Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy 9781501323096, 9781501323126, 9781501323102

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24 HOUR REVENGE THERAPY Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch. . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Reviews Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds —Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: Transformer by Ezra Furman In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Rubin Peepshow by Samantha Bennett Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson The Holy Bible by David Evans Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Wagner Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson Southern Accents by Michael Washburn and many more…

24 Hour Revenge Therapy (or, The Strange Death of Selling Out)

Ronen Givony

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Copyright © Ronen Givony, 2018 Cover image © 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-2309-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2310-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-2311-9 1

Series: 33 3

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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. Randall Jarrell, “The Taste of the Age”

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Contents

Introduction 1 Rainy days drop boyish wonder 7 How can I do this better? 17 The clarity of Cal to break your heart 33 These things go wrong so often 45 This is all we want from life 59 Our enemies will laugh and be pointing 101 Selling kids to other kids 119 It’s a long way down again 153 People from bands and labels. The good ones 171 Notes Postscript: Hey, I remember that day Acknowledgments Bibliography

195 203 207 209

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Introduction

At first glance, Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993–94) might seem an unlikely choice for a 33 1/3 treatment. Unlike better-known albums such as Pet Sounds, Exile on Main Street, or Loveless, there was no special mythology attached to its creation, no famously prolonged recording sessions, or bankrupted labels, or rampant drug abuse. Quite the opposite: 24 Hour was made with a minimum of melodrama, over a brisk two days in May 1993, and an additional day of recording a few months later—all for under $2,000. Unlike a Kid A, an Astral Weeks, or an In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, there are no allusions or especially cryptic lyrics on the album to decipher; no surreal imagery or opaque symbolism; no ideology, politics, or allegory to untangle. Song after song, the language of 24 Hour is one of raw and unequivocal desire, heartbreak, wonder, and self-doubt: a register of extreme confessional candor that would seem to require no interpretation at all. Finally, unlike a Bitches Brew, an Entroducing, or an It Takes a Nation of Millions, there is nothing radical or even all that innovative about the sounds, instruments, textures,

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song structures, or production of 24 Hour. (As the album’s uncredited engineer Steve Albini once said: “No great breakthroughs will be made in the punk-pop format, but that can be said about every genre of music.”1) By the same measure, it is fair to call the album something other than universal or timeless. That is: along with countless other guitar bands in the early ’90s, Jawbreaker was very much a band of their moment. If they had found each other even a short time before or after their ten years as a group (1986–96), it seems likely that their story would have ended rather differently. Why, then, 25 years on, does this funny, sad, sweet, bitter, peculiar little album—11 songs and 38 minutes—retain so much of its original loyalty, affection, and reverence? Why, when so many artists came and went in that confounding decade of the ’90s, did Jawbreaker—in their own words, “the little band that could but would probably rather not”—come to seem like more than just another group, like the reason why you got into punk and underground music to start with? Why do they persist, today, in remaining relevant to so many people—an audience larger by orders of magnitude than when they were together? And how did it happen that, two years after releasing their masterpiece, the band that was somehow more than just another band to its fans—closer to equipment for living—was no longer? * * * It’s a romantic, old-fashioned, and largely obsolete notion: it was their sincerity, their intelligence, their perceived authenticity, and—most of all—the gravity of their words, that set Jawbreaker apart, and ultimately did them in. 2

INTRODUCTION

At a time when rock music was overwhelmingly laddish, aggressive, and puerile—has there ever been another?— Jawbreaker was not above expressing hurt, weakness, empathy, and regret. At a time when punk bands all but exclusively wrote about the minutiae of teenage life, their songs were about resisting “the herd of independent minds” and the circular firing squad of scene orthodoxy; about the poverty of other people’s expectations, and the fear of growing complacent; about picking over the scabs of one’s mistakes, and wondering if you weren’t going to end up alone, or settling for a life that was less than the one you deserved. In place of certainty, Jawbreaker dwelt in ambivalence; in place of politics or slogans, their program was one of selfquestioning and self-searching, while still trying to have fun—all expressed in a language that was poetically rich and yet sharp as glass. Then and now, they sounded like a smarter, wittier, more sensitive, observant, and literary version of the many punk and indie bands making music during those years. (Not coincidentally, Jawbreaker is one of the few punk bands ever to count women in significant numbers as fans.) More than Nirvana, more than Operation Ivy, more than Fugazi, even, Jawbreaker was the band that meant everything to the people who knew and cared about them. It was precisely for this reason that, when the romance was over, the rupture and backlash would be as ugly as it was. * * * So what happened? Depending how far back you want to go, you might say it started in the summer of 1993, when 3

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Green Day—like Jawbreaker, part of the fiercely independent, do-it-yourself, all-ages Bay Area punk scene—signed to the major label Reprise. Or before that, in 1990, when Nirvana signed to Geffen Records, and set off a stampede of A&R men in search of the next big guitar band. Going further back, for context, we might point to 1986, when the critic Stanley Crouch eviscerated Miles Davis as a compromised sellout; to 1966, in Manchester, when a “fan” heckled Bob Dylan as “Judas!” for the crime of playing an electric guitar; or even to the late nineteenth century, when Nietzsche dissed his former friend and idol Richard Wagner as “the greatest example of self-violation in the history of art.” The story is an old one, and the same: the once-beloved turncoat or traitor who has sold out his art, his integrity, and his community— all for mere commercial enrichment—and in so doing, has fallen from grace. It sounds impossibly archaic, quaint, naive, even charming, in 2018, when most people no longer think of recorded music as an object of value, deserving of their money or active attention. But there really was a time in the notso-­distant past when musicians and fans genuinely cared whether a big corporation or a small indie label was behind their music; when the questions of authenticity, integrity, and selling out, were a matter of very real importance to artists, critics, and listeners; when the ethos of punk and indie music was understood to have something broadly in common with independent thinking, progressive politics, rejecting mass consumerism, and not accepting things as given. That this impossibly utopian and idealistic moment was less than 20 years ago—maybe less than 10 or 15 years ago, as 4

INTRODUCTION

of this writing—is one of the reasons why Jawbreaker’s story and example remains relevant. That, in hindsight, we might have lost something useful in that unobtainable idealism is, I hope to convince you, another. This book will seek to answer how we got here from there, through the story of one representative but also superlative band. Greil Marcus once wrote about the tradition of punk: However you follow it, it is a story that was played out, lived out, more times than anyone knows in the years after the Sex Pistols vanished—in a village in Andalusia, after class at the University of Leeds, in a warehouse in Prague. The story was always the same: the music made a promise that things did not have to be as they seemed, and some brave people set out to keep that promise for themselves. The story was always different: each version left behind its own local legends, heroes, casualties, a few precious documents, a tale to tell.2 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is one of those precious documents and tales, of a band that was all these things: local legends, heroes, and casualties. A Word About Usage Throughout, Jawbreaker’s members are referred to as Adam, Blake, and Chris. I do this not to claim any proximity or friendship with the band—I knew none of them before starting this book—but merely as a space-saving shorthand for Pfahler, Schwarzenbach, and Bauermeister. 5

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Jawbreaker’s story is forever tied to the Bay Area, and the indeterminate triangle of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley: its landscape, personalities, values, and character. In its origins and influences, however, Jawbreaker was just as much a Los Angeles band, and a Northeastern band, as it was from the Bay Area. * * * Adam Pfahler grew up in a bohemian, ocean-side, “kind of strange, West Coast” family. His mother was a creative, fashion-minded beach beauty who owned her own store, and designed her children’s clothes. His father was the celebrity surf pioneer Freddy Pfahler, who starred in Bruce Brown’s 1958 surfing film Slippery When Wet. Most influential to Adam, however, was his older sister Kembra, a performance artist who moved to New York at 17, and founder of the infamous glam-goth band called The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. It was through Kembra that Adam was introduced to punk and new wave music: the Ramones, Blondie, and

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The Clash. When he was 14, he started playing drums, and going to all-ages punk shows on the weekends. It was a fortuitous moment to be a teenager who loved music. At the time, L.A. was in the throes of an epochal cultural event, captured by Penelope Spheeris in The Decline of Western Civilization: the birth of underground, do-ityourself, independent American punk and hardcore, and the heyday of Black Flag, Minutemen, Descendents, X, and Social Distortion. L.A. hardcore was music of furious velocity and aggression, partly born of necessity. Greg Ginn of Black Flag: “It was always almost like clockwork—you could play for 20  ­minutes before the police would show up. So we knew that we had a certain amount of time: don’t make any noise until you start playing and then just go hard and long until they show up.”1 The ethos of L.A. punk was twofold: it was a scene, and a genre, as well as a counterpoint to the more ­commercial new wave of the era. Both the musical and ethical dimensions would have a lasting effect on the young members of Jawbreaker. At 16, Adam transferred to Crossroads—a private, alternative school on the west side of L.A. Then and now, Crossroads was renowned as a haven for artistic youth: among its many famous alumni are Maya Rudolph, Gillian Welch, Gary Coleman, Jack Black, and Zooey Deschanel. Today, Crossroads has two separate campuses in Santa Monica on some of the country’s most expensive real estate. In the early ’80s, though, students attended class in an industrial warehouse, separated by an alleyway from a junkyard next door. When students weren’t expected in class, they would 8

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congregate in the alley, smoke cigarettes, and eat lunch. It was there, on Adam’s first day as a transfer, that he met a fellow student hanging out in the alley. His name was Blake, and he was also in the tenth grade: he was funny, and bright, and he and Adam hit it off quickly. * * * Blake Schwarzenbach was born in Berkeley, and spent time growing up in Boulder, Portland, and L.A. His mother studied horticulture and converted to Buddhism in the early ’70s, working with Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche before moving to Nova Scotia, where Blake would spend summers and vacations. When he met Adam, Blake was living with his father, a carpenter, contractor, and architect, as well as a filmmaker and artist, to whom he once said he owed his “critical nonconformity.” Blake describes himself as a sullen teenager, “bent on his own destruction,” but Adam remembers the two of them as more rounded: pranksters, skaters, and music nerds, as well as good students and athletes. “Blake was and is one of those people that you’re naturally drawn to. He’s smart, funny, and insane. He could play mean guitar, drink you under the table, and skate vert the next day, all while maintaining a 4.0 GPA.”2 Here is how Blake once described growing up in L.A. in the early ’80s: For a film town, L.A. had absolutely no sense of theatricality in 1982. People wore light clothes and aspired

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to comfort as a universal human value. Mass culture celebrated the sun, the unchanging weather, militarism, brazen corporate advancement and an overall cynicism that could only have succeeded the psychotic implosion of the ’70s. . . . Music, on the whole, was sunny and about sexual gratification and extreme partying. It was time to finally feel good. This passed as culture for almost a decade.3 In reaction, he turned to dark, cerebral music: “Certain groups seemed to sense the cultural vacuum and poured themselves into it with all the courage and comfort that comes from knowing that no one really cares. These bands wore makeup and too much clothing and had grandiose, existential lyrics about death and atrophy and hallucinatory nervous breakdowns.” TSOL, The Gun Club, X, The Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, Wall of Voodoo, 45 Grave and Saccharine Trust came to occupy and blow apart my imagination at this time. But it was The Dream Syndicate that really captivated me. . . . I listened to their EP and Days of Wine and Roses over and over again and it gradually became the soundtrack to my frustrated days and nights. After school, the opening riff of “Tell Me When It’s Over” provided a rich sanctuary from the many humiliations of being a dark dreamer in L.A. at that time. I finally saw them open for Psychedelic Furs at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 10th grade. They were totally unprofessional—long, awkward spaces between songs, sloppy, druggy oration, and 30 minutes of feedback when they were done. That last part really 10

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won me over. . . . Karl Precoda, their wet-eyed, crosswearing freaky guitarist, came to preside over my writing. He could articulate a line in a stumbly, broken way that held and always risked losing the script. And he played jangly lines and feedback, not chords, which gave the band this enormous texture and lilt. But he never lost the color of the tune. Melody always prevails in The Dream Syndicate, which is a real triumph when you think about it, because they were so unabashedly beholden to the Velvet Underground, but I think they recognized the power of melody and rhythm as the two could work together within a song. “Then She Remembers” is now, I think, their highest achievement. It used to scare me, but now I just wonder at its courage.4 According to band legend, Blake’s career as a musician started the day he noticed a bass sitting unused at school. From a fanzine interview with Geek America: Q: What were you guys like in high school? Blake: I had acne and three really good friends. And I stole a bass from my French class, that’s how I started playing. . . . Someone left it, an awesome Gibson bass in the closet. . . . I opened the door one day and there it was. So I went back after class one day and snaked it. Then I taught myself how to play.5 In their junior year, Adam and Blake started their first band with a friend from Crossroads. They named themselves Red Harvest, from a Dashiell Hammett novel, and were influenced by the experimental punk bands on Greg Ginn’s 11

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SST Records: Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, Meat Puppets, and especially Hüsker Dü. According to Blake, Red Harvest played “long, howling instrumental surf goth”: “We knew very few ‘notes’ and tended to cycle on one groove for a long time.” Red Harvest played a handful of shows before breaking up, as high school bands do, around graduation. One was a house party alongside a local band with the dubious name of Magnolia Thunderpussy. That band was led by a singer named Jon Liu, who Adam had known since seventh grade, and who will soon reappear in this story. This apprenticeship established a musical bond that would continue for longer than Red Harvest’s drummer and guitarist could have known. Adam and Blake graduated from Crossroads in spring 1985. That fall, they both enrolled at colleges that would turn out to be short stays: Adam at Santa Monica, and Blake at Santa Cruz. It was around then, on the opposite side of the country, that Chris Bauermeister—a shy, soft-spoken teenager with bright-red hair and a black leather jacket— arrived on the NYU campus. * * * Chris Bauermeister was born in Germany, and grew up in an intellectual, German-speaking family in Connecticut. Solitary, introverted, and slight, he spent his childhood thinking of himself as an outsider: “I think my whole outlook on life was affected by being the kid to pick on from second through sixth grade in a small, rural private school.”6 12

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Of the three members of Jawbreaker, Chris’s adolescence was the most turbulent. His parents separated when he was five, leaving him and his younger sister Claire with their mother, an alcoholic and manic-depressive: “It wasn’t something that people talked about. It was alcoholism or mental illness, nothing people dealt with publicly. Even my teachers at school—no one acknowledged what was going on.” Like his future bandmates, Chris was the product of an unusually progressive education. At 15, his parents moved him to Hammonasset, an alternative high school that was similar to Crossroads, but with only 150 students, “most of them social rejects like myself.” He flourished, became a diligent student, and started making friends. At the same time, the shadow of his family life was never far: every so often, he came home from school to find his mom passed out on the living-room floor. To compensate, he self-medicated with drugs and alcohol. After a certain point, he decided something had to change: “My dad would come visit on weekends, but he would just take off when he didn’t want to deal when mom went nuts. She went seriously crazy a few times and I eventually ended up moving out.” Chris and Claire moved out at the start of his senior year: first, to a friend’s home, whose mother charged him minimal expenses; then, to a kind of halfway house, with four other boys his age; and finally, to his grandmother’s vacant house on the Connecticut shore, where he found himself responsible for his and his sister’s well-being: “I was in charge, basically, figuring out how to pay for our rent. I had to learn finances pretty quickly, how to pay the phone bill, how to do grocery shopping, being the primary caregiver.” He was 17. 13

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Like Adam, Chris was introduced to music by his sister. His first loves were new wave and prog rock, followed by the early punk staples. Before he could even drive, he had decided to become a musician; swayed by the playing of Pete Farndon from The Pretenders, he started taking lessons on bass. While living in their grandmother’s house, Chris and Claire began going to punk shows at The Anthrax, an allages venue in Stamford where Jawbreaker would play on their first tour. The Connecticut punk scene was dominated by an even more aggressive strain of hardcore than L.A.’s, along with the audience that this genre tended to attract: skinheads. Soon, Chris was listening to extreme music—Red Alert, Minor Threat, Gang Green—and, for a time, he was an active member of the regional skinhead scene. After graduation, Chris applied to colleges around the Northeast, before deciding on NYU: “I was still socially awkward and figured that throwing myself into a big city would be an ideal way to overcome that.” Surprisingly— for the instrumentalist who drives so many of Jawbreaker’s songs—it wasn’t until college that Chris joined his first band, Butcher Clyde, who happened to be looking for a bass player. By his own account, he was an imperfect fit for the group. At the time, his taste was shifting away from the Northeast hardcore of his high school days, toward the more melodic and stylistically varied bands emerging from Washington, D.C.: Rites of Spring, Marginal Man, Dag Nasty, Government Issue. When Butcher Clyde broke up at the start of sophomore year, Chris decided it was time to start a band of his own. * * * 14

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In the fall of 1986, Adam and Blake moved to New York from California, and transferred to NYU. It was the year of the Challenger explosion; Top Gun was the number-one movie in America, and Whitney Houston the best-selling album. For the 20-year-old friends and former bandmates, it must have felt like an exhilarating plunge into the unknown. Within a month of arriving on campus, they talked their way out of their original housing assignments and into a room in Hayden Hall, overlooking Washington Square. Three blocks away, on Bleecker Street, were a halfdozen record shops. The room adjacent to theirs turned out to be empty, so they jimmied the lock and annexed that one as well. They explored the city, skipped class, and went to shows at CBGB, Irving Plaza, Rock Hotel, and ABC No Rio. Around campus, they noticed a guy with red-orange hair. “Chris definitely stood out because he looked crazy, you know, he had that leather jacket with all the studs on it, and it was painted up and had all the band names on it, and he had bright orange dreadlocks,” Adam says. “When you’d see him around, he was memorable. If someone described that kid to you, you’d know exactly who they were talking about.” It so happened that Chris had posted a flyer in the cafeteria of his dorm, asking if anyone wanted to start a band. Adam: “It wasn’t just this Xeroxed thing. It was something he had drawn, like a poster. It was all colored and it listed all the right bands.”7 The names listed were Minor Threat, Government Issue, Sonic Youth, and Scratch Acid—not exactly four bands that most people would use to describe Jawbreaker, but close enough, apparently, for kindred spirits 15

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to recognize another. Itching to play music together again, Adam and Blake took down the number. On the day they called, a soft, high-pitched voice answered, and plans were made. Blake said to Adam: “Dude, I think we’re going to have a girl bass player.”8 Finally, on the day they arranged to meet, the guitarist and drummer of Red Harvest were taken aback to find they’d been speaking with the kid from around campus with orange dreadlocks, and the crazy leather jacket. The trio that would become Jawbreaker had its first rehearsal in November 1986 at Giant Studios, a popular rehearsal space for local bands on the seventh floor of 142 West 14th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, a short walk from their NYU dorm rooms. Blake: “We were like total Cali wusses amongst the burliest Lower East Side guys.” Chris: “It was a little rough.”

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How can I do this better?

