A mere three weeks before his 17-date European tour, Jay Reatard (real name Jay Lindsay) found himself without a band. [Photo credit Rob Walbers.]

His tersely-worded, spelling-grammar-error hilarious Twitter response read: “Band quit ! Fuck them ! They are boring rich kids who can’t play for ahit anyways .. Say hello to your ugly and boring wifes opps I mean lifes guys suck it.”

That was October 6.

I spoke with the prolific punk rocker by phone nearly seven weeks later and a few shows into his current U.S. tour, and he still seemed bitterly bemused. “We never talked about it. There wasn’t any sort of ‘I’m not happy in this situation, can we fix this?’ There was no talk of compromise or facilitating some sort of needs that they had for the road. It was just like, ‘Hey man, we quit, we’re on your porch, can we have our money?’” He laughed unhappily. “But you know, maybe I did do something really wrong and I’m just delusional and I don’t know it.”

The desertion by Billy Hayes and Stephen Pope has been linked to Jay’s concert antics. (the most recent YouTube clip featured Jay peeing on Pope during a jam) [CORRECTION: According to Jay via Twitter, the aforementioned antics did not include this video clip, which was from a Reatards reunion show; the person peed on was from that band and was not, in fact, Pope.] But the two wouldn’t have joined lo-fi garage group Wavves a month later if they couldn’t handle frontman drama, right? Lead singer/visionary Nathan Williams’ track record includes a very public onstage meltdown in Barcelona earlier this year that cost him a drummer and led to the cancellation of Wavves’ European tour.

For Jay, it was important that his overseas dates continued as planned. “I was like, well, I have this European tour — why don’t I just get some Europeans? This band, the Cola Freaks from Denmark, immediately came to mind ‘cause we did about a month of dates in the U.S. last year.” The Cola Freaks weren’t active at the time, and bassist Anders Thode and drummer Jacob Elving quickly agreed to fill the vacancies.

This article appears in Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2009.