports that Jay Bennett, formerly of Titanic Love Affair and Wilco, died this morning at the age of 45. If you're a Wilco fan, then you know that Jay's fingerprints are all over their three best albums: Being There, Summer Teeth, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. You also know that he was portrayed as an impossible collaborator in the movie I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which documented Wilco around the time of the making and release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The uncomfortable dynamics between him and lead singer Jeff Tweedy gave the film its cringe moments and also resulted in his departure from Wilco in 2001.
I saw Jay play a solo show a few months later, in a small NYC club in front of maybe 100 people. This was after seeing him with Wilco a year earlier playing a sold out show at the legendary Town Hall. He was almost starting from scratch...
I think his greatest contribution to Wilco is the "sonic landscape" that he refers to in the aforementioned documentary. You got the feeling that Jeff Tweedy would enter the studio with a simple, albeit beautiful, acoustic song and Jay would send it over the top with organ, piano loops and guitar noise. His contributions meant that the band went from the run-of-the-mill alt-country of A.M. to the looser experimental songs on Being There. This outtake shows some of that tension between Jay and Jeff (together at the piano) as well as some of Jay's trademark noise (around the two-minute mark).
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