For their first four years together—1986 to 1990— Jawbreaker did what all serious young bands do, or did then: they rented a rehearsal space, practiced, wrote songs, and taught themselves what worked, all without much in the way of glory. They called themselves Thump, to start, and then Terminal Island. The obvious model and overwhelming influence was Hüsker Dü—a smart, ambitious, hardcharging, melodic power trio with lush, jangly guitar lines over a ballistic rhythm section—along with Scratch Acid, The Jesus Lizard, Social Distortion, and Psychedelic Furs. On December 1, 1987, Terminal Island played its first and only show at the off-off-Broadway experimental theater La MaMa: the soundtrack to a rock opera, “Under the Bad Star,” starring Adam’s sister Kembra, comprising all original punk instrumentals. They earned $30. Blake: “It was just us, trying to figure each other out in that hourly room for a while. We went through a lot of incarnations before we sounded anything like the band we became.”1

24 HOUR REVENGE THER APY

Indisputably, there are times well into their debut album when Jawbreaker sounds uneven, embryonic: a band learning to shake off the weight of their heroes, or figuring out whether they want to sound more like Hüsker Dü, Scratch Acid, or The Jesus Lizard. But as early as the first demos, there are unmistakable flashes of future greatness—of a band that sounded tighter in their first recordings than they had any reason to expect—and moments of striking originality that show a young group with a clear idea of where it wants to go, but can’t quite yet reach. Incredibly—for a band that became synonymous with one person’s voice, who was already present—the group auditioned singers for most of their first year together. Hard as it now seems to imagine, it took Jawbreaker two full years to realize that they already had a lead singer, and a legendary one at that, in Blake, who had previously only dabbled in singing. At the end of Adam’s first year in New York, for reasons both romantic and financial, he transferred out of NYU, moved home, and enrolled at UCLA. Instead of looking for another drummer, the band chose to keep playing together, and became a bi-coastal, part-time project, reuniting during school breaks to rehearse and write new songs. In the spring of 1987, they recorded a five-song instrumental demo under the name of Terminal Island. Shortly after recording that demo, and nearly a year of auditions, the band decided they had found their singer and fourth member: Jon Liu, formerly of Magnolia Thunderpussy, who was now at UCLA with Adam. Jon: “I guess at some

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point, Blake just floated the idea to me. I had screamed over other groups in the past, so I was like, ‘Yeah, that’d be great.’ I don’t know if there were any grand ambitions. It was more, ‘Let’s get together and play some shows.’”2 When their junior term at NYU ended, in mid-1988, Blake and Chris took a year off from school to focus on the band, and moved to L.A. By then, they were calling themselves Rise. On October 20, at 20-20 Recording Studios in Santa Monica, Rise captured seven songs with engineer Harris Doku, and Jon singing lead vocal on all but one. The exception was a swampy, mid-tempo number called “Shield Your Eyes,” written and sung by Blake, in which the vocal sounds tentative, the guitar is buried, and the bass is disproportionately loud. Even so, it is unmistakably the band’s breakthrough and first great song, a statement of purpose, setting out the blueprint for any number of Jawbreaker songs to come. Blake: The second song I ever sang, which had the good fortune to find friendly ears in Mel Cheplowitz at Shredder Records. In typical JB fashion we started with broad strokes. In trying to make our first recordings we usually worked with someone, via phonebook, who had discount rates and almost no idea where we were coming from. To their credit, these engineers worked seriously and tirelessly to help us get songs to tape. I think it was our good fortune to find people, very happenstantially, who were trying to start something out in the consumer desert of West LA.

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Jon Liu: “When Blake brought the fully fledged critter that was ‘Shield Your Eyes,’ I knew my time, and job, was done. Lyrically, melodically, functionally, I was faced with my own totally gratuitous redundancy. My contributions up to this point had been feeble at best, but then, to be confronted with something that worked so coherently, instead of spurring me to inspiration or aspiration, just really highlighted my pointlessness in the group.” The song begins: There was a sun once. It lit the whole damn sky. It kept everything—everything—alive. And there was a man once. He looked it straight in the eye. He saw everything. Everything. He went blind. As sung, the first line sets up the expectation that we are hearing a song with the most conventional of beginnings: “There was a son once.” With the next line, though, we understand that the ambition of this song is far greater. This is not a song about a son, but the sun—an all-consuming, totalizing, omniscient vision, a scene out of Kafka or William Blake: man stares down sun; man loses sight; man stares blindly, helplessly, at the walls. But does he lose, or does he acquire another sort of knowledge in his blindness? What does it mean to see “everything”—“too much”—and, by seeing the truth, like an oracle, go blind? 20

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Does self-knowledge necessarily lead to blindness, as it did for Oedipus? And what sort of truth is it that “burns bright”? Pondering some of the same questions, and his own blindness, three centuries earlier, John Milton wrote:          Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair, Presented with a universal blank Of Nature’s works to me expunged and razed, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.3 In both statements, the speaker is blindly confronting a void, or what Milton describes as “a universal blank,” “cloud instead and ever-during dark.” This void is the subject of the Jawbreaker songbook: the feeling that one will always be a stranger, or a blind man, cut off from “the cheerful ways of men.” * * * In November, Blake recorded a new vocal take for “Shield Your Eyes,” which was mixed in with the October session. To Adam and Chris, it had become obvious that they had their lead singer; by year’s end, the group would ask Jon Liu to leave. You can imagine how it went by hearing Jon’s version: “I got laid off from the band. I am cool with it now. It was to everybody’s benefit. But at the time, there was some 21

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bitterness. It came down to Chris telling me, and he was still living with me at the time.”4 The band sent “Shield Your Eyes” to the influential punk zine Maximumrockandroll (MRR), in San Francisco, which also broadcast its own national radio program. MRR began as a radio show hosted by a New Jersey transplant named Tim Yohannan, whose father was an army officer during World War II, and later a professor of literature at City College in New York. Despite or because of an academic father who had served in the military, Yohannan was a born dissident and organizer, a lifelong punk evangelist, and a committed, doctrinaire leftist, who made MRR into the Bay Area’s most prominent punk institution.5 Using goof voices, the band called in to request their single. In late 1988, “Shield Your Eyes” was played on MRR radio by DJ and zine staffer Walter Glaser. Serendipitously, Mel Cheplowitz, owner of Shredder Records, happened to be listening, and asked the band to contribute the song to an upcoming seven-inch compilation. With a new lead singer, a debut single, and a finished lineup in place, there was one important matter of business left. The name Rise, they had learned, was already taken. Once again, they would have to find a new name. Staying up all night, they brainstormed a list of names on a sheet of paper; the next day, they found the name Jawbreaker among them, which no one remembered writing. The definition seemed to suit them: a machine used for crushing iron; a word that was hard to pronounce; a round, hard candy, which slowly revealed its sweetness. * * * 22

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“Shield Your Eyes” came out on The World’s in Shreds, Volume II in February 1989, in a pressing of 1000. It was their first officially released song: the vinyl reads “Jawbreaker–Shield Your Eyes–© & ℗ 1988 Rise.” Unlike the later recording that opens Bivouac, this version is slower, distorted, with an almost reggae-paced drum fill to open, and an extra verse and chorus that were later cut; it can be heard on the rarities comp Etc. That same month, Jawbreaker recorded their first full demo in Santa Monica. This demo consisted of nine songs, four of which would be released on various compilations and splits. Demo #1 is 30 minutes of melodic, up-tempo punk that circulated informally on tape. The cover has an early photo of the band, a typewritten definition of their new name, and the obligatory punk logo: a German monogram with four capital Fs, for the nineteenth-century motto “Frisch, Fromm, Fröhlich, Frei” (“Fresh, Pious, Cheerful, Free”). The insert listed the band’s phone number and home address in L.A. Notably, the demo includes several vocal contributions from Chris—background harmonies on “Better Half,” a Big Black-type spoken part on “Split,” and the half-pop, halfhardcore song “World of Shit”—which would never appear again in any form, studio or live; on the evidence, he might have made an interesting singer in his own right. There are moments in Demo #1 when Jawbreaker is clearly in the process of becoming themselves. You can hear on “Equalized” and “Split” where Blake first used vocal overdubs to set up the internal call-and-response that would become Jawbreaker staple. There are other moments that foreshadow too: “Down,” with its lacerating chorus; the 23

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exquisite strain of “Better Half ”; and “Caroline,” an early fan favorite, about a girl in an institution. At the same time, there is an uneven quality to the songs, a certain sameness in the music and lyrical content that marks apprentice work. Certainly, compared to the early “Shield Your Eyes,” Demo #1 is evidence of a better-practiced band, and of a vocalist steadily learning to use his instrument—but it is notable chiefly as juvenilia, or a marker of things to come. * * * Demo #1 was the start of a remarkable year in which the young group would write some 20 new songs. On March 16, 1989, they played their first show as Jawbreaker at Club 88 on Pico Boulevard in L.A. Tickets were $3. In the weeks after, they played tiny clubs around the city: Al’s Bar, The Gaslight, The Anti-Club. Gradually, they moved up from first to second and third on a bill. Blake: We started playing out in Hollywood where NO ONE can get a show unless you were totally metal. Punk was so dead in L.A. Chris and I made a bunch of fake flyers for our first show where we were playing with all these really awesome hardcore D.C. bands who didn’t mean shit to these promoters anyway, but to us they were the big bands. “Marginal Man and Jawbreaker” or “Government Issue and Jawbreaker.” All these bands we thought were really cool. We’d enclose them in our little press packet and send them out and say “Can we play here?” Of course, they never gave us the gig. In April, Jawbreaker played their first show at 924 Gilman Street, the legendary all-ages venue in Berkeley where 24

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countless punk bands came up—Green Day and Operation Ivy, foremost. In its earliest incarnation, Gilman was a Tim Yohannan and MRR project, and from day one, exemplified Yohannan’s idealistic ethos, sometimes to the point of parody. Nonprofit, volunteer-run, alcohol-free, the club was equal parts concert venue, co-op, and community center: members

Figure 2.1  “The rules” (circa 2004) at Gilman.

(Reprinted with permission from 924 Gilman Street. All rights retained.)

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were required to pay dues, attend meetings, and even perform chores, from security to cleanup. All bands were paid the same, and initially forbidden from advertising their own appearances, so as not to discourage attendance for openers. Yohannan’s involvement in Gilman ended in September 1988, but his mission very much carried on. Then and now, inside the venue’s doors, a stenciled sign reads: NO RACISM NO SEXISM NO HOMOPHOBIA NO DRUGS NO ALCOHOL NO VIOLENCE The rules extended into seemingly less substantial territory. From its earliest days, bands who were signed to major labels were explicitly forbidden from playing at Gilman—a policy that would later lead to groups like Green Day and Jawbreaker being banned from the venue. From 1989 onward, Jawbreaker would play 15 shows at Gilman, including some of their best performances. * * * In May and June, the band recorded its first EP, Whack & Blite, and a seven-inch single (“Busy”), both with engineer Michael James. The records were pressed on the band’s own label, Blackball Records, which is still managed today by Adam. As the band’s most limited and first standalone release, the “Busy” single has become a cult object. The cover is a still 26

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from The Bad News Bears, showing Walter Matthau pouring Jim Beam into a Mickey’s Big Mouth beer. This resulted in a cease-and-desist letter from the actor’s lawyers, demanding that all copies of the single be destroyed. In response, Jawbreaker did what any responsible punk band would do: they printed 500 more, in various colors, along with T-shirts. In “Busy” and the Whack & Blite songs, the band sounds faster and more assertive than on Demo #1, but still melodic. It is clearly Chris’s instrument leading the band, and his bass lines the engine that give the songs their structure and interest. Compared to later Jawbreaker, the three songs on Whack & Blite sound boisterous, unpolished: “Lawn,” a Raymond Carver–type scene of a man looking in on his family from the outside; “Crane,” a self-conscious nod to early hardcore; and “Eye-5,” whose opening guitar line and closing crescendo anticipate similar moments in Bivouac and 24 Hour. Also that summer, Jawbreaker recorded Demo #2: seven songs captured live to two-track, which showed a band further gaining its confidence. Compared to the first demo, the songs from this session are darker, more bass-heavy, and accelerated, at times to the point of comical velocity. Blake’s voice is anguished, almost bloodcurdling: the sarcastically titled “Fantastic Planet,” or “Driven,” with its apocalyptic imagery; “With or Without U2,” a tongue-in-cheek medley mashing up verses from U2, Misfits, and The Vapors; and “Gutless,” a breakneck sprint into a memorable instrumental midpoint, phrased in five, with a mentally adhesive chorus. The obvious apex of Demo #2 is “Want,” a triumph of Blake’s early growth as a songwriter. Even more than 27

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“Shield Your Eyes,” it shows a band learning to play as a true ensemble, and a young writer tapping into new reserves of ingenuity. Unlike other parts of Demo #2, in which lyrics are stuffed into lines where they don’t always fit, the verses of “Want” tumble headlong into an ecstatic verbal current, of the kind that Allen Ginsberg might have produced: the overflowing confession of a bibliophile with too much to say. It’s the song in which Blake perfects the lyrical strategy of direct address, combining neutral observation with secondperson directives that the listener can hear as a command: Dark secrets burn their vessel. Tearing out to grab a mouthful. Chunk of heart destroyed by quiet. Yell it out before it kills you now. Let it all out. By stretching out the vowels of the chorus, and wringing out their meaning for as much as he can—“aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, I, want, you”—he performs a neat rhetorical trick, of reducing the hyper-verbal high wire of the previous verse to a kind of lovers’ baby talk. The song is ebullient, a cascade of words and images to match the emotion. It was with good reason that Jawbreaker chose to open its first album, Unfun, with “Want”: it’s hard to imagine a more immediate introduction to the band. * * * At the end of their sabbatical year in L.A., Blake and Chris returned to finish their senior term at NYU, and continued writing. Blake: “I wrote a lot of those songs on 16th Street 28

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and 3rd Avenue. About seven of them were started or written in my apartment. I think, if anything, those songs have a kind of New York desperation to them.” In January, they flew back to L.A., and recorded their debut album in “about 60 hours” with producer Richard Andrews. That album, given the misnomer of Unfun, came out on Shredder in 1990, with improved versions of songs from both demos, and “Busy.” Unfun comes rocketing out of the gate with a more polished production of “Want,” before accelerating into “Seethruskin,” an early band highlight, and “Fine Day.” The album is a clear extension of the melodic punk of Whack & Blite and Demo #2, but the band sounds more cohesive now: Chris’s playing, in particular, stands out in its subtlety and presence. Moreover, the production has allowed Jawbreaker to start approximating the band they would become in their prime: the bass floats woozily, the guitar rings out, the drums resound crisply. Blake: “I think there was only one way to make Unfun: with limited abilities and unlimited enthusiasm. The recordings have a certain knotted energy. . . . It’s so dense and, I would say, overwritten, but not in a critical way. It’s such dense music that I’m astounded that we were doing that. That was the feeling in the band, that we only had that one record. And it was such a rare thing to make an album that we went at it pretty intensely.” To promote the album, Jawbreaker embarked on their first tour that summer: a bruising, ten-week, 52-show death march (with several two-a-days) across the United States and Canada. Blake booked the tour by himself, using MRR’s Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, and his father’s phone card. On 29

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one hand, the “Fuck ’90” tour was a feat: the band played to crowds from Boston to L.A., and established themselves as a group worth following in the national punk scene. On the other hand, the band hated each other weeks into the tour, and promptly broke up the day they got home. “When I booked that tour, I had no idea what I was doing—and it showed,” Blake remembered. “It was roughly two months, in the summer, for a totally unknown band. Of that tour, we probably had six rad shows. Then there were maybe 25 utterly forgettable metal-club-in-Florida-type shows. I might be exaggerating, but that’s my recollection.”6 Chris: “Two-and-a-half months was a little tough. You’re tired and everyone expects you to be partying and happy. We did have a lot of fun. But it was intense. I stopped talking to Blake and Adam when we reached Canada, and that was a couple weeks before the end of the tour.”7 After the tour, Blake and Chris returned to NYU, and went months without speaking. One night, Chris walked into CBGB for a show, and struck up a conversation. “I heard you guys broke up.” “Yeah,” said Chris, surprised. “That sucks.” It was the first time since tour he had thought about the band: “I had no idea that someone would even know who we were, let alone know that we had broken up and cared about it.” It would soon become a pattern. In December of 1990, Chris finished his degree in philosophy and literature. A few months later, Blake earned his bachelor’s in English literature and creative writing, and Adam, a BA in history from UCLA. With some prodding 30

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from friends, Blake and Chris patched up their differences, and resolved to give the band another shot. That summer, the group came to a mutual decision: they would move together to the same city, and concentrate entirely on the band. “It was what we were doing with our lives,” Chris said. “No more college. Nothing else.” They were soon on their way back to California: to restart the band, and to write new songs in their new home, San Francisco’s Mission District.

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The members of Jawbreaker relocated to San Francisco in the summer of 1991. In many ways, it was a city that would be unrecognizable to its residents today, where basic apartments rent for several thousand dollars a month. Like New York in the 1970s, rent was cheap, city life was less hygienic, and artists eagerly made the city their home. Adam: “The Mission was the least expensive San Francisco neighborhood in 1991. The day we moved in, we found a sharpened screwdriver, a used condom, and a hypodermic needle in the stairwell. It was like, ‘Welcome to San Francisco!’” The band moved into two apartments on the top floor of a building on Sycamore Street, between Mission and Valencia, with their friends Raul Reyes (Jawbreaker’s first roadie) and Lance Hahn (of the great pop-punk bands Cringer and J Church). That summer, they played 25 shows: in Davis, with a fellow rising local band named Green Day; in Santa Barbara, with Fugazi; in L.A., at Jabberjaw. Meanwhile, they were rehearsing multiple times a week.

