After several years of living and recording in Chicago, Jay Bennett was looking for a place where making music could be a part of his life, not his whole life. According to Matt DeWine, who manages Bennett’s studio, Pieholden Suite Sound, in Rantoul, “He needed to take a step back from recording. He was living at the old studio for a number of years, and in his words, dealing with a lot of things in his life.”
DeWine continued, “When he pulled the plug and pulled out of Chicago, he was taking his own life back and getting in a healthier place. He wasn’t involved in the day-to-day [operation of Pieholden Suite], but it was his studio, he knew where it was headed and he was really excited to get back into it once we could decide how we were going to do that. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite get back to that point.”
MOURNING WHILE KEEPING ON
It’s been just over a year since Bennett passed away on May 24, 2009, and his family and friends have been working tirelessly to preserve his legacy. The Jay Bennett Foundation, an organization supporting music and education, was launched on May 24 of this year, and on July 10, a new Bennett album, Kicking at the Perfumed Air, will be released. The album will be available as a free download, and listeners will be asked to donate an amount of their choosing to the Foundation.
“Twice A Year,” Jay Bennett
In a press release, Bennett’s brother Jeff said, “Those of us who loved Jay lost a son, a brother, a collaborator and a loyal friend. The world lost a gifted musician, thoughtful song-writer and uniquely creative force in the studio who was always working to make music better. This album is part of a larger effort to honor Jay’s memory and enhance his legacy by exposing more people to his music and by supporting charitable efforts to make the world a better place.”
In addition to keeping the studio going, DeWine has spent much of the past year helping to assemble the album. “Basically pick the songs and pick the order is what we did. We were already working with Jay on doing that for two years,” DeWine stated. He struggled with describing whether Bennett had left his recordings in a completed state or not. “It’s hard to call it completed, because he didn’t get the final sign-off,” DeWine noted.
“Jay would finish an idea. Most musicians will start a song, do some overdubs, fuck around with it, get upset, and then throw it away. Jay would always see a song to completion and then set it on a shelf and not look at it for five years. To me, it sounds like one of his most holistic records.”
And there’s no shortage of material to choose from for subsequent albums. “He recorded on every media known to man, so I’ve got pretty much a whole storage unit filled with every media, every tape,” DeWine said. “A lot of these machines I don’t even have, so I’ll have to get on eBay and find ’em, find somebody to fix it, and then transfer it off said media. It’s a logistical nightmare, but I think it’ll be cool once we figure out what’s there.
“If this release goes well, hopefully we’ll continue to put out music for free and have any donations go to the foundation or one of its partner non-profits.”
PRESERVING THE SPACE
The nondescript Pieholden Suite Sound storefront is shoehorned between a defunct movie theater and an old sporting goods store in downtown Rantoul. You’d never even notice it was there unless you were looking for its specific address. But once you’re inside, it has an unmistakably warm, welcoming vibe.
The studio’s name is obviously derived from the Wilco song “Pieholden Suite,” but DeWine explains the origin of that phrase. “The word Pieholden is actually a made-up word,” he related. “Wilco was at, like, a flea market in Europe and some dude was selling some sort of street food/pocket/pita-esque thing, and as far as they could tell, he was saying ‘Pieholden! Get your pieholden!’ So they kind of stole that, and the song came from that, and then Jay made the play on words Pieholden Suite Sound.”
And that name has applied to several different locations where Bennett had studios. “Pieholden Suite Sound is just always wherever Jay’s gear was set up,” DeWine explained. “It technically was in Champaign once before in a loft in downtown … that I was just at the other day, and this dude still lives there. So wherever [Bennett’s] house or his studio or his loft was, is Pieholden.”
DeWine got to know Bennett when both were living in Chicago. “Jay said one time, ‘You’re always welcome here [in the studio],’ and I took him at face value and just showed up every day for the rest of my life,” taking on an internship of indeterminate length. “I don’t know if he was just being polite or serious, but I wasn’t going to not hang out in the coolest place with the coolest guy.”
And then, “Four or five years ago, he was looking to get back to Champaign where property was affordable and lifestyle being clean and fun. He just missed Champaign, so he got this little space, and got a little house in Urbana. [The studio space] sat chill for a while, and then I started leaning on him, I was missing the studio, and he was cool with me getting it going, so he just gave me the keys and a bank account, and he just let me build it. We worked together long enough that I knew what kind of place he wanted, and it grew from there.”
DeWine thoroughly enjoys working with the vintage recording equipment that Bennett amassed. “Jay was just really into fun recording toys, and being a major-label recording artist, he could afford the fun, dream toys. He was just real cool about getting… most of the stuff in these racks is older than us. The build quality is just of a generation that no longer exists. And a lot of it is tube-based, which they still do, but not quite as well and not quite as much. It’s just a dream to come here and work. Tube pre-amps, vintage compressors, a lot of cool eq’s, weird tape machines everywhere, fun effects racks. It was just Jay digging in pawnshops and basements and digging up the real cool old stuff and putting the time and money and effort into keeping working.”
While DeWine admits that the studio hasn’t exactly been overwhelmed with business in the last year, there have been enough bands make use of the space to make ends meet. Several Chicago bands like Brother Truck and Notes and Scratches have recorded there, and Santah‘s White Noise Bed was made at Pieholden. “It was cool meeting those dudes [from Santah],” DeWine said. “There’s not a ton of local business, but when I can meet some local musicians and make some friends and make a cool record, that was a lot of fun.”
DeWine is very clear in describing Pieholden’s mission and his responsibility in keeping it going. “Jay was privileged enough to surround himself with all these instruments and all this gear,” he shared. “He wasn’t necessarily trying to run a fully commercial studio so much as a great studio that made great music and paid the bills and got by, but it wasn’t so much about what made business sense as what makes sense to make cool records.
“And in his mind, it was surrounding yourself with really great instruments and really great recording gear in a cool place with good people and kind of doing it like that, you know?”
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Gillian Gabriel contributed to the reporting for this article.