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“We practiced all the time and were writing constantly,” Chris said. “We had a really sketchy practice space in the Tenderloin, which was an adventure to go to every time. We never ran into any of the bands we shared it with.” In October, Jawbreaker went into Razor’s Edge studios with producer Billy Anderson to begin recording their first mature album, Bivouac. * * * Both Bivouac and 24 Hour Revenge Therapy are about a certain moment in the lives of young people—simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying—when one is finished with school, newly out on one’s own, and essentially clueless as to what one wants from life. They are about the time between adolescence and adulthood—the years in the desert, as it were—of being broke, and under-employed, but still ambitious; of staying up late, falling in and out of love, and learning who your friends are; of feeling aimless, adrift, ecstatic, disoriented, and intoxicated with one’s newfound autonomy. This is a moment common to young people for centuries, the subject of any number of classic novels and Bildungsromans: Young Werther, Stephen Dedalus, Amory Blaine, Holden Caulfield, and Augie March among them. Gradually, you come to understand that everything you’ve learned in school has only prepared you so much—that is, not at all—for life in the real world, which is indifferent to your wishes. Adam: “We took the album’s title from the sample we used on the instrumental passages in the end—it was from a nature show on ant colonies. The narrator talks about 34

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bivouacs: temporary encampments that the ants build out of their living bodies to protect the queen. We thought it apt, as our move to S.F. felt a bit like a bivouac.” Blake: “Doubt after college, a universal theme among the young adults. Or better said: last year you were in a dorm eating soup and watching snow melt on your parkside windows, and now there’s someone shooting up in your car and two strangers are fucking in your stairwell.” These are the subjects that Jawbreaker would first take up in Bivouac, and bring to a kind of perfection with 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. * * * Compared to Unfun, and everything before it, Bivouac was a 180: slower, heavier, and gloomier in every way. Where the earlier Jawbreaker songs were exuberant and danceable, the second album was a set of sprawling, complex, deep-sea epics; angry, paranoid howls of despair; mournful, worldweary funeral dirges; and vivid, multipart revenge fantasies. By and large, Bivouac is music for feeling bad; comfort food, where Unfun was music for your feet. It was the Nebraska to their Born to Run: the first unanticipated swerve from the pattern their fans expected them to take. Blake: It’s like hearing a little monster—an amalgamation of all that it loved: Mike Ness, Bob Mould, Dave Pirner, Evan Dando, Sinead O’Connor, Guy Picciotto. Yes, it does pain me, and pleasure me—the steadfast affinity to these coordinates. But that’s kind of the thing with Jawbreaker— especially in this nascent point in our development—it 35

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was like this unstoppable creature that loved so many things and felt itself to be ugly and with a too-large beak. Fortunately, that phoenix-like spirit always seems to prevail in the final seconds, through comedy, tragedy, and a fierce assertion of its right to exist.1 Adam: “As I look back, I think that we were trying to prove something with that record. We were definitely stretching out.” Blake: “Nothing was inadmissible, and I think the more successful moments come from a kind of direct transcription of daily events into a larger sense of pathology. It’s a strange kind of therapy, because now you are the auditor and the patient is a permanently arrested younger you. I feel awkward about the snapshot, but also glad that the creature dared to pose at all.” Bivouac is a work of dense layering and experimentation— of dramatic instrumental breakdowns, disembodied vocal samples, and cinematic moments that round out the bigger numbers. It is Jawbreaker’s most stylistically varied and leftfield album, as well as their most collaborative, with songs written in full or in part by Adam (“Parabola”) and Chris (“P.S. New York is Burning,” “Sleep,” “Like a Secret”). The album opens with a revamped version of “Shield Your Eyes,” which quietly fades in following a 15-second drone swell. After the ear has adjusted to the silence, the buzz, and the building hum of anticipation, the band enters— and the song sounds impossibly huge. Compared to its first incarnation, this track reveals a band that has been playing together for the better part of five years, that is now working

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with a producer who knows how to make them sound monumental. Where Bivouac really starts ramping up, though, is with the second song, “Big,” a response of sorts to “Shield Your Eyes,” which comes into focus with one of Blake’s most indelible images as a songwriter: In this ocean, I’m a bag of tea. I make some clouds, but they’re minor league. For a so-called punk band—for any band, really—this is a sublimely haunting metaphor of utter futility: could there be any symbol more overmatched, lonesome, and infinitesimal, than a teabag in the ocean? In keeping with Bivouac’s pervasive air of uncertainty, “Big” offers more enigmas than answers. Who are the speaker and object of the sinister Orwellian warning, “It’s going to hurt us more than it hurts you”? What is the opposition between “you and yours” and “us and ours”? Moreover, wouldn’t “I love it when you think big” contradict the preceding “Best to keep your eyes / Stare at the sidewalk lines”? As though in reply, the band tears into a gripping instrumental run: the bass solo and drums are interrupted after a minute-long build by a lightning strike from the guitar, and a final direct address: “DON’T IT MAKE YOU FEEL?” A less trusting writer might have spelled out what “it” meant, but Blake leaves this to the listener’s imagination: everyone has something that makes you feel small. In this way, the listener can’t help but insert herself into the song, and take on the role of the “you” in the question: “Don’t it

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make you feel small?”, as well as the responding comment: “I love it when you think big.” * * * One exception to the general mood of gloom on Bivouac is “Chesterfield King,” Blake’s most successful story in song, and a rare ray of sun in an overcast sky. The intro is phrased in six, with abrupt breaks before measures, before launching into straight 4/4. The scene opens novelistically, in the middle of things, followed by an interior movement into the narrator’s mind. As in “Want” and “Big,” the speaker pivots repeatedly into direct address—an embracing, intimacymaking technique that draws the listener into closing the loop of the story being told. The song is a model of realistic detail, and Carver-esque imagery that reveals everything in its plainness: “steam showing off your breath and water in your eyes”; “parkas clinging on the lawn”; “traced the little lines along your palm.” The language is personal and private, yet elastic; precise, almost journalistic, and yet strangely universal. After “Chesterfield King,” and two fun covers (Joan Jett’s “You Don’t Know” and The Pretenders’ “Pack it Up”), the catchiest tune on Bivouac—and an uncanny prophecy of things to come—is “Tour Song.” On the evidence of its lyrics, tone, and title, it would seem to be a straightforward number, of a tour outing gone horribly wrong. The song opens with an answering-machine message in the left channel from Blake to his girlfriend back home, followed by one of his best leadoff lines: “700 miles to play to 15 angry men.” Just when it seems like it can’t get any worse, something transformative 38

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happens: a remarkable, stream-of-consciousness moment, underscored by a key change in the guitar, and a drop down to half-time by the drums. The speaker is engaging in active cognition—“Suddenly, joe kicks hard in my veins”—and the crowd responds: “fists turn into brave ears”; “I fell in love with my enemy.” In turn, the speaker wonders if he shouldn’t feel more gratitude—“I’m living life my way”—before concluding in the negative: “Every little thing / must go wrong.” Knowing what we do about the grueling “Fuck ’90” tour— when Jawbreaker drove from one end of the country to the other over two months, and played to near-empty rooms most nights, only to break up upon returning home—we might surmise, reasonably, that this song is about that experience. But “Tour Song” was written as a piece of pure fiction, before “Fuck ’90,” and before the band had even ventured on its first tour. Knowing this—perhaps unfairly—puts the song, and its writer, in a different light. Surely it means one thing for a band that’s suffered through a tour to write about it, and something else for them to imagine that “Every little thing / must go wrong,” before they had even set out? And how can such a band already have enemies? * * * The final two songs on Bivouac show a band arriving at an apotheosis. “Parabola” is Jawbreaker’s most ferocious song: a minimal, driving, Jesus Lizard–type bass workout that opens with a Hitchcockian image: “I caught my eye in a swinging door / I’d never seen that man before.” With good reason, it was introduced by Blake in concert as “a song for mean people,” and would remain a live staple. But it was in 39

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“Bivouac,” the album’s closer, that the band achieved a special kind of majesty, and the furthest distance they ever reached from their punk roots. As Chris O’Leary wrote of another ten-minute epic in Rebel Rebel, his song-by-song study of David Bowie: “Draft a map of Bowie’s collected songs, plot ‘Station to Station’ somewhere near the margin and mark it: here he went no further.” With the exception of one or two moments on Dear You, “Bivouac” is Jawbreaker’s heaviest and most crushing song: the melancholy, minor-key bass intro; the lonesome guitar wail; the slow and steady drum beat; the extended, noiseravaged outro. The lyrics are a series of funereal detail: “fingers in the earth”; “hands in the water”; and, intriguingly, “boat of my father.” Especially in certain live recordings, it puts one in mind of John Lennon’s song “Mother,” and its primordial howl for help. And yet: even in his most despairing moments, it’s as though Blake can only express himself in metaphorical images, or willfully bend the meaning of a word (“I’m an only”). At the close of “Bivouac,” the song and the album, there is a resolution or wisdom gained after the odyssey of the preceding twelve songs. No longer an adolescent, not yet an adult, the speaker is still learning to stand on his own, and to speak with his own voice, which he now knows means dialogue with others: Now this is home. But the property’s on loan. So much for letting go. I’m picking up the phone.

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It was a devastating, heartrending plea for human ­connection, and an end to loneliness. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was Kurt Cobain’s favorite Jawbreaker song, and the one he requested when the bands went on tour together, two years later. Blake: I have these six memories affixed in my mind of this band, and one of them is when we played at this coffee shop in the Mission called Muddy Waters. We were playing there one night and we ended up playing the song “Bivouac” for the first time. That song was very random—it either worked or it didn’t. It happened to work the first time out, and there was just this feeling that the band was changing. That, to me, was a very happy memory.2 * * * In the summer of 1992, Jawbreaker hit the road once more. The “Hell is on the Way” tour started in Salt Lake City and took them up the East Coast before the band’s first trip to Europe: seven weeks of shows in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, U.K., and Scandinavia. In a robust proof of “Tour Song’s” certainty that “Every little thing / must go wrong,” Blake’s voice gave out 25 minutes into a set in Kalamazoo, Michigan, five days into the tour. The show is on YouTube. Blake sounds absolutely monstrous—closer to suffering than hoarse—and apologizes after the first song: “My voice is worse than I thought.” The band storms through a handful of their most brutal songs,

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mostly unreleased material from Bivouac, before Blake, sounding like a mutant with a guttural howl, walks off. Adam: Five songs into the set, Blake turns to me and mouths the words “I quit.” He apologized to the crowd and took off. The next day, he comes back from the doctor and tells us he has a polyp the size of a grape on his vocal cords, it’s a $2,500 surgery and two-week silent recovery. So we have a meeting and make the decision that we’re gonna have our roadie Raul sing for the rest of the U.S. and possibly first couple weeks in Europe.3 On the way to their next show—a house party in Ann Arbor—the band wrote out lyrics for Raul to sing. He tells the story with good humor: I’m sitting diligently in the back of the van trying to remember all these lyrics that I’d been singing to for a year or so, but never in a public forum. They started playing and I started singing “Parabola.” I can’t remember any of the words and I didn’t want to hold the lyrics sheet up there, the timing’s all off. I’m basically yelling the lyrics. Blake just started singing after that.4 “It was too late to turn back, so we kind of just went ahead,” Blake said. Christy Colcord, the band’s European booking agent and tour manager for that run: “His throat was terrible by the time he got to Europe. They called me a couple of days before: ‘We can’t decide if we should get on the plane or not.’ Because the doctor was saying, don’t do it. 42

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You can hear on some of those songs they recorded, how bad it sounded.” He probably should have not come and had the surgery in New York or L.A. and rescheduled the tour. But you know, those tours . . . they really wanted to do it. Nobody had any cushion for money with those things, so if you cancel a tour you lose everything. Everybody who planned it loses everything, you lose your tickets—and none of us had jobs, so, it’s a financial hit as well as a missed opportunity. So they were really keen to do it. It was just, yeah . . . probably a mistake. Blake: “This is going to seem like a real downer, but that period seemed really arduous for me because I was so physically challenged by singing. Every day was full of dread, having to stand up there and see what would happen. But [once we got to Europe] it was too late. We had to play or else we would have bankrupted our friends.”5 At first, simple force of will got them through, but Blake’s punishing vocal style caught up with him three weeks in. “I don’t know if we felt obligated, or thought it would be punk to play through,” said Adam. “But we did. And by the time we got to Ireland, Blake spit up this giant red blob that was alarming. Christy was like, ‘Fuck this; we’re getting you to the hospital.’ It was worse than we thought. So finally we slowed down and said, ‘Let’s get him better.’ Then, of course, a week later, we were right back at it.”6 In London, the first week of October, Blake underwent surgery to remove the benign polyps from his throat. A few days later, they were back on the road, for two final weeks 43

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of shows in Norway, Denmark, and Germany. “I have to say that surgeon was masterful,” Blake recalled: I wrote him a letter when we got back to the States begging that he forgive the bill. And he did. I started writing [“Outpatient”] at home once we got back, but it was really shocking. We were in Norway for our first show after surgery and I was singing before I was supposed to— they said give it 10 days and I think we gave it five or six days. It was two octaves higher. It just had like no grit, it was a pretty unwieldy instrument, and I had to break it back into what I knew is my voice.7 Adam: “It’s all or nothing with us. [Before] that European tour, we were all living on Sycamore and—I think this needs to be said—we were all like, ‘Well, if we’re going on tour, then we’re going to quit our jobs and put all of our stuff in storage.’ So after that, we get back home. And Blake and I were sleeping in the van.”8

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One song from the Bivouac sessions that didn’t make it onto the album was “Ache,” an introspective, mid-tempo love song that Jawbreaker first played at Gilman on November 16, 1991, but left unmixed when deciding the final album sequence. The song opens with a ringing, triumphant solo guitar line, as though to signal an arena-sized anthem about to commence. Instead, the introductory lyric delivers the opposite—a humble, heartbroken confession that reads as entirely private, even self-negating: I believe in desperate acts. The kind that make me look stupid. Just keep reinventing myself. It’s move or die. The drama being enacted here is one of willful self-creation. In the second line, we hear Blake pause between “The kind” and “that make me look stupid,” as though he’s figuring it out as he goes. “Ache” is a song about thinking things through, and not caring if you’re being lied to, so long as those lies come with a veneer of intimacy; about distinguishing new realities from old, and learning to describe them in a way

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that isn’t artificially prepackaged or false. This was counsel of a higher order than punk audiences were used to hearing. Compare the lack of artifice in “Ache” with Rites of Spring’s “Drink Deep,” in which Guy Picciotto spits out: I believe in moments Transparent moments Moments in grace When you’ve got to stake your faith. It’s anyone’s guess what this means; by contrast, there’s not much mistaking “desperate acts / The kind that make me look stupid,” as anyone who has tried to salvage a relationship knows. At the end of “Ache,” this is the narrator’s parting conclusion, and advice— Pick up the phone and punch your home code. Somewhere, sometime let me make you mine. —which sounds curiously like the closing line of “Bivouac,” the title track: “I’m picking up the phone.” Beyond its imperatives of self-discovery and self-creation, the end of “Ache” reveals a song about our consciousness of other people, as a means of becoming less cruel—about our capacity for openness, curiosity, and empathy. You can start to see why the band left the song off Bivouac: even if parts of the lyric didn’t feel slightly unfinished, its core of sweetness and warmth would have sounded slightly out of place on the album. * * * 46

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By early 1992, before Bivouac was out, other new songs started popping up in Jawbreaker’s sets. In February, early versions of “West Bay Invitational” and “The Boat Dreams from the Hill” premiered at Gilman; in June, also at Gilman, they first played “Indictment” and “In Sadding Around.” In September, Blake wrote “Boxcar” while their van was being searched by police on the side of the road in France; that same month, they premiered “Ashtray Monument” in Belfast. When the band returned to the United States, in late October, more than half of their next album had been written and road-tested. After coming home from tour, the band went off into separate housing arrangements. Adam moved to Albion Street, and got a job at a video shop on Valencia for five dollars an hour. Chris stayed in the building on Sycamore and worked as a “certified toyologist” at a store called the Imaginarium. Wanting to change things up, Blake moved to Oakland, “to one of those gnarly warehouses,” Adam recalled, of which there was a thriving subculture at the time: “Living behind a curtain in some punk house.” Blake: “I liked to stay alone and write in my room. I was a librarian. I would commute to the city and work at a library, and then we would just practice and play shows.”1 It was while living in Oakland during the winter and spring that Blake started writing a new set of material. Unlike the expansive, multipart suites of Bivouac, the new songs were localized, intimate, personal journal entries, and candid snapshots of a community: people, places, and relationships. The dominant style was an attentive yet tender realism, an interest in domestic stories, romantic memories, private self-doubt, and expressive juxtaposition. Where the lyrics 47

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of Bivouac were figurative, the new songs were confessional, unguarded, diaristic. Moreover, where the second album was a collective effort, with lyrics and music from all three band members, the new songs were increasingly solo work. “Blake was hitting his stride as a songwriter,” said Chris. “Bivouac had songs that I’d written lyrics to entirely or songs that I wrote the main riff to, but 24 is all Blake.” Adam: “24 Hour was weighted more toward Blake’s songs than the more collaborative ones that we came up with on Bivouac. It was definitely a fertile time for Blake’s writing.”2 * * * Part of the lasting power of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is that, although the action of the songs happens in the Bay Area, they could just as easily take place in Minneapolis, or Chicago, or anywhere that twenty-somethings congregate and set out to create their own lives. The album tells a story familiar to every young person who moves to a new city, makes friends, falls in love, and reluctantly grows up. There are keg parties, steamy kitchens, shots of whiskey, cigarettes, rooftops, warehouses, train tracks, bottles on night stands, people passing out, sick jokes, hastily discarded clothes, debris in the yard, unanswered letters, old photos, dyed hair, hookups behind unlocked doors, and kisses with alcohol on one’s breath. “When we first got to San Francisco and we began writing and recording Bivouac and 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, that seemed to be when all our living was done,” Blake recalled. “Maybe because of that, 24 Hour was really about living there. Those songs were really written in the midst of it for me—and they tended to address that area.”3 48

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It was a moment of copious, intense, almost mysterious creativity. Indeed, to ask the band about the making of 24 Hour is to confront a kind of mystery, in that all three remember the songs coming into existence automatically, with minimal tinkering. This seeming effortlessness is 24 Hour’s true sleight of hand, in that the songs are always more complex than they seem, and self-evidently the work of a group that has gained considerable life experience playing music together for seven years: a band at its artistic summit, and one that never sounds derivative, or anything like a typical Bay Area punk band. After the scale and ambition of Bivouac, we see in 24 Hour a group paring itself down, reducing itself to the barest elements—a band that has learned to do more with less. According to Adam, a big part of Blake’s rapid growth as a songwriter had to do with the unrecognized influence of Jon Liu, whose interview was one of the highlights of my research. Adam: I mean, Jon Liu was an incredible lyricist and a brilliant guy. I still remember his words. I always thought Blake took something from that. He wasn’t biting his style, but I think that it might have made him step up his game. Early on, it was one of the things that Mel [Cheplowitz] said when he put out the first record: “You guys are gonna get really good reviews or really bad ones, because these lyrics are smarter than the people reviewing the record.” When I asked Jon Liu about this, he said, with characteristic self-effacement: Though that plays perfectly into my megalomaniacal narcissism, I don’t think there’s any real kernel of true 49

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there. Blake was always a literate bloke, whether it was the Beats, Bukowski, Fante, Hammett, Jim Thompson, and I think he found and formed the vehicle that let him merge voice & verb. He might’ve took a minute to gather the gumption to push breath through the mic, but I think that was just a matter of straightening his spine and finding his swagger. For his part, Blake has never been shy about acknowledging his influences. Over the years, he has hailed Exene Cervenka, Richard Butler, Randy Newman, Mike Ness, Doug Martsch, Sinead O’Connor, Morrissey, Jeff Mangum, Bob Mould, Dave Pirner, and Guy Picciotto, among musicians, and Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, John Fante, Jack Kerouac, Jayne Anne Philips, Jean Genet, John Keats, Anne Carson, Wilfred Owen, Anne Sexton, Mahmoud Darwish, Fredric Jameson, and Dick Hebdige among writers. And yet, with the possible exception of Exene—after Patti Smith, the first songwriter to make punk music and poetry that was smart, sensual, and literary, like Jawbreaker—it’s hard to point to any predominant influence. It is as though Blake has managed to learn selectively from the best of each, and fuse a disparate chorus of genius into his own individual voice. Adam: “It was obvious. Super obvious. At the time, it felt like you could shoot a gun in the air and hit a great song that Blake had just written.” Chris: “The thing I like the most about 24 is that there’s not a lot of tomfoolery about it, if you will. It’s not a lot of effects, using good microphones, all live. There, you do a live take. It’s done.” He continued: “The thing about this record is that I don’t think anything was hard. 50

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Not only that it captures what we sounded like the most live, but also that of the records, this is the one where we were all on the same page. That’s part of the reason it holds up. It’s just, we’d been playing together for so long at that point and we’d moved in a certain direction and we’d all ended up in the same place at the same time, as it were, and it just clicked. It made sense.” Blake: “I would bring in what I had, and Chris is so quick and is such a great bass player that I would never have to tell either of them anything, they would just jump in. All those songs were realized pretty quickly as a band.”4 * * * Some albums are stories of superhuman endurance in the recording studio: 24 Hour is not one of them. The bulk of the album was recorded in two days, and mixed in one; a supplementary session was also completed in a single day, three months later. 24 Hour is the rare album whose artwork took longer than its recording. Come to think of it, the drive to and from the studio probably took longer than that. On Friday, May 14, 1993, Jawbreaker set out on the 2,100-mile drive in their van from San Francisco to record with Steve Albini at his home studio in Chicago. Then and now, Albini was among the world’s most respected studio engineers, having recorded classic albums by Nirvana, Pixies, and P.J. Harvey, as well as any number of Jawbreaker’s musical heroes: The Jesus Lizard, Bitch Magnet, Scratch Acid, and Big Black, among others. The band had borrowed $2,000 from Gary Held, the owner of Revolver Distribution, to pay for studio time, gas, hotels, 51

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and food. Their new record was fully written, sequenced, and thoroughly rehearsed; before packing up the van, they played the album in full for Gary at a practice session. Adam: “We told him: ‘Okay, sit down, here’s our record.’ And we played him the record in sequence, down to where after the last song on side one we said, ‘This is where you’d get up and flip the record over.’ We had it totally dialed in. That’s why we thought it wouldn’t take too long with Steve.” After recording Bivouac exclusively with Billy Anderson, the band was understandably anxious about working for the first time with Albini, who had recently finished engineering In Utero with Nirvana. “We didn’t know any better,” Adam said. “We thought we had to pass some sort of test or be a known band to record with Albini. I just called him up. I think I called information and got his number and coldcalled. He picked up and was totally gracious and just said, ‘Yeah, I have time here. I’ll pencil you in.’” Driving the van was Cassandra Millspaugh, one of Blake’s housemates in Oakland. On Saturday, they stopped in Reno, and checked into a motel next door to a gun shop. The following day, they drove through Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa, before arriving in Chicago early Monday, where they were greeted by their friend Ben Weasel, of the band Screeching Weasel, and taken out for a $1.29 breakfast. They checked into a Days Inn: $55 a night, for four nights. That afternoon, the band pulled up to Albini’s house to load in, and found themselves in the presence of their idols. Blake: “There was a little bit of intimidation when we showed up. It was like, ‘Wow, we’re at his house.’ It was kind of shocking to us. The day we moved in, The Jesus Lizard was 52

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practicing in the basement. That was a double whammy: not only were we meeting Steve Albini, but the Lizard was flexing down in the basement.”5 Chris: “I was a huge Big Black fan so I was slightly starstruck about being there; I was an even bigger Scratch Acid fan and Dave Sims was also working there at the time. I don’t think I said anything to Dave Sims except for ‘Pass that bagel, please,’ the whole time I was there, even though he’s one of my bass icons.”6 Adam: We loaded into his studio and [Albini] starts busting out all these microphones and, it’s kind of amazing, me and Chris were done that day, in one day. We started recording basics at three and were done by six. So in three hours, me and Chris are done with 24 Hour. . . . We would get through a song and then have to run up a couple flights of stairs to hear how it sounded. We’d get up there and we’d kind of go, “Did that sound okay?” And he’d go, “Yeah, sounded great.” And we’d go, “Okay, moving on.”7 “I wasn’t that familiar with the band before they showed up,” Albini recalled: At the time there was a kind of shift underway. There was a sort of furious Detroit and D.C.-style hardcore that was the dominant motif of punk bands in the early ’80s—and then there were the non-punk bands that were quite abstract. I remember Jawbreaker being one of the few punk bands I had run across at that point that had a more melodic sensibility. They were less furious than the

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hardcore bands but they weren’t as abstract as—I don’t know what you would call them—the more head-case and freak-out bands.8 On Wednesday, May 19, they got up early, drove to the studio, and recorded Blake’s guitar and voice parts. As the day went on, the band and Albini warmed up to each other: they talked about pool, and poker, and sports. Adam: If we fucked up or hit a wrong note, Albini would pipe in from the control room up in the attic and say, “It’s a clam.” If you really fucked up, like dropped a beat, he would say, “It’s a moose.” That was day two. As the day progressed, he would refer to Blake in military ranks and it would go down as the day went on. He was just being funny, you know. But I asked him who he thought was the better captain, between Kirk and Picard. He said, without missing a beat, “Oh, no question. Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Fucker of women. Despoiler of planets.” I never forgot that. Every song on 24 Hour was recorded in one or two takes. To the extent there was any drama during the sessions, it happened on day three. With all of the band’s songs fully tracked, Thursday was scheduled for mixing. Two songs into the mix, everyone started to smell something burning, followed by black smoke filling the room; the 24-track analog tape machine had malfunctioned and caught fire. Albini said: “Oh shit. We’re fucked.” The mix session was over. Without a working tape machine, there wasn’t much anyone could do: another band would be pulling up to Albini’s 54

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house to start recording that weekend. In typical Jawbreaker fashion, they had booked themselves on a summer-long national tour to start immediately upon leaving Chicago. Now, with their schedule disrupted, they could either leave Chicago with the tapes, and mix them with someone else down the line, or wait it out, and try to book something during Albini’s next open window. With nothing better to do, the band hung out in Chicago. They played an in-store at Reckless Records, and watched the Cubs lose to the Florida Marlins at Wrigley Field with Ben Weasel. On Saturday, Blake and Cassandra drove to Lafayette, Indiana to join Screeching Weasel at Sonic Iguana studios for a song on the band’s new album. Meanwhile, Chris and Adam called ahead to promoters and venues from their hotel, and canceled the first show of the tour in Dayton, Ohio. On Sunday, May 23, Jawbreaker played for a packed house at Isabel’s Grand Finale, a tiny, sweltering, all-ages venue (today a doctor’s office) on the northwest side of Chicago. The show is on YouTube: despite the heat and crush of the crowd, the band is in good spirits, and talkative. “Chesterfield King” is prefaced as “an irresponsible song that romanticizes a bad habit,” and “Boxcar” as being about “the shitty things that people do to each other in the punk scene.” When Blake introduces one of the newly recorded numbers as “a song about a boat,” the crowd responds in cheers, and seems to know most of the words already. On Monday, with the studio tape machine newly fixed, Albini and the band started mixing at nine in the morning, and finished just before midnight: twelve songs in fifteen 55

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hours. For three days of work, Albini billed the band $1,032. The invoice detail went as follows: 2 days 24-track equipment rental @ $200.00: $400.00 2 days engineering @ $300.00: $600.00 1 DAT cassette: $20.00 4 cassettes @ $3.00: $12.00 Total due: $1,032.00 Payable To Steve Albini, Inc. 24 Hour’s original credits say that it was produced by Jawbreaker, recorded in Chicago, and engineered by Fluss— Albini’s cat. “My preference is not to be named because I feel like my role on the record is not that important, ultimately,” Albini said. “The band wrote all the songs and performed everything and made the decisions, then they went out on the road and developed an audience willing to buy it. So the band is doing all the work, I’m sort of part of the equipment.”9 The band added Albini’s name to the credits of the twentiethanniversary remaster: “Produced by Jawbreaker. Recorded by Steve Albini. Engineered by Fluss.” * * * “We took the tape over to Ben Weasel’s house and listened to it on Tuesday,” Adam remembered. “It was like we were too close to it.” We had no distance. The fact that it took so little time to record and mix, we didn’t have it in our head right. We 56

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were too in it. We had cassettes when we embarked on this national tour that we were going on and I remember at some point listening to it in the van on the boombox, and Blake was like, “We can’t listen to this anymore, this is gonna drive us fucking crazy. We can’t do this to ourselves. We have to get rid of these things,” and we literally threw them out the van window and didn’t listen to it again until much later. Blake: “I don’t like to listen to mixes immediately afterwards. There’s always that point where you can really freak yourself out, and we did. We had that period for like seven months of having test pressings but no record out, which was kind of crazy.”10 After leaving Chicago, the band drove to Albany for the delayed start of the “When it Pains it Roars” tour, for which they would once again play across the entire country, into July. The tour was advertised in MRR with one of Jawbreaker’s most widely recognized graphics, of the umbrella-hoisting Morton Salt girl—earning the band its second cease-anddesist letter—along with the misanthropic observation: “Living proof that you can have your cake and eat shit, too.” That summer, dubbed versions of 24 Hour began to circulate among fans, and within a few months, the songs became known well in advance of the album’s release date—an uncommonly early example of the pre-internet album leak. When the band finally listened back to the Albini tapes, after playing the songs over 30 shows, it was clear that a number of them would have to be redone. In August, upon returning home from tour, Jawbreaker booked a day of studio time with Billy Anderson to re-record “Boxcar” and “The 57

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Boat Dreams from the Hill,” remixing “Jinx Removing” and “Do You Still Hate Me?”, and recording a new song that Blake had written since Chicago: “Condition Oakland.” That same month, in the August 24, 1993 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the following local news item ran: Warner Brothers Records won the hard-fought multilabel battle to sign Green Day, a trio of Berkeley-based twenty-year-olds that have sold an impressive 30,000 copies of each of its two albums for East Bay independent Lookout Records. The buzz on the band is that Green Day, a not-so-oblique reference to pot-smoking, is a grassroots phenomenon poised to break big with the release of a major-label debut early next year.11

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This is all we want from life

In Zagreb, Croatia, on the corner of a quiet street in the city’s upper town, is one of the world’s great museum collections: the Museum of Broken Relationships. In a few small rooms, hundreds of visitors have donated or purged themselves of keepsakes from relationships gone sour: toys, clothing, books, letters, jewelry, knick-knacks, and other unwanted mementos from former lovers, extinguished flames, absent relatives and friends. In its persistent attention to relationships past, love squandered, things ended, and moving on, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy can be thought of as its own museum of broken relationships. * * * In large part, the story of punk is one of declarative selffashioning. Think of the Stooges (“Now I wanna be your dog”); Ramones (“I wanna be sedated”); Sex Pistols (“I wanna be anarchy”); or Sleater-Kinney (“I wanna be your Joey Ramone”). This is Jawbreaker’s characteristically counterintuitive addition to that series: I wanna be a boat. I wanna learn to swim.

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Then I’ll learn to float. Then begin again. * * * Here are a few ways of writing about boats: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. * * As I was going down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets And had nailed them naked to colored stakes. I was indifferent to all crews, The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons When with my haulers this uproar stopped The Rivers let me go where I wanted. * * Boat on a hill, never going to sea. Anchored to a fixer-upper’s dream. This boat is beat, never gonna be a boat now. Thirsty, sees the sea from high on ice plant. The first passage is the start of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); the second is the opening 60

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of Arthur Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” (1871); and the third, of course, is Jawbreaker’s “The Boat Dreams from the Hill.” In all three treatments, the boat is a symbol of potential—a container for “every man’s” wishes. In all three, the boat’s meaning is amplified in its nameless human observer, who is described by verbs made subject: for Hurston, the “Watcher”; Rimbaud, the “haulers”; and Blake, the “fixer-upper.” For Hurston, the ship symbolizes the world’s fundamental injustice: how life gives some all they desire, and others’ “dreams mocked to death by Time.” For Rimbaud, the boat is a vessel of delirium, but also of heartbreak. Similarly, in Blake’s rendering, the boat represents something tragic about life. Despite the pension-plan dreams dreams of its owner— which, as the rhymes imply, it resembles—the boat “never had a chance.” Jawbreaker’s boat is given small but revealing human details: “thirsty,” “missing fishy flutter,” it “remembers the carpenter’s sure hand.” Its futility is magnified by consonance, alliteration, and the onomatopoeic jangle of “fishy flutter on its rudder,” underlined by the drums. In this way, the song evokes a sympathy for the life of objects—what the writer Teju Cole calls “the way the little things that surround us vibrate with accreted knowledge, as if they had been taking note of human behavior all along.”1 (Incidentally, the name Freud gave to the sensation of deep interconnection with the universe was the “oceanic feeling.”) Needless to say, “I wanna be a boat” is not the sort of statement one hears in polite society—observe the momentary confusion or delight that crosses the face of someone hearing 61

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this song for the first time. It’s a seemingly random image that commands a moment of thought from its listener, which only obscures the most important line in the song, at the end. But what of wanting to be a boat that’s “beat,” “out to pasture,” “never gonna be a boat now”? Why would seeing a boat in disuse—“anchored to a fixer-upper’s dream,” “sold at an auction, on the dolly ever since”—inspire thoughts of wanting to be something that “never had a chance”? The answer is embedded in the song’s closing lines: “Sometimes, rainy days drop boyish wonder,” and “Begin again.” Why “rainy days” and “boyish wonder”? Aristotle said that philosophy starts in wonder: “It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize.” As another philosopher observed, rain also sets us to wonder: “Only someone who has grown up in the big city can appreciate its rainy weather, which altogether slyly sets one dreaming back to early childhood. Rain makes everything more hidden, makes days not only gray but uniform.”2 Like its human owner, the boat looks ahead to something beyond the present, and feels that it too deserves something better. “Most of us are not superstars, but we believe we could be if only given the opportunity,” wrote David Carr. “We are, as a matter of practicality, a nation of supporting players, but who among us has not secretly thought we could be at the top of our business, company or team if the skies parted and we had our shot?”3 “Boat” is a song about the skies parting, and believing in one’s shot. Like much of the album to follow, it is a call to renewal, starting over, and becoming something new. * * * 62

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After “Boat,” 24 Hour detours briefly into a twopart editorial statement. Considered together, “Boat,” “Indictment,” and “Boxcar” stand apart from the rest of the album. They are the only songs that seem to have little to do with 24 Hour’s constellation of themes: relationships, communication, and the nature of memory; becoming an adult and an artist in a rough environment; the elusive qualities of intelligence and originality. By comparison with the rest of the album—to state a minority opinion— “Indictment” and “Boxcar” are arguably the thinnest songs on 24 Hour, hooks and all. If not for their popularity, and the impact of their lyrical sentiments, they would not be worth lingering over—but they are worth our lingering, and then some. “Indictment” and “Boxcar” are Jawbreaker’s “My Back Pages,” or “Positively 4th Street”: their acid kiss-off and farewell to a scene that had outlived its novelty, interest, or usefulness. Originally titled “Scathing Indictment of the Pop Industry,” “Indictment” begins: I just wrote the dumbest song. It’s gonna be a sing-along. All our friends will clap and sing. Our enemies will laugh and be pointing. It’s probably pointless to read too much into a lyric that opens with “I just wrote the dumbest song”—but, for all its modesty, “Indictment” makes several sweeping, contradictory claims, and reveals a good deal about its subject by what it leaves out. In the second verse, the speaker declares, “It won’t bother me, / what the thoughtless are thinking”; but at the end, he says that the virtue of a happy song is how “it gives me 63

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space to think, I guess / To think less, and less.” He uses the aspirational “It won’t bother me,” instead of “It don’t,” which begs the question of why he spends ten verses explaining how he’s not bothered, without so much as a chorus. And to whom is he referring as “our enemies”? Is it the same enemy met by the speaker of “Tour Song,” or a newer set? As in so much of 24 Hour, “Indictment” is a seesaw between the poles of optimism and pessimism: friends and enemies, the thoughtless and thinking, clapping and singing versus laughing and pointing, all at “the warehouse”—a thinly veiled reference to Gilman. It might seem like protesting too much to ask “what’s so wrong, / with a stupid happy song?” In truth, for bands in Jawbreaker’s circle of peers, there were a surprising number of injunctions that self-respecting punks were expected to fall in line with, from which label they were on, to how much money they earned, to the lyrical content of their songs: a severe, puritanical, oddly illiberal state of affairs, for a culture that supposedly had its roots in free thinking. “I felt like Jawbreaker was always in some kind of hot water,” Blake said. “There were these people in the Bay Area that looked like they had a deadly agenda and they were really focused. . . . There were all these sort of Gilman Street rules and stuff. I think we were seen as not ‘down.’ People just saw us as a band that wanted to write their dumb pop songs.”4 As though to repudiate what little the thoughtless are thinking, a major thought is introduced: It says many things in its nothingness.

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It gives me space to think, I guess. To think less. And less. At first, the “it” being referred to is the “stupid happy song” of the preceding verse. But as the thought develops, “it” expands, and assumes metaphorical shape (“It gives me space to think”), paradoxically, despite its “nothingness.” This paradox is the concept of negative capability: John Keats’s idea that the mark of a great artist is a capacity for thinking less, not more, and remaining content with “half-knowledge”; when an artist is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This “irritable reaching” is the true subject of “Indictment,” the thinking of the thoughtless. By the time we arrive at the closing line, “it” refers not only to the “stupid happy song,” but the experience of art as a whole. “Indictment” concludes with two inversions of show business cliché: “We could be / the next group that you rob” and “It isn’t who you know, / it’s who you burn”— the former, an especially sour rewrite of the Minutemen’s “Our band could be your life.” “Moving units and tracking charts” and “Selling kids to other kids” are tropes of indiemusic-about-indie-music that LCD Soundsystem would build a career on a decade later. When we arrive at the closing negation—“It means nothing”—another contrast has been drawn, back to the art that “says many things / in its nothingness.” Once again, the parting terms are those of cognition and forward motion: “If you think we changed our tune, I hope we did.” * * * 65

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According to Blake, “Boxcar” was written on the side of the road during their first European tour: “It is a very American song, but it came from living in that van and the culture of the van. Christy and Mary Jane [Weatherbee] were from Lookout! London, so we were hearing stories about Green Day. I felt that claustrophobia of our home scene, abroad. I was pissed off and just did this little ditty, which was the germ of that song. It happened in a few minutes, just the verse, the ‘you’re not punk and I’m telling everyone.’”5 For better and worse, “Boxcar” was Jawbreaker’s most famous song, and the closest they ever came to a hit—the two minutes of their career most people are likely to know, if they know them at all. That this self-described pissed-off little ditty, dashed off in minutes, which fans would request in concert as “the 1-2-3 song,” would come to symbolize the essence of Jawbreaker—the most consummately verbal, introspective, and self-conscious of bands—is a cruel twist. It’s tempting to wonder what might have happened if “Boxcar” had hit MTV in the way a similarly hook-driven song like Green Day’s “Basket Case” or Rancid’s “Ruby Soho” did, and if it would have gained any traction. As far as Jawbreaker songs go, “Boxcar” is not—to this listener— among their more interesting efforts; but it’s precisely the kind of song that would have caught fire on MTV in 1994. (Not that someone didn’t try: the band recorded a glossier version of “Boxcar” with Rob Cavallo during the Dear You sessions, but refused to include it on the album; you can hear it on the reissue.) In concert, “Boxcar” was introduced, variously, as a love song, an homage to trains, and—most often, and most 66

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accurately—about “the shitty things people in the punk scene do to each other.” It begins: You’re not punk and I’m telling everyone. Save your breath, I never was one. You don’t know what I’m all about. Like killing cops and reading Kerouac. The opening couplet is quintessential Blake—rapid-fire, crystalline, circuitous—and probably the two lines for which he is most known: a childish accusation, answered by a conclusive reply. The third and fourth lines can be attributed to either viewpoint, separately or together—the first speaker, defensively, or the second, ironically—“killing cops and reading Kerouac” being outrageous punk hyperbole, but also grounded in reality (one of the Bay’s legendary punk bands was MDC, or Millions of Dead Cops). What did “You’re not punk” mean then, and what, if anything, does it mean today? For all its disgust, there isn’t much explanation in “Boxcar”; like art, or pornography, punk seems to be one of those terms you recognize upon contact. By comparison, it doesn’t mean much to say that someone isn’t jazz, or techno, or classical; this appears to be a loyalty test semi-exclusive to the “liberal” world of punk. If punk is mohawks, mosh pits, leather jackets, tough guys, and aggression, then that was explicitly forbidden by the self-enforcing rules of Gilman’s membership, and largely obsolete in California by the time Black Flag was finished. If punk is all-ages, cost-conscious, anti-corporate, indie labels, progressive politics, and not selling out, it would be utterly foreign to its founders: the Stooges, Ramones, Sex 67

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Pistols, and so on. But if punk is thinking for yourself, doing it yourself, and not accepting life as granted, then surely Jawbreaker must qualify? In the term of the anthropologist Benedict Anderson, punk is an imagined community: like a country, it is “imagined” because, by definition, “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”6 By the time of 24 Hour, the makeup of this community was an all-consuming question, and—almost more than the music itself—at the heart of what it meant to be punk. Before there was anything like a true punk scene to speak of, there was a long and contradictory list of rules spelling out what was or wasn’t punk: allegedly, the most radical and least rule-bound of genres. As early as 1978, as John Doe of X writes in his memoir, punks were debating “what was & wasn’t cool or what was or wasn’t punk rock”— This is how a bunch of outsiders, fuckups & loners turned into a bohemian, punk-rock community. People exchanged stories of where they came from, crazy shit they had done in their young lives, ideas of what was & wasn’t cool or what was or wasn’t punk rock. It was like going to the strangest, coolest graduate school of music, art & life, even though everyone was just fucking around & having a wild time.7 —which is a peculiar way of “just fucking around & having a wild time.” A punk song could only be so long, so many

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chords, and so many time changes; only so “arty,” and only so “pop.” He continues: Punk rock songs are not: all screaming & yelling 3 chords (most Ramones songs are not) 2 minutes long stupid lyrics w/ no leads fast, loud & atonal Punk rock songs are: provocative immediate hook driven (title usually repeated many times) specific fast, slow & in between8 To most of Jawbreaker’s fans and peers, punk was a stance of opposition—a wholesale rejection of the mainstream. To be punk was to resist commercialism, to remain authentic, and to take pride in staying small. But for the band itself— in the formulation of Groucho Marx—punk was a club and a community of which they were longer interested in being members: My enemies are all too familiar. They’re the ones who used to call me friend. I’m coloring outside your guidelines. I was passing out when you were passing out your rules.

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One, two, three, four. Who’s punk? What’s the score? There’s a lot going on here. Most deceptively, the irresistible chorus counts off using the “One, two, three, four!” cadence popularized by the archetypal punk band, the Ramones, only to undercut itself with two self-negating questions: “Who’s punk? What’s the score?” The first question doubles back on itself: who’s punk, but also whose punk? Similarly, “What’s the score?” questions the tiresome one-upmanship of the punk scene, but also a more subversive point, of who serves as the soundtrack to that scene. This skepticism is underlined by the arrangement: nowhere else on 24 Hour is Blake’s guitar part so basic and in line with traditional punk (read: Ramones-type) values. Why did Jawbreaker believe themselves to be so besieged, so surrounded by enemies, guidelines, and rules? For the second time in as many songs—and for the second time in three minutes, which most of us would call compulsion— an opposition is set up between friends and enemies. We’ll pick up on this again in the next chapter—but for now, what Jawbreaker made of their imagined community can be surmised: “You’re on your own. / You’re all alone.” * * * From the fourth song onward, 24 Hour is a different album than its opening suggests. So far, the first three songs are all in the elemental key of G major, and all start on the same note; they are also the three shortest songs on the album. But after the middle fingers of “Indictment” and “Boxcar,” there

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is no editorializing about enemies or guidelines, no digs at “moving units and tracking charts”; and, aside from a wink in “West Bay Invitational,” nothing about being in a band, or what it means to be punk. Instead, the focus turns inward: away from scene politics, and meta-commentary, toward personal confession; away from “what the thoughtless are thinking,” and toward “How can I do this better?” From “Outpatient” on, 24 Hour becomes a private account instead of a public bulletin: a journal of one person’s attempt to make sense of a harrowing year; an unguarded recounting of one or more relationships; an album about being alone, and wondering what one’s purpose in life is supposed to be. Written shortly after Blake’s throat surgery in London, “Outpatient” is the first true story song on 24 Hour, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Instrumentally, it is in the key of B major, and the first song driven by Chris, whose woozy, floating bass lines create a sense of suspension and narcotic haze, echoed in the metrical stresses of the verse: “Doped up and coasting down the hall.” As in Jawbreaker’s other story songs, “Outpatient” opens directly into the action, without prelude or explanation, trusting the listener to draw the connections herself, and imitating the momentary disorientation of its subject. In keeping with “Outpatient’s” theme of dislocation, the narration is a jumble of voices and vantage points, without a fixed speaker—unattributed dialogue of the sort that James Joyce and William Gaddis made their trademark. (Only by reading the lyric sheet do we know that the lines in the second verse have quotation marks around them.) The opening teases the listener with a mystery—whose voice, if 71

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“not quite your own”? Although we don’t know it yet, this is the first of several “little voices” we will encounter before 24 Hour is done, and the first of several occasions when those voices cause the speaker to wonder if he is being heard by anyone at all. “Outpatient” is the third of four songs so far on 24 Hour to directly address a “you.” (“Boat” is the only song on the album without a “you.”) Few songwriters have addressed themselves to a second person as often as Blake: if “you” is not the most common word in his lyrics, it can’t be far off. His pronouns (“I,” “you,” “we,” “it”) create a sense of almost uncomfortable intimacy: sometimes, “you” is the listener; sometimes, a beloved person, or someone who is absent. These songs force the listener into an active role: “you” and I have to coconstruct meaning from suggestions and fragments. In 1926, Virginia Woolf wondered why illness had not taken its place with love, war, and jealousy among literature’s primary themes. In illness, she wrote, “we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads”; “when the lights of health go down . . . undiscovered countries” come into view. The speaker of “Outpatient” has similarly come into view of undiscovered countries: “Do you read me?” is, at once, a literal reference to the act of writing, and a term of distress, spoken over radio. At the same time, it serves as a dispatch from the world of the unwell to the healthy, emphasized by the internal rhyme of “bleeding” and “read me.” The persistent repetition of this phrase, and the geographical punning of “Incontinent off continent,” recall the words of Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone 72

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who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” * * * In the movie L.A. Story, Steve Martin’s character, the disaffected TV weatherman Harris Telemacher, asks the audience and himself: “Why is it that we don’t always recognize the moment when love begins, but we always know when it ends?” That unmistakable, terminal moment—when love ends—is one of the key subjects of 24 Hour: the detritus of a relationship, or what you remember when you think back on happier times. In “Ashtray Monument,” the first song in a minor key (F sharp minor), what remains is not the stuff of high drama, but quieter, more invisible, everyday moments: washing dishes, reading to one another, taking pictures, saying “I love you.” The title yokes together an unlikely pair of words: by definition, an ashtray is a container for ephemera, for disposable objects that will soon be thrown away; a monument, the exact opposite. An ashtray monument is one that has been allowed to grow beyond recognition: an image of surrender, or extreme, unhealthy solitude. Accordingly, “Ashtray Monument” is a song about living alone—and newly alone, after having shared a life with someone. After the bouncy bass lines and leisurely tempo of “Outpatient,” the song opens with a crash: a driving, aggressive guitar line, and a series of insistent drum fills—Adam’s nod to 73

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Cheap Trick’s Bun E. Carlos—the kind we might expect from a D.C. hardcore song, not a romantic recollection. “Free, alone” is an unusual way to start a song, and another unlikely pairing of words. Underscoring the speaker’s agitation, the first verse alternates fragmentary thoughts with long ones: three syllables in the first line, compared to eight, six, and ten after. The chiastic repetition at start and close (“Free, alone” and “free hands now”) and the three consecutive stresses of “free hands now” reinforce the isolation described. Run for cover there’s a big one coming. You’ll be lucky if you’re at ground zero. No one said that this life was easy. Did that no one ever live a life this hard? This chorus—if it can be called that—is also unusual: none of the lines rhyme, until “life this hard” chimes belatedly with “scattered in the yard” in the next verse. “No one said that this life is easy” is a commonplace—the sort of thing you hear from someone who believes their counsel to be worth a good deal more than it is—which is then undercut by Blake’s inverted attribution to a real person. These lines above borrow a rhetorical trick (“No one said . . .” followed by “Did that no one . . .”) from Homer’s Odyssey: after being blinded by Odysseus, who deviously uses the pseudonym Outis, or “Nobody,” the cyclops Polyphemus shouts out in pain to his comrades that “Nobody” was trying to kill him, so no one came to his rescue. The speaker of “Ashtray Monument” is similarly abandoned and bereft, alone with his memories. As often with Jawbreaker, the most personal moments are elided over: “You said, ‘I love you,’ / I guess you did,” which 74

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doesn’t mean that it wasn’t true, only that it’s finished. The speaker isn’t pleading, or putting up a fight: just trying to get the story straight in his mind. The rapid time warp achieved in “Best friends, strangers now” recalls Humbert Humbert’s parenthesis in Lolita: “(picnic, lightning.)” Most revealing, the words “life” and “live” appear eight times in “Ashtray Monument,” more frequently than any other on 24 Hour—a fitting lead-in to “Condition Oakland,” the album’s centerpiece and encapsulating statement. * * * Every so often, tiny miracles will occur in the recording studio, the kind that no one could anticipate: the making of “Condition Oakland” was one such miracle. In its extreme claustrophobia and jittery tempo, “Condition Oakland” is a kind of sequel to “Ashtray Monument”: most any of the preceding song’s lyrics would seem to apply here as well. Like “Shield Your Eyes,” “Condition Oakland” fades in—the only song on the album to do so—with six seconds of anxious silence and feedback, to establish a similarly anxious and dissonant mood. Instead of a gradual entry, led by the drums, here all three instruments begin in lockstep. What we hear is an insistent pattern: an ascending figure in E major on the guitar, punctuated decisively by the drums (this is the only Jawbreaker song with a significant part played in 3/4 time); a repetition of the guitar figure, another answer from the drums; and again, and again, until we meet a speaker in a similar state of repetition-compulsion and circularity. From the onset, Blake’s voice is distorted, indistinct, as though piercing through layers of static. The guitar refuses 75

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to give way to the words: in places, it almost seems to be deliberately obscuring what we hear, so the setting is truly “black as night.” The opening image is familiar to us from any number of folk songs—the lonesome, nocturnal figure heading “down to the tracks”—but here, instead of spinning his story, the way a conventional bard or bluesman would, the speaker undercuts himself with a mocking, self-effacing put-down: “So I’d be a poet in the night.” In these verses, the speaker is surrounded on all sides: two uses of “room” in consecutive lines, and two mentions of “night.” “Beat the walls” evokes the blind man in “Shield Your Eyes,” as does the “big room that is this life,” which also echoes the “big one coming” of “Ashtray Monument.” Then, what might be the most spectacularly self-loathing of ’90s rock choruses, in a long decade of them: This is my condition: Naked and hysterical, reaching to grab a hand that I just slapped back at. This is my condition: Desperate, alone, without an excuse. I try to explain. Christ, what’s the use? The first line sets up the expectation that the speaker is issuing a demand: “This is my condition,” followed by an uncommon coupling and a three-part elaboration when repeated, which retroactively turn “condition” from a demand into a plea. The speaker’s vocabulary is compulsive: this is the third  time  in 76

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four songs we hear the word “alone,” and the second use of “desperate.” At the start of the chorus, we hear Blake’s voice multiplied, as though in a chorus of condemnation; as the thought develops, and piles on details of the speaker’s isolation, the doubled voices drop away. In the first verse, the speaker “rode down to the tracks, / Thinking they might sing to me,” the way the Sirens of Greek mythology lured sailors to shipwreck with their song. At the end, we are told that the sounds in the air are not from goddesses, but earthly “hot rods and gunshots and sirens”: his mode is the mock-heroic, where men can never be heroes, even if they try. The repetition of “these,” “there’s,” “their,” and “they” recall the words of another Oakland native, Gertrude Stein, speaking of where she grew up: “There’s no there there.” At five-plus minutes, “Condition Oakland” is 24 Hour’s longest track, and one of Jawbreaker’s longest songs, period. And yet: after the 2:45 mark, Blake’s voice disappears, the drums drop down to half-time, and narration shifts to the voice of Jack Kerouac, reading from his early “spontaneous prose” piece “October in the Railroad Earth,” and TV personality Steve Allen on piano. “October” is about the months Kerouac spent living in a San Francisco flophouse, and working as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad, after moving west to live with Neal and Carolyn Cassady. In his 1968 Paris Review interview, Kerouac described the piece as “highly experimental speed-writing.” The recording was from Poetry for the Beat Generation, a Dot Records collection on cassette in Blake’s library, which was played from the band’s low-fidelity boombox while pointed at a Shure SM58 microphone. 77

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On first listen, the sample appears to be meticulously dropped in, to maximize the percussive effect of Kerouac’s voice, and the complementary tinkering of Allen’s piano with guitar and drums. As it happened, though, the part of the reading that made it onto “Condition Oakland” was a fortuitous accident: without knowing where it was cued up to, the band hit play on the tape at the precise moment when Kerouac says, “everything is pouring in,” two minutes in. Incredibly, Allen’s piano part is even in the same key as the band. It seems unbelievable that this exact moment in the tape just happened to be cued up on the boombox, and to line up as perfectly as it did with the silences and noisier passages that follow in “Condition Oakland”—but sometimes, that’s how magical things happen. Here is the text of Kerouac’s reading: . . . everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains. BUT IT WAS THAT BEAUTIFUL CUT OF CLOUDS I could always see above the little S.P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your heart. It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin’ to do, ole Frisco. . . . The street is loaded with darkness. Blue sky above with stars hanging high over old hotel roofs and blowers of hotels moaning out dusts of interior, the grime inside the

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word in mouths falling out tooth by tooth, the reading rooms tick tock big clock with creak chair and slantboards and old faces looking up over rimless spectacles bought in some West Virginia or Florida or Liverpool England pawnshop long before I was born and across rains they’ve come to the end of the land sadness end of the world gladness all your San Franciscos will have to fall eventually and burn again. Kerouac’s words stand outside the music, or above it; they have nothing to do with the story of 24 Hour or “Condition Oakland,” and everything. Unlike the samples on Bivouac or Unfun, which are used largely as texture, Kerouac’s voice and Allen’s piano are very much part of the ensemble here. The sampled narration retroactively adds valence to the song’s opening line: “I rode down to the tracks.” The long outro teases a build-up and tension between the guitar, drums, and ride cymbal that is released only at the song’s close, with a long, noisy, glorious instrumental fadeout, as though to imitate “the end of the land sadness end of the world gladness” before “all your San Franciscos will have to fall eventually and burn again.” It is here that we arrive at a curiously underappreciated fact about Jawbreaker: for all their verbal gymnastics and lyrical virtuosity—for all their intellect, wit, and literary qualities— they were never more singular or fully themselves as a band than in their instrumental passages, such as the end of “Condition Oakland,” or equally memorable moments in “Big,” “Shield Your Eyes,” “Parabola,” “Busy,” “Eye-5,” “Drone,” and so on. Blake: “I always liked the long, arty songs we did, partly

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because they were so difficult to do live. Anything where we’re jamming and expanding space, I still get excited about.” A confession: for most of my years of loving this album— until shortly before starting on the proposal for this book, in fact—I never knew that the voice in the sample at the end of “Condition Oakland” was Jack Kerouac’s, and I almost wish I could unlearn this fact, as I never understood the enduring fascination with his writing. (Truman Capote: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”) Then I went back to “October in the Railroad Earth,” and saw how many images and themes it somehow had in common with 24 Hour, despite being written 40 years earlier: “the switching moves of boxcars,” “the reading rooms tick tock big clock with creak chair,” “old faces looking up over rimless spectacles,” “long before I was born and across rains”—and, of course, “The clarity of Cal to break your heart.” As Christopher Ricks wrote of the surprising connections between Bob Dylan and an older poet like Tennyson: “It is not enough to call him a precursor; they can simply be kindred spirits.” You don’t have to know the precise meaning of “It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin’ to do, ole Frisco . . .” to hear in Kerouac’s scatting of “nathin’ to do” the place of all yearning and frustrated young people, forever. Both the album and the prose poem are ambivalent love letters to the beauty of California, as can only be glimpsed by an outsider, or one who has newly moved there. For these reasons, “Condition Oakland” is 24 Hour’s emotional and structural center, with exactly five songs before and five after, and its clear musical high point. Blake: “It seemed like a good summation of the record in a weird way, to come after the fact. Somehow it tied up a lot of 80

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ideas from the record in one song . . . it addressed those ideas of loneliness and struggling to be an artist in a kind of rough environment. It has a lot of immediate truth to it.”9 * * * After the peaks and canyons of “Condition Oakland,” 24 Hour resumes on a smaller scale, with a new version of “Ache.” Like the take recorded during the Bivouac sessions, the song opens with a ringing guitar line; here, however, the tempo is slower, and gives way to a more active drum part. Once again, instead of commencing immediately after the guitar intro, the band halts briefly, and considers, for a pregnant pause of five seconds that seem a lot longer than they are. The earlier lyrics (“a thin sheet / With a lot of heart”) have been revised with the more elliptical “thin sheet / across the face,” which fills in the most chilling single image on 24 Hour: a corpse, horizontal, awaiting burial. The drum beat in the verses turns upside down halfway in: downbeat becomes upbeat and vice versa, then reverts. Blake: “That song really came together in the studio. I think we tried a pretty outrageous trick where we used a very anthemic guitar and I had a little Radio Shack amp. We thought it would be at least a funny experiment to make that kind of soaring guitar come out of a little Radio Shack transistor amp.”10 What is most noticeably different about the 24 Hour version of “Ache” is the use of vocal overdubs, in the form of a call-and-response. In the lyric sheet, these lines are printed without any break or contrast. But on record, the voice that calls out “I believe in desperate acts” is clearly different from 81

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the one that responds, “Look like a fool”; the latter sounds closer to the distorted voice from “Condition Oakland,” an antiphonal comment that answers to Blake’s regular singing voice. We can hear these overdubbed responses as though bracketed: parenthetical inflations, injunctions, and asides, which sometimes amplify the meaning of the words just sung, and sometimes overrule them. The technique is one that Blake first used in “Equalized,” and Will Oldham would employ in “I See a Darkness,” giving the sense of two speakers in dialogue. The antiphonal response here is partly vocal harmony, partly for the sake of rhyme, and partly thematic counterpoint. “That’s pretty old.” What’s pretty old? In these lines, “old” appears to be a synonym for “tired,” or “clichéd.” But if this is right, it would seem to be contradicted by “I never felt like this before,” unless “old” is being used to mean the opposite of cliché: novelty, or wisdom. What sort of wisdom does the speaker newly possess, and what does this have to do with the “desperate acts . . . that make me look stupid? (Look like a fool)”? To “look like a fool” is, of course, to resemble one, but also to look on the world as only a fool can. In King Lear, the character of the Fool is a clown, subject to whippings and punishment. At the same time, the Fool is the most perceptive of commentators, and one of two characters in the play who fearlessly speaks the truth. After Lear has given away his kingdom, needlessly, the Fool says to his king, “Thou wouldst make a good fool,” and continues: Fool. If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time.

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Lear. How’s that? Fool. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.11 Being old is not the same as being wise, and the speaker of “Ache” seems to agree. Sometimes, it is precisely the opposite—“desperate acts, / the kind that make me look stupid,” or foolish—that reinvent us, and make us new. The closing verses are a catalog of opposites: “So right, so wrong,” “You win, you lose,” “same old,” “old news,” questions and answers, giving and taking, seeming and faking, coming and going, taking the lead and being lead on. “Let me make you mine” and “lean your head on mine” are symmetrical, rhyming, monosyllabic pleas: working examples, should we need them, of the desperate speech acts that make you look stupid. “Ache” is about the suspicion that one is going to end up alone; about believing the best might well be behind you; about only wanting a chance. It is a song about convincing yourself that things are going to turn out okay, when you aren’t entirely sure that’s true. It is the saddest song on 24 Hour, and the song Blake says he is most proud of. Along with “Bivouac,” “Ache” is one of the most crushing lyrics he ever wrote: a distinction not to be surpassed until “Jet Black” on Dear You. More than any other song on 24 Hour, it makes plain the absurdity of calling Jawbreaker a mere punk band, or any of the useless categories (emo, alternative, pop-punk) that accumulated around them. * * *

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A famous anecdote about Ernest Hemingway goes as follows. One day, eating lunch with some fellow writers at a restaurant in New York, Hemingway declared to the group that he could write a short story only six words long. The other writers were unconvinced. Hemingway told each of them to put ten dollars in the middle of the table. If he was wrong, he would match the sum; but if he was right, he got to keep the whole pot. The writers agreed. Hemingway wrote down six words on a napkin, and passed it around the table. The writers read it, conferred, and handed over the money. Hemingway had written a beginning, a middle, and an ending, all in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” As with most such anecdotes, this one is probably apocryphal. (In 1921, a newspaper columnist wrote, rather morbidly: “There was an ad in the Brooklyn Home Talk which read, ‘Baby carriage for sale, never used.’ Wouldn’t that make a wonderful plot for the movies?”) Still, it speaks to something valuable about the power of language, and literature: how the essence of the most tragic human drama can be transfigured into art, by compacting it ruthlessly to its barest fundamentals. Hemingway is not a writer Blake seems to have commented on, but he does compete mightily and even surpass the master with the next song on 24 Hour, which would seem to do Papa one better. The five words “Do You Still Hate Me?” may not quite have a beginning, middle, and end, not as Hemingway would have recognized. But they double as a completed story in itself. The question condenses a scenario and a feeling familiar to all of us: after a relationship is over, and all we can think of is the many ways we fell short; after a 84

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decisive break, or argument, when there doesn’t seem to be any way of putting things back together. Like the sample in “Condition Oakland,” these five words tell us everything about the song they contain. This is a story without beginnings and ends, a kind of narrative suspension: there is a past, and an eternal present, but not much prospect of resolution. Unlike “Outpatient” and “Ache,” “DYSHM?” is not a song about insight or progress, but stasis, and feeling stuck in the mire of silence and uncertainty. After “Indictment” and “Boxcar,” which are by design, being satirical songs about punk, “DYSHM?” is the most basic of 24 Hour’s songs instrumentally. Unlike those earlier songs, however, it achieves a level of emotional intensity and lift not reached in any other part of the Jawbreaker songbook. To the degree that there is any ambiguity in this very straightforward song, it is the deliberate confusion of chronology at the start. The first line sets a mood that is progressively contradicted and expanded by what follows, to mirror the learning curve of the speaker: “Been hearing about you” is what you say about someone you hardly know, to whom you’re being introduced for the first time (“I’ve heard so much about you”). “All about your disapproval” shades the portrait in, contrarily, and is sung in a higher register. With the admission, “Still I remember / the way I used to move you,” in the same key, it’s clear that the speaker has been doing a lot more than idly hearing about someone: by the end of the first verse, there are six mentions of “you” and “your” in eight lines, and six mentions of “I” and “me.” “DYSHM?” is in B major, bridging D sharp and E. Lyrically, it is a catalog of all the ways in which someone can 85

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leave you wondering, or off-balance, reinforced structurally by irregular line lengths. Six of these eight statements in the first verse are fragmentary; only the revealing “Still I remember . . .” opens up and runs over to two lines, with this remembering dramatized by an intervening pause. After the irregularity of the opening verse, the chorus is a plateau of evenness and symmetry. All eight lines ask a single, direct question, ending in a question mark; seven of the eight lines are the same length, at four syllables. Only the title, and the heart of the song—the question that contains within it every other question in the litany—stands apart, with five syllables. In each of the four-syllable lines, there is one accent, which is always on the third syllable; in the outlier question, there are two consecutive stresses, on the third and fourth syllables, in imitation of being stuck, or stíll háted: Are you óut there? Do you héar me? Can I cáll you? Do you stíll háte me? Are we tálking? Are we fíghting? Is it óver? Are we wríting? The drama here is twofold. There is the escalating intensity of the questions—from the rhetorical “Are you out there?” to the pleading “Can I call you?” to the valedictory “Is it over?”—along with a more subtle, almost subliminal act of imaginative sympathy between listener and subject. In the regularity of the metrical stresses, and the ease with which 86

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the listener can discern the pattern of the song, a kind of narrative anticipation is generated, in which we expectantly wait to hear how the next use of the pattern will occur. By the time we hear “Are we talking?” or even “Can I call you?”, we have a pretty good idea of how the rest of the chorus will go, which in turn makes us anticipate what comes next in the pattern. In this informed anticipation, the listener comes to identify with and even resemble the mental state of the speaker, who also waits for resolution in suspense. Musically, the chorus is notable for the way in which it sits in the singer’s passaggio, a term in classical music used to describe the vocal registers between a singer’s chest voice and head voice. Traditionally, classical singers learn how to iron out flaws in their passaggio, but here Blake uses these imperfections to heighten the emotional delivery of “Hey, I miss you!” The magic of “DYSHM?” lies in this rallying hook, which is so basic as to defy comment: the (somehow) simultaneously heartbroken, ecstatic, cathartic, and unabashed exclamation of “Hey, I miss you!” This moment—four simple, singlesyllable, open-vowel words, two of them “you” and “I”—is the apex of Blake’s love song–writing, and a crest reached only in one or two other moments on 24 Hour. Despite the song’s seeming pessimism, its mile-high litany of regrets, the closing refrain of “DYSHM?” makes it one of Blake’s most triumphant and uplifting lyrics: a textbook illustration of “Want’s” urging to “let it all out,” and one of those desperate acts that make you look stupid. In sweeping aside the song’s opening verbal torrent, and laying his confession bare—“Hey, I miss you”—Blake says 87

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more, and more deeply, than he could with ten times the number of words. There is not a person alive who cannot say of someone in their life: “Hey, I miss you,” or “Do you still hate me?” As is true of the most enduring punk music—at its best, the most democratic and egalitarian of genres—when we sing along with these words, the wall dividing spectator and participant dissolves; the referents of “I,” “you,” and “me” become as much our own as they are Blake’s. This is why “DYSHM?” will always be the most generous of Jawbreaker’s songs. * * * After “DYSHM?”, we return to the form of the story song. “West Bay Invitational” is about a party that happened in Adam and Blake’s apartment on Sycamore Street in the winter of 1991—or rather, it starts out about that. The song begins in A major, and counts off from Adam’s kick drum, floor tom, and snare, which are answered by a pensive bass line, and a distant guitar melody. The clashing of music and theme lend a weirdly anxious, heavy intro to a song about a party. All of the neighbors decided: It’s time to have all our strangers over and make friends. Chris got a pony keg of loose charm. I had an accident. I hurt my arm. This verse is a kind of fun-house mirror, where everything is inverted. Usually, when someone tells you about a party, they decided to have all their friends over; here, it’s all of the neighbors deciding “to have all our strangers over,” which already tells us something about the neighborhood. (Blake, introducing “Boxcar” in 1996: “Welcome to San Francisco. 88

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Please drive carefully. Act like you don’t know anyone. Be a stranger, all the time.”) In the next verse, a new character is introduced: “You.” From the outset, this “You” is differentiated from the many preceding mentions of “you” on 24 Hour by its specificity: “You were from Oakland by way of the Midwest.” This attention to detail continues into the next line, which compresses three nouns in rapid, consonant monosyllables (“I bought a rose and a suit with the pants pegged”). It’s the mention of “You” that conjures these details, and bends the trajectory of the lines to follow. By the third verse, “West Bay” has veered into a different song from the one that started out about strangers and neighbors. We notice the change right away: five mentions of “you”—two in one line—and four each of “I” and “we.” Underlining this shift, Blake’s voice shoots up a register, with the disclosure of an intimate detail, both revealing and opaque: “You said, ‘I smelled you twice today.’” The diction becomes slurred, repetitive, approaching drunken. The earlier specificity of detail has gone blurry: “Someone was passing out somewhere.” The air of drunkenness is reinforced by the dizzying multiplicity of rhyme, even in words that don’t ordinarily sound together. There follows a revealing non sequitur, each line sung in a progressively rising register: I just looked deeper into you. You bit my neck blue. We hung our clothes up on the floor And put our faith in a closed door. 89

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With these words, the band shifts into an ascending minorkey instrumental—as though to allow the lovers a moment of privacy, a curtain between acts, before returning to the song’s main riff. The tension here is between Chris’s swampy, syrupy bass line, playing off Adam’s ride cymbal and snare, playing off against Blake’s insistent guitar: a rendering of the exhilarating vertigo to be found between clothes hung “up on the floor” and “faith in a closed door.” When the vocal resumes, we sense that something is different: the instrumental passage has delivered us to our original starting point. We’re having this party. Please come. It won’t be the same without you. Please come. With the point of view returned to the neighbors, we are full circle: back before the party, where the song began, or at another party entirely, emphasizing circularity and routine (“Isn’t it always?”). Once again, “you” seems to be a different person: no longer from Oakland by way of the Midwest, more than “all of our strangers.” The compulsive frequency of “I” and “me” has resurfaced as a repeating phrase: “Please come,” intoned four times over eight lines. “It won’t be the same without you” is a tender, hopeful, and possibly mistaken (but no less defiant) reply to the earlier question: “Isn’t it always?” The plaintive repetition of the closing verses suggests we could also be present at the morning after the party—when one is deathly hung over, and thinking back to the night before, and nauseously wondering why going out had ever seemed like a good idea—all themes that will continue into the next song. * * * 90

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After the neighbors and strangers have gone home; after the party is over, all is quiet, and we are alone, or stuck with ourselves: this is the setting of 24 Hour’s penultimate song. Like “Condition Oakland,” “Jinx Removing” seems like a sequel to its preceding song, which is also in A major. In concert, it was always introduced by Blake the same way: a song about the power of religious voodoo candles sold in the Mission to determine the outcome of a relationship. (Belfast, 1994: “This is a song about the curative power of the Santeria cult in domestic American relationships; it may apply abroad, we don’t know.”) With its headfirst opening and double versechorus structure, “Jinx Removing” resembles “DYSHM?” in a number of ways—one reason the band tended to play one or the either live, but rarely together. The song opens with a buzzing guitar line over a bouncy bass-and-drum rhythm, suggesting a basic, Unfun-type rock number to come, before doubling back and starting up again with an irregular rhythm, and a decidedly unfun mood. “Talked out and now I’m feeling crowded” is a mood familiar to any introvert. “All the errands in the world / won’t save us now” is pitch-dark humor, typical of Blake: a reduction for anyone who hoped that crossing items off a to-do list would bring relief. Salvation might seem a lot to ask from errands; the OED reminds us an “errand” is not only a task, but also has a religious meaning (“a petition or prayer presented through another”). The language of belief and redemption continues into the second verse, which returns to the binaries of “DYSHM?” As in the earlier song, this verse is a catalog of opposites, within each line and couplet: smart and dumb, talking and listening, 91

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knowing and not-knowing, make-believe and life. Yet these lines also stand out for what they choose not to mention in a love song: to start, anything about physical beauty, or even appearance. This points to something uncommon about “Jinx Removing,” and so much of 24 Hour: its proudly cerebral view of romance, and of love as a meeting of equals. For the speaker of this song, as in the song to follow, the ideal partner is someone who knows when to talk, and when to listen: someone who knows things—who sees things differently— but not to the point of cynicism. In contrast to “West Bay,” romantic love in “Jinx Removing” is an intellectual partnership: a meeting of minds as well as bodies. In this consistent attention to a romantic partner’s intelligence—to the qualities of originality, patience, learning, and verbal expression—the writer of this song is someone the novelists of the nineteenth century would have recognized as one of their own. Considered together, “Jinx Removing” and “West Bay” conceive of desire as essentially dual: spiritual, as well as corporeal. Then—speaking of desire—we get an utterly barren, naked, plainspoken confession: a kind of soliloquy, and a mushroom-cloud moment that, no matter how many times you’ve heard it, no matter how familiar, never fails to induce a lump in the throat. If they are not the words that the rest of 24 Hour has been building up to, there are no such words on the album: “I love you more than I ever loved / anyone before, or anyone to come.” What can you say about a line so private, so personal, exposed, and free of artifice? There’s something almost unkind or voyeuristic about listening in too closely—like staring at someone who had a horrible day, crying on the subway. 92

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By rights, this line shouldn’t work. Written out on paper, or read out loud, it’s downright embarrassing. It’s a line that a poetry teacher would circle in red ink, the sort of thing a lovesick adolescent commits to their diary about a first boyfriend or girlfriend. Maybe this is precisely why it does work. In their candor, their nakedness, and exposure, like the question “Do you still hate me?” and “Hey, I miss you,” these are words that all of us can say about someone in our lives. All of us have someone we are possessed by, or someone we will always wonder about—for better or worse, with reason or not—someone who stood apart from the rest. To say that you love someone more than anyone before means one thing; but to say that you love them more than “anyone before, or anyone to come” is something else: the difference, in Mark Twain’s words, between the lightning bug and the lightning. * * * How do you close out an album about desperate acts, disasters, fixer-upper dreams, boyish wonder, things going wrong so often, and all we want from life? With the most sublimely melancholy song on the record, of course. “In Sadding Around” is a kind of summing-up or index to 24 Hour: a valediction whose every image and theme corresponds to multiple points in the ten songs preceding. Heard in sequence, the song imparts to the album a certain narrative resolution, and a retrospective logic, which make the eleven-song cycle of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy one long series of sadding around. According to Adam, the title (“New Slow Sad” in early live shows) derived from a saying of Bob McDonald, a 93

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friend of the band: “Bob just said that one day. Blake asked him what he was gonna be doing, and he said he was going to be in sadding around all day. Blake just kind of wrote it around that.” If there were any remaining ambiguity about the relationship in “Ache” and “Jinx Removing,” this song squashes it. Fifteen seconds in, a far-off tone hovers in and out of hearing, a warning siren in the distance. Once again, as befits a song about a relationship’s end, the opening verses seem unable to rhyme, apart from the ominous “right” and “night,” and “recovery” with “being here.” “Little demons by my bed” and whispered secrets (“the kind you never hear”) echo the “little voice that’s not quite your own” from “Outpatient,” as well as “Do you hear me?” and “Then I remembered us in that bed.” These verses are haunting, even harrowing, in a way that’s not easy to pin down. Maybe it’s the structure, or the scaffolding—how the arc of the music subtly mirrors the arc of the story: a heavy, gut-churning, off-key intro, with the band in perfect sync, accelerating, and building, before progressively dispersing. Maybe it’s because the first two verses are nearly all enjambments: protracted, reflective, confessional thoughts, running vertiginously over from one line to the next. Maybe it’s the dissonance of the legalsounding “Recovery in lieu of ” butting up against the existential “being here right now.” Or maybe it’s as simple as taking Blake’s words at face value. To write a song in the year 1992 with the lyric “Sleeping off the last five years / takes another five” is to isolate the exact length of time that Jawbreaker had been a band in earnest. That they would ultimately break up less than five years later is only one of 94

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the reasons “In Sadding Around” remains the most uncanny four minutes on the album. Is this song a conscious or unconscious statement of misgivings about more than just romantic relationships, but artistic ones too? In its closing verse, the speaker of 24 Hour is consumed by what can only be called a parting moment of revelation. There is the double meaning and internal rhyme of the first line: “Sore, hit the floor,” as the printed lyrics tell us, but also the imperative: “Soar, hit the floor.” This line is parallel in syntax and meaning to “So I let go,” but where the earlier verse left us “a long way down again,” here, the ground affords an ascendant vision: “Got my first glimpse of the sky,” and “The stars were on your side,” a nod to Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Superstitious hyperrealists, we notice the second appearance in the album’s two final songs of the number thirteen. All of this is woven together in a final blaze of alliteration and consonance. “In Sadding Around” collapses on a final, unresolved, exceedingly dissonant, diminished chord: the tri-tone, or devil’s interval, which was not only avoided by composers historically but explicitly banned by the church in medieval times. The parting words of 24 Hour are circular, enigmatic, self-negating: “I say hello and it’s goodbye again.” It’s tempting to write this line off as an evasion, after the candor of “In a cell we kiss and tell,” or the incandescence of “the stars were on your side.” But that last word gets stuck in the head, somehow: “again.” With this concluding mention, the word “again” is heard more than all but one on 24 Hour: “life.” The promise of “Boat” is that all of us—fixer-uppers, 95

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pension planners, on the dolly, on a porch in Brooklyn—can decide that we want something more from life, and begin again. After “In Sadding Around,” we understand this last repetition to mean something similar: goodbye to all that, and hello to renewal, or starting over: begin again. * * * Like its recording, 24 Hour’s cover art was a product of economy: a handmade collage of accessible materials assembled in Adam’s kitchen one afternoon. The cover is divided into four uneven boxes. The upperleft is a perfect square, framing an off-center black-andwhite photo of a pocket watch from Hiroshima: most of the numerals are stripped off, but we can see that the watch is stopped at 8:16, at the precise moment when American bombers dropped the first atomic weapon. In the upper-right are three safety matches lined up on a brown background, made of flattened cigarette filters: two of the matches are touching, just so, while the third one stands slightly apart. The lower-right is a monochrome field of metallic gray—the foil from a pack of cigarettes—with the album title in maroon capital letters. It’s a visual pun; the color of the title matches the coated heads in the matchbox above. The lower-left is another borrowed image, from Looney Tunes, of a cannon aimed directly into a canyon: a second example of overkill, quite literally, as well as the familiar resting place of Wile E. Coyote, the inept cartoon predator whose lust for revenge is perennially thwarted by two enemies—the Road Runner, and gravity—that always win. The horizontal and vertical borders separating the four boxes 96

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are a mix of therapeutic pills and capsules, cut out by hand from a drug almanac: Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and so on. Inside the lyric booklet were black-and-white photographs that Adam took to accompany each song: a mound of pennies for “Indictment,” voodoo candles for “Jinx Removing,” train tracks for “Boxcar.” Like the band and the songs it represents, the cover of 24 Hour is a study in contrasts: deadly serious and playfully lighthearted; vivid, realistic color next to minimalist abstraction; mass destruction side-by-side with a Looney Tunes gag. In this way, the artwork implicitly teases the album’s contents: disaster and depression, but also persistence, stoicism, and humor; solitude and isolation; perspective, memory, and consciousness; adolescence and adulthood; art and life. * * * What are we to make of the title? What, exactly, is the 24 Hour Revenge Therapy? Is the emphasis on therapy, or revenge? Are these two words squaring off in opposition, or in tandem? How does the title of 24 Hour integrate its songs into an overarching narrative? And how are we to enact or interpret that narrative in an album that is barely 38 minutes? By now, it will come as little surprise to note that, of the title’s four words, only one appears during the course of the album. The word is “hour,” as it occurs in a moment of discovery in “Ache”— I never felt like this before. I say that every hour.

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—which is as good a stand-in for the “story” of 24 Hour as any other. The OED defines “revenge” as “the action of hurting, harming, or otherwise obtaining satisfaction from someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at his or her hands.” In a directly opposite sense, it defines “therapy” as “the medical treatment of disease; curative medical or psychiatric treatment,” from the Greek word for “healing.” What is the relation between hurting and healing, satisfaction and treatment? Is it the vindictive desire for revenge, for which we need therapy? Or is the revenge itself the therapy? And what does any of this have to do with 24 hours? In Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest surviving work of literary theory, we read of three classical unities, or rules, that stage plays of the time typically followed. There is the unity of action: a play should have one action that it follows, which is of a certain magnitude—a good way of describing the desperate acts and heartache coursing through 24 Hour. There is the unity of place: a play should happen within a single place—another given on the album. And there is the unity of time: the plot of a play should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours. What the speaker of “Ache” calls “move or die” can also be recast in the language of poetry or philosophy. For Nietzsche, a strong poet was one who could tell their story in words never used before. Ultimately, their test is one of escaping inherited descriptions, and willing new ones into existence: what others have called giving birth to oneself, or acquiring a language with which to narrate unfamiliar experience (“I never felt like this before / I say that every hour”). Or, as 98

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an old crank once put it: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”12 By framing the songs of 24 Hour as a continuous narrative, respecting the unities of action, place, and time, we can hear the album as more than a collection of songs: a kind of journey, or a process of self-understanding; a course of therapy. But there is another sense in which 24 Hour’s relentless attention to memory forces us to think about time passing in our own lives, and the many ways in which 24 hours can be organized or put to better use—how many different days can be carved out of a day. Chapter one of the narrative sets forth a modest, if uncommonly expressed, wish— I wanna be a boat. I wanna learn to swim. Then I’ll learn to float. Then begin again. Begin again. —to which chapter eleven returns and concludes: I dip my toe in this cold, cold life. I want to dive but I can’t find your feet. From the song titles alone—“Ache,” “Outpatient,” “Ashtray Monument,” “Condition Oakland”—we can infer that any therapy to occur will be self-administered; that the desired satisfaction of the revenge therapy will be self-realization, self-acceptance, and self-understanding: begin again. In this sense, 24 Hour echoes what Bob Dylan once said about another meditation on revenge, “Like a Rolling Stone”: “In 99

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the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know. Telling them they were lucky. Revenge! That’s the better word. . . . Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet up with.”13 From the fixer-upper dreams of “Boat” through the first glimpse of the sky on “In Sadding Around,” the dominant key of 24 Hour is one of longing, desire, and healing—therapy—over revenge.

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One day in October 1993, Blake came home to his Oakland apartment to find a surprising message waiting for him on the coffee table. One of his housemates had written: “Tour with Nirvana next week? Yeah, right!” Also written down was a phone number and a name: John. He called the number, which was answered by someone at Gold Mountain Management, in L.A., and was “promptly put through about five transfers,” before John was on. This is how Blake wrote about the conversation after: “Yeah, Silva.” “Um, this is Blake, from Jawbreaker. I think you called me.” “Oh yeah, Blake, well, here’s the long and short of it: Greg of The Wipers just fired his bassist in Europe, making it impossible for them to work the next leg of Nirvana’s tour, so we’re talking about six shows. You’d open, followed by Mudhoney, then . . .”

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I wanted to interrupt and tell him he had the wrong band, that this was, you know, Jawbreaker—the little band that could but would probably rather not. You know, the three dysfunctional introverts who were scared of no one and everyone simultaneously. You know, like a little punk band comprised of three friends who were really lucky to still be friends, like, you know? But I just thought this and he continued his high-speed proposal. “. . . so we start next week and basically, I need to know if you want to do this, what you’re gonna need, and . . .” “Well,” I said, “why us?” “Look,” he said, powerspeak yielding to dogged agitation in his voice, “I just do what Kurt asks me to. He says, ‘Get Jawbreaker.’ So it’s my job to get you and here we are. You’ve been on the band’s list for a while. This is real, Blake. This isn’t a joke.” I was genuinely freaked at this point. I told him I’d have to confer with my band and get back to him. Jesus, I just wanted to fix my car and start writing again. Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of thrilled, and somewhat grateful to have the frightful monotony of my life sledgehammered by this invitation.1 Unbeknownst to them, the offer had arrived through the intervention of Cali DeWitt, a young artist from L.A., who had seen the band play multiple times, and who happened to be working as Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny. “I had moved to Seattle and I was living with Kurt and Courtney ’cause I got a

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job babysitting Frances, and he heard me listening to Bivouac a lot,” DeWitt recalled. “When it came time for picking bands to go on the In Utero tour, I was very vocal that they should choose Jawbreaker. . . . I was twenty and they were one of my favorite bands.”2 Adam and Chris were both convinced that Blake was foisting a prank on them, and not without reason: the first show they’d been offered was a week away, in Albuquerque, giving them only a few days to rehearse and get the van ready. When he finally persuaded them the invitation was real, they told him to hightail it to the Mission for an impromptu band meeting. Just a few days later, on Tuesday, October 19, they drove up to the mammoth Albuquerque Convention Center. Bill Schneider: “We were touring with four guys in a ’78 Dodge van. Nirvana had ten buses, and our van was parked next to the ten buses at a loading dock.” Adam: “It was more people than I’d ever seen. It wasn’t a rock-star moment. It was one of those, oh, Jesus Christ, what have we gotten ourselves into?”3 We played our first set and we’re scared shitless and not sure if it went that great. And coming offstage, I notice [Kurt’s] sitting side stage, just listening through the monitor mix. And being like, “Oh, shit. This guy doesn’t have to be here. There’s three buses that he could be watching a movie on right now, hanging out with his kid.” But he was there to check out the opening band. So I was super grateful for that, and thought that was pretty fuckin’ glamorous, because . . . there’s the man himself, checking out our band. And he even asked Blake, “Are you gonna play ‘Bivouac’ on this tour?”

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Blake’s journal entries from before and after their first exposure to “stadium punk”: (Moments before our first show): Well, here we are in the convention center. Utterly clueless, having things done for us. No wonder rock stars go nuts—they relinquish too much control of their lives, becoming pampered and infantilized. One of the crew people actually asked a caterer to make him a peanut butter sandwich (he was standing in front of a basket of bread, an open jar of peanut butter, a clean butter knife. . . .) What the fuck? This guy can assemble and tear down a multi-million dollar stage and sound system but he can’t make a fucking sandwich. Shit, time to play. Welcome to stadium punk. Shoot me now, forever. Oct. 20: Well, I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a great time last night. A remarkably friendly crowd (although monstrously dumb and/or chemically-enhanced, I suspect). On “Bivouac,” my wallet sprayed coins, cards, scraps of paper all over the stage and I was throwing gum and personal junk into the crowd (one girl returned a Grand Auto receipt to me in front of the show, which was good because I needed it for reimbursement). Anyway, I really dug it. Mr. Cobain was totally sweet and told us to do whatever we wanted. We sold shit out front like blackmarket racketeers and the youth was priceless! I love Albuquerque. After Albuquerque and Kansas City was a show booked at the unlikely venue of a chiropractic college in Davenport,

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Iowa, followed by two nights at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago: a very different sort of visit from their last time in town, five months earlier. Jawbreaker was introduced to the crowd of 5,000 by Ben Weasel, and Nirvana by the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait. The last date of the tour was in Milwaukee, on October 26. Blake describes “Boxcar” to the crowd as a song about Oakland, “where punks sit around and talk shit about each other.” The show was reviewed in the Milwaukee Sentinel: “Preceding Nirvana were Mudhoney and The Jawbreakers. Musically, a case could be made for Mudhoney as a more interesting band than Nirvana. Certainly, their stylistic and emotional range is greater. The Jawbreakers, by contrast, seem to have one tune that they recycled with minor mutations for a half-hour.” Adam: They were all very gracious, and nice to us, and very welcoming. What was really cool was, they made sure that the hall didn’t take any of our merch, no percentage. I don’t know if they were selling it for us or if they were allowing us to set up a table near theirs. But they made damn sure that we didn’t have to pay it to the hall, which to us was considerable. But just that they had to go through that, and had to go and tell somebody, “Look, make sure you do these guys a solid, and let them sell their shit, because they’re not Nirvana.” I remember thinking that was a cool, standup thing. After the show, the Jawbreakers packed up for the long drive home. The following night, in Kalamazoo, Nirvana would be

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joined by the next set of openers, and Jawbreaker would be back in the real world. They had played for six gigantic crowds in seven days with one of the biggest bands in the world, and had carried themselves as well as anyone could expect. It was something to be proud of: a genuine accomplishment, and a sign of how far they had come since 1986. At the same time, the band was well aware of returning home to a certain reckoning back in the Bay Area. As if to preempt the inevitable, writing about their brief flirtation with “arena alternative,” Blake feels compelled to disclose not only the band’s meager nightly earnings, but what they charged for shirts and albums, the number of guest list spots allotted, and even the contents of their hospitality rider: Here, for what it’s worth, are the relevant facts/numbers of our involvement (I include these because I’ve learned people have a habit of making numbers up when none are given): We received a flat $500 a show (about what we make now on our own tours with a lower guarantee vs. percentage). We sold our own shirts and records at $8 a pop (or 2 for $15), much to the consternation of the unionized club vendors. We drove our own van, paid our own gas, got and paid for our own motels (or stayed with friends). We were given a guestlist of ten which we filled with friends and anyone else who looked like they wanted to come in (we didn’t have enough friends in these places to fill the list). We also used the “all-access” laminates we were given to get more people in when the list was filled. We were given a meal at each show (magnificently catered for cast and crew by a company called Eat Your

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Heart Out), as well as a 12-pack of nice beer, juice, pop, and cigarettes. It says something about the improbability of Jawbreaker’s opening slot for Nirvana—and how musically rich that weird moment was—that the bands replacing them and Mudhoney on the next leg of shows would be the Boredoms and Meat Puppets, who would soon join Nirvana onstage for one of its most legendary performances, on MTV Unplugged. Bill Schneider: “They got a really good response. Then it was like, ‘This huge band really likes our band. Maybe it won’t be all bad. Maybe we should do this.’”4 * * * It was during the lead-up and aftermath of their short tour with Nirvana that Jawbreaker’s story first took a turn for the surreal. Until now, their example has been conventional enough: a young band works hard, develops its voice, and learns how to take the training wheels off. Slowly, they attract an audience, which grows the more often they play. The band records an album, and goes on tour. Eventually, if they survive this, they are offered their first big show, which leads to other opportunities. They record another album, and go on tour again. If they are lucky, and tenacious, at some point, they can start to support themselves from their music, and walk away from their day jobs—a milestone, it bears mentioning, that most artists never achieve. This is the point that Jawbreaker had reached by the end of 1993: not wealthy, certainly, or even all that comfortable,

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but finally able to scrape together a living, after seven years as a band. If their album sales were less than historic—tens of thousands, to Nirvana’s millions—they had a young, adoring, passionate fan base, and one that could reliably sell out 500-capacity venues across the United States and Europe. It’s maybe not how most people imagine rock stardom—but it’s a remarkably rare plateau all the same. Then, one day, maybe, the band gets a lucky break: the phone rings, or an invitation falls out of the sky, which almost seems too good to be true. The lucky break is partly the result of good fortune, but also, indisputably, from all the years’ accumulated hard work, the countless miles on  the road, and the many sacrifices the band has made to get there. It’s not quite winning the lottery, but it’s big enough for them to be foolish to pass on. You might think that the fans who have been there all along would celebrate the occasion, or consider their taste validated. Only—and this is where the story starts to veer into headscratching territory—instead of taking pride in the band’s lucky break, or cheering them on, their fans view this hard-won success as—of all things—a betrayal, a compromise, and a sellout. Blake: “I think we were fortunate [with Bivouac]. But we still got some flack. Even at that point, there were people who didn’t think we were especially punk-rock, as some people practiced it. I don’t think there was any major pushback, though, until we did the Nirvana tour. That’s officially when it started.”5 Adam: We took a fair amount of shit from the punk community for even taking that gig. It was never a question that we were gonna say yes to that. We were like, when do we start? Let’s get the fuck out there now. We were down. We knew that they were gonna jump on us for that. We knew that 108

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if we accept that, we’re gonna take shit. We didn’t give a fuck. We knew we’d get thrashed. But, fuck it. We went, and we were happy to go. And there’s no regrets. We knew there’d never be regrets about that. It sounds so obvious as to hardly need saying. You’d think that being asked to go on tour with one of the biggest bands in the world—and a historic one at that—was, at the very least, something of an honor, and an acknowledgment of Jawbreaker’s long road to (relative) success. (Imagine your long-suffering musician friend being asked to open for Radiohead, or your perennially waitressing actor cousin winning a role in a Tarantino film.) And yet—as bizarre and incredible as it sounds today—to Jawbreaker’s fans and peers, at that spectacularly tortured moment in music history, going on tour with a major-label band like Nirvana was equal to embedding oneself with the enemy. It didn’t matter that Nirvana was an epochal group, and one that even its detractors understood had shaken up the general order of things. It didn’t matter that it was Kurt Cobain who introduced countless millions to unsung punk heroes like the Meat Puppets, Bikini Kill, K Records, and the Melvins, whose life was changed by punk just as much as anyone at Gilman. Nirvana was still on a major label and MTV, and still sold millions of records to jocks and suburban poseurs who had seen a video and decided they were now into punk. Blake: I was really shocked. I mean, I understood that you can’t sign to a major label, but that you couldn’t play shows with a band that was on a major label seemed to me so 109

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restrictive and prohibitive. . . . I was bummed that I got negative feedback from friends that that was a sellout move. Nirvana were a great band and they asked us to play with them, so it wasn’t something that we needed to think about at all. “We knew that there was gonna be backlash,” said Adam, “that people would sketch on it, that they would not be into it. We knew that we were gonna get shit-talked, we knew that they were gonna write about us in Maximum for doing that, and we did it anyway.”6 * * * Needless to say, Jawbreaker was hardly the first band to be called sellouts, absurdly, by a sanctimonious and overheated audience. As early as punk’s founding days, the genre’s pioneers were routinely derided as sellouts when they were barely making rent. “Sellout” was punk’s scarlet letter: the tar and feather with which the fallen were separated from the virtuous. In a scene where left-of-center politics were assumed, to call someone a sellout was the most degrading insult obtainable, short of resorting to personal or politically incorrect language: the equivalent of calling a socialist bourgeois, or a Republican anti-American. Moreover, to call someone a sellout was not only a comment on their commercial dealings: a band could “sell out” for cutting their hair a certain way, or for playing songs that were too slow, or too weird, or simply not to the liking of its listener. Slim Moon, founder of Kill Rock Stars, recalls how fans of the riot grrrl bands Bikini Kill and Bratmobile criticized them

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as sellouts for working with a label owned by a male. Here is Henry Rollins of Black Flag, writing in 1982: At this time we were playing new material and it was making some people at the shows a bit hostile. We did that a lot. We would do entire tours with new music in the set, sometimes only doing a few older songs. People were not always that open-minded about this and would yell that we had sold out. I can’t think of a band that was accused of selling out more than Black Flag. We got shit for releasing an album because real bands didn’t release albums. We sold out because we didn’t cut our hair, or because we had a song that was slow or longer than three minutes. Sold out because we had instrumental music in the set. We did all the “wrong” things. All the time we were working our asses off and we were dirt poor. We would read the sellout bullshit and laugh. It might not have been so bad if I had been able to get three meals a day out of our big sellout moves. Imagine having to take that shit from minuscule fakes like Maximumrockandroll and Flipside.7 On the surface, it seems like a harmless enough word— an easy, if reductive, distinction between the artistically authentic and not—until we recall its meaning in the language of racial politics and betrayal. In American history, the sellout as race traitor is as old as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and as current as rhetoric around Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson, and Samuel Jackson’s character of Stephen the house slave in Django Unchained: a deed closer to treason, apostasy, self-sabotage, and moral corruption than mere profiteering.

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In 1957, the editors of Jet called Louis Armstrong a sellout and an Uncle Tom for reassuring the world that “the Negro’s lot in America is a happy one.” Miles Davis, whose longevity earned him years of such abuse, was called an Uncle Tom by Wynton Marsalis for saying that he liked Journey and Styx more than contemporary jazz, and as such by Stanley Crouch in “On the Corner: The Sellout of Miles Davis”: Beyond the terrible performances and the terrible recordings, Davis has also become the most remarkable licker of monied boots in the music business, willing now to pimp himself as he once pimped women when he was a drug addict. The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy writes in his book Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal: The specter of the “sellout” haunts the African-American imagination. . . . For many of them, the label “sellout” is more damning than “Uncle Tom” or kindred epithets. . . . While the latter insults refer to blacks who are deemed to be servile or otherwise lacking in an appropriate sense of racial pride or racial duty, “sellout” refers to someone who is dangerously antagonistic to blacks’ well-being. He is worse than an enemy. An enemy is socially distant. The sellout, by contrast, is a member of the family, tribe, nation, or race. The sellout is a person who is trusted because of his perceived membership in a given group— trusted until he shows his “true colors,” by which time he has often done harm to those who viewed him as a kinsman or fellow citizen.8 112

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As extreme and faintly comical as it sounds, it was this same language of high treason and Judas-like betrayal with which the (predominantly white, male, middle-class) Bay Area punk scene conducted its loyalty tests and show trials. Here is Tim Yohannan comparing the scourge of major labels to “nazi skinheads” in MRR in June 1994: The punk/indie/underground scene is under attack, just as it was back then [by skinheads]. No difference, except this time the thugs are smarter and richer. Their motivation is just about the same—control, power, dominance. Although the former assault was spurred by extreme right-wing political rhetoric, the latter is based on more traditional corporate right-wing political objectives. There can be no middle ground or grey area when you’re under attack by forces alien to the fundamental principles of a community or society. That’s easy when a band or label is blatant in their changing behavior, but few are out front like that. It is usually much more difficult to discern when people you thought were your friends and were completely committed, start getting chummy with the invaders, whore themselves out, and then rationalize it under a cloak of bullshit. Ben Weasel, “Punk is a Four-Letter Word” (MRR, July 1997): Listen up, dumb ass: An entire fucking scene—the one that enables you to see Rancid on MTV in 1997—was created by a bunch of maniacal fucking misfits. Those same misfits, fuck-ups and losers nurtured that scene and helped new people who came along and wanted to be a 113

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part of something different. They made that scene thrive, and it grew into the monster that it is today. . . . there was a time when you knew who was the fucking enemy, and part of the reason that those lines have shifted around so much is because everybody’s too goddamned scared to stand up and say what they believe in, and really believe it, enough to take a punch in the mouth if it comes to it.9 How did a word once deployed in the language of racial politics devolve into a catch-all for the trifles of indie rock? How did a term used to challenge structural inequality and discrimination get co-opted by white guys interrogating each other’s punk bona fides? Was there any awareness on the part of even the most conscious punks that they were appropriating a term of far greater stakes, or drawing false moral equivalencies? That the entire Bay Area punk scene—Gilman, MRR, and the rest—could exist only because of white privilege seems not to have been very much on the minds of the otherwise left-leaning punk community. Scene regular Ben Saari: “Gilman couldn’t happen anywhere other than Berkeley. It took advantage of the triple threat of liberal Berkeley, a fucked-up industrial neighborhood, and the social privilege of the kids who were going there. If it had been a bunch of black kids doing that in North Berkeley, it would’ve got shut the fuck down right away.”10 (Jawbreaker noticed this: the copyright for Bivouac is listed as “© Punk: The Other White Meat Music.”) Curiously, it was Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong—not typically known for his insight on class and racial politics— who openly noted the white privilege implicit in talk of 114

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selling out, and its inevitable conflict with artistic ambition. In a 2005 interview with Spin, he said: It’s so white to worry about things like that. Hip-hop guys are so much more dangerous and so much more willing to take risks in music in a lot of ways because they’re not afraid to be successful. It’s embraced. That’s what you’re supposed to be. You’re supposed to be a superstar. In rock ’n’ roll, and especially alternative rock music, it’s sort of looked at as if you’re not supposed to be up there. It’s taboo. And it ends up making for conservative music, because all of a sudden you feel like you have to have all these rules and are not really a rock star.11 By the time of the self-flagellating early ’90s, even a band that no one outside the Bay Area had heard of could incur the wrath of the self-appointed sellout police. In 1993, Green Day’s original drummer, John Kiffmeyer (a.k.a. Al Sobrante), went so far as to print T-shirts denouncing Jawbreaker’s former tourmates Samiam for the crime of earning a $500 guarantee per show. The shirt read:

GREED SAM I AM DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU OR THE SCENE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR $500.00 PER GIG TOUR GUARANTEE CONTACT PETER DAVIS @ CREATURE BOOKING IN MINNEAPOLIS (FAX) 612-872-0238 115

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“He would literally be holding a picket sign in and outside Gilman, it would say things about how Samiam was selling out the scene and fucking Gilman over,” recalled John Quittner of local band Brent’s TV. “According to him they had a $500 guarantee, which at the time would get you called a sellout.” In their partial defense, the bitchy sentiment and backbiting was hardly limited to the Bay Area. The following year, in MRR, our story’s Zelig, Steve Albini, published an instantly classic essay, “The Problem with Music,” in which he systematically details the ways that major labels manage to cheat their artists, and debunks categorically the reasons for any band to sign to a major. In a polemic worthy of Jonathan Swift or the Marquis de Sade, Albini’s moral disgust is palpable: Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive

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simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke.” And he does, of course. Well into the next decade—a point to which we’ll soon return—these sentiments were not only common, but arguably mainstream. For a time, anyway. * * * On December 16, 1993, Jawbreaker recorded two new songs, “Housesitter” and “Sea Foam Green,” that would come out on limited compilations. In the first weeks of the new year, Blake would record the earliest solo demos for the next album: the world-weary, aptly titled “Jet Black,” whose final version Woody Allen would hear and approve for use, owing to a sample from Christopher Walken’s hilariously insane character in Annie Hall; and the lighter, romantic, verbally inventive “Million,” whose lyrics (“They offered me a million bucks / all I want's a steady fuck”) would prove eerily prophetic.

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24 Hour Revenge Therapy came out in stores on February 15, 1994, on Tupelo/Communion Records, nine months to the day Jawbreaker set out in their van from San Francisco to record with Steve Albini. Blake: “When our album came out, it was just a relief. It was a real slow burn, but people who knew us liked it pretty immediately and felt like it was a genuine portrait of our band. That was satisfying and I got real good feedback from just people I knew, like real fans of the band.”1 As with Bivouac and Unfun, the band would spend most of the next year touring in support of the new album. This time around, though—depending on your outlook—their timing was either utterly perfect, or uniquely disastrous. Two weeks prior to the release date, another Bay Area trio’s album had also come out: it had a cover illustration by local artist Richie Bucher, and the scatological title of Dookie, by Green Day. Coincidentally, it was also 38 minutes long, the exact length as 24 Hour—but that’s where the similarities end. Dookie would go on to sell a staggering ten million copies in the

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United States alone, and twenty million total worldwide— just behind Purple Rain and Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, all-time. As Dan Ozzi wrote: “Let that sink in for a second. An album named after a pile of shit sold roughly as many as an Academy Award-winning Prince soundtrack.”2 No one could have known it then, but Dookie would become the Bay Area’s Nevermind—the album by which every other local band was henceforth measured, and a line in the sand. In its sheer ubiquity and magnitude, Dookie was a landmark album, but also a landmark moment in youth culture, and the mainstreaming of punk, which inevitably triggered its own wave of major-label piranhas and overnight imitators. Before Dookie, a band like Jawbreaker would have existed in relative obscurity: an active, self-sustaining, if largely underground, phenomenon. After Dookie, and the mass audience won over to its poppy, accessible take on punk, there commenced a full-on major-label stampede, identical to the ones that followed the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Nirvana. Howie Klein, former president of Reprise Records: “When the record companies saw Green Day break, so gigantically and so fast, all of the record companies thought, ‘Well, we can do that. All these punk bands are the same anyway. My kid has a friend who’s in a punk band. I could get them and they’ll be our Green Day.’ Some record executives honestly thought Green Day was the first punk band.”3 “They sold ten million records their first major-label release—their first shot at a major label,” said Gilman bouncer and artist Jerme Spew. “Nobody knew. They didn’t even know. When they hit a million records, I remember 120

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hearing how Billie Joe was like, ‘A million? Who in the hell is buying this shit?’”4 It is entirely possible that there were bigger or more unjust casualties of the post-Dookie stampede than the three members of Jawbreaker, but I’m not aware of them. * * * As was true for any band within earshot of Seattle two years earlier, interest benign and otherwise from writers, major labels, and fans inescapably spilled over to bands in Gilman’s orbit—so much so that Billie Joe Armstrong initially refused to answer questions about the venue in the press, which only amplified everyone’s curiosity further. Jesse Luscious, singer of Berkeley punk band The Frisk: “After Green Day signed, they were really good about keeping Gilman out of Rolling Stone. They were very protective. But kids dug and reporters dug and they found out what Gilman was. And so we literally had tour buses driving by saying, ‘That’s where Green Day started.’ Fucking insane.”5 For Jawbreaker, a band that never sounded remotely like Green Day, the tsunami’s effect was twofold. On one hand, the tide brought in by Dookie’s success unquestionably raised all boats. 1994 was the year of The Offspring’s Smash (six million sold in the United States, eleven million worldwide); NOFX’s Punk in Drublic (640,000); and Rancid’s Let’s Go (610,000). Between early Green Day, Operation Ivy, and other catalog titles, Lookout Records grossed $10 million in 1994; between The Offspring, Rancid, and others, Epitaph made $64 million.6 Alongside the bands and labels, a subeconomy of studio engineers, merchandise companies, printers, graphic 121

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designers, photographers, record stores, concert venues, booking agents, and so on flourished. Fat Mike of NOFX: In February of ’94, Green Day (who were opening for Bad Religion at the time) released Dookie, and the punk scene went fucking apeshit. . . . In the ’80s, punks were like the Freemasons or Skull and Bones. We had our own club, our own rituals. We could identify each other in public and, as far as straight society was concerned, we spoke a coded language. Punk allowed us to wear an outcast label as a badge of pride instead of a mark of shame. But suddenly our secret language was being decoded by the major labels. Our rituals were laid bare in the press. And the doors to our secret clubhouse were kicked open by MTV.7 Lars Frederiksen of Rancid: “You could see it coming, from Nirvana first putting the stamp on everybody. But I never could see that we would be doing it. Whatever happened with The Offspring or Green Day and us—I would have told you you were out of your fuckin’ mind.”8 Although their sales were always lower than their more famous peers, and their fan base indisputably hard-won— to date, 24 Hour has sold 70,000 copies—it was during this time, not coincidentally, that Jawbreaker was most active and regionally beloved as a band. Adam: “After 24 Hour came out, we really got rolling. We weren’t playing at little bars or just warehouse shows or house parties—we did that stuff for fun, but Robin Taylor would book us at Slim’s, which is a 500-capacity place, or she’d book us at the Great American Music Hall, or we could go and play at the Roxy down in L.A. 122

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Basically, we were playing these rooms that held maybe 500 people now. Which was huge for us.”9 Anthony Newman: “I was helping them with their merchandise table, so I was sitting out in the lobby and you sort of have a keyhole view into the main room. . . . I remember I could see them performing through a doorway and thinking in that moment that they’d made a jump from being this smaller band with a rabid fan base to a band that could go further.”10 * * * And yet—as is always the case when the underground temporarily conquers the mainstream—success, popularity, and acclaim all come with a price. Unfamiliar faces start to replace old friends in the crowd; talk of community rapidly turns to talk of commerce; a certain careerism, scrutiny, and backlash set in. Adam: “People don’t talk about it, but at a certain time in a band’s life, if they get too popular or stick around too long, your friends stop coming to the shows, and you’re playing to strangers. It gets a little bit weird.”11 Chris: “When you’re selling tens of thousands of records, you don’t know who [they are]. I don’t know tens of thousands of people. I can’t know tens of thousands of people. I know a handful of representative people who are pretty cool, who were involved in what I would call punk rock at the time. And a lot of those people had strong beliefs, which selling out to a major record label violated. So, yeah, I don’t blame ’em in some ways, if they were looking to us.” Blake: “I was becoming a third-person character. We began knowing less people at our shows, and when we 123

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played, it was like an event. We weren’t just another band with a whole bunch of bands on a bill. When we first moved to the Bay Area, we would play a lot of eight-band bills, or we would go up to Sacramento and play these shows with a bunch of hardcore bands or whatever. But then, rather suddenly, we weren’t playing those shows. We were playing our own shows. All the attention was directed at us.”12 “I really don’t want to lose the people who always really got us because they feel estranged by new people showing up at gigs,” said Blake at the time. “I know that’s inevitable, but there is this core of fans that I really value, who are, like, 15, and they write letters that show they intuitively really get my songs about desperation, empty bottles, ashtrays. I’m always surprised to get that, that I’m connecting that way, and I just hope that continues.”13 MRR columnist Brian Zero: As soon as [Dookie] happened, everybody knew that the money was gonna come. . . . That’s when everybody knew the shit was gonna hit the fan. Like, “Okay, are we really over now?” Because the stuff that follows, a lot of the time, is just really kind of a joke. . . . Because you knew from that point forward, every Greg Brady that wants to make it is going to start a band that sounds like Green Day. At that point you had people who start looking at it as a career and not as a community.14 What was once the province of a self-selecting few had become pop. Infrequently, such a moment will catalyze a surge of uncommon musical creativity, as it did in New York in the late ’70s, with the heyday of the Ramones, Talking

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Heads, Blondie, and Television. More often, however, it activates a pattern of crude imitation, watering-down, and mass commerce. As Jon Savage wrote of the unlikely few months in 1977 when the Sex Pistols captured the popular imagination of Great Britain: “At the moment when a subculture becomes visible and thus gains power, there is great tension between the enjoyment of that power and the commercialization that, simultaneously willed and despised, is bearing down like an express train.”15 All pop movements have started with elites—and none, to that date, more self-consciously than punk—but there is always a point where the elite loses control. That point is reached when the mass market and mass media take over, a necessary process if that movement is to become pop. Within this transaction, simplicity is inevitably imposed on complex phenomena, but there is also a fresh burst of energy released with unpredictable, liberating results. Punk was a living exemplar of the sub-cultural process: the dispossessed gain cultural access, but at a price. Pop music is the site of this sale and the record companies are the auctioneers. Definition is a vital part of this, not only pinning down punk, but opening the floodgates of commerce. As the trade magazine Music Week stated: Punk “might be THE NEXT BIG THING so long awaited.” For the next few months, any male rock group with the requisite stance had an interested hearing from the major record companies.16

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Mike Morasky of Steel Pole Bath Tub: All of a sudden, all the new bands kind of sounded like that because there was this real genuine opportunity to succeed. It opened the floodgates for the liars, you know what I mean? It was sort of like, “Here, come to the Bay Area and be a big fat liar and you might become rich.” Seattle, same thing: “Here, come play heavy grunge rock and you might be rich.” In that regard, it’s just kind of a natural progression: when people have a good thing, it tends to attract people to it, and eventually that just ruins it because this core good thing can’t just necessarily support all those people.17 Ian MacKaye on punk’s ’90s pop moment: [Previously,] If I was walking around somewhere, on the street, it was instant tribal identification. I’d see people and immediately be attracted to them—some woman with a shaved head or just something about them, it was just instant identification. And it was really a very important part of my community and the larger community that I felt a part of. And a few years ago, when punk rock spread everywhere, it became really hard for me. Suddenly it was like some weird horror movie. I kept seeing people who I’d identify with instantly and then I realized, wait a minute, they’re just normal people. It’s like some old WWII movie where you’re in a whole town of regular Americans but they’re actually all Nazi spies. That’s what it felt like. Kind of freaked me out a little bit.18

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With Gilman punk having cracked MTV, radio, and national retail, Maximumrockandroll found itself avalanched with promotional records, press kits, interview requests, A&R inquiries—even major-label albums (!) in their mail. In early 1994, MRR clarified their review policy, and published the following set of guidelines stipulating what sort of music was henceforth permitted or banished: A few notes about what you WON’T find reviewed in these pages. You won’t find major-label releases, nor their phony subsidiaries, nor will you find releases produced & distributed by Caroline or Relativity, who are also up to their necks in major-label connections. You also won’t find a lot of releases from big indie labels that used to be known as “punk” labels but are turning out the most dreadful rock imaginable. . . . Generally speaking, if it ain’t reviewed here, it’s not because we never got the record . . . and more than likely, it’s not being reviewed because it has absolutely nothing to do with punk or hardcore and sucks big time.19 Blake: “I think it’s just protectiveness. People guard their bands and there was really a feeling at that time that labels were vultures. They were going to lots of shows and trying to swoop up bands.”20 Aaron Cometbus: “There’s a flipside to the joy of creation, this feeling of futility and loss that comes with it, and it was especially strong at that time because it felt like we were losing our whole scene just at the moment when other people were starting to discover it. That feeling was in the air—that just as

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we were getting out of the gate, we’d already lost something essential that couldn’t be replaced.”21 The supreme irony of all this navel-gazing is that—much like the major-label gold rushes in London and Seattle—by the time Dookie and 24 Hour came out, the golden age of second-wave Bay Area punk commencing with Operation Ivy was essentially over. In the coming years, there would be a tiny number of good-to-great rock albums from the region, but certainly no more than would require one hand to count, until the emergence of Deerhoof, The Aislers Set, and Thee Oh Sees some time later. Jon Savage’s damning obituary for London’s post-Sex Pistols punk scene rings true for the Bay Area in 1994 as well: “Although those caught in the adrenalin rush could not see it, punk was now an outmoded definition, liable to result in stylistic and/or social conservatism.”22 * * * In March, Jawbreaker set out for another seven weeks of shows. More new songs debuted on tour: the gloomy, Bivouac-ish ballads “Accident Prone” and “Basilica”; the romantic 24 Hour–type rockers “Shirt” and “Sister”; the slashing, claustrophobic “I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both.” Two weeks before the end of tour, between shows in British Columbia and Washington, they heard on the radio that Kurt Cobain had been found dead. Adam: The van was in the shop somewhere in Idaho, and we had to go get a rental in order to get to our hotel room. The guy at the car-rental place said something really flippant, in a real cavalier, shitty, cold way. [The news] was playing 128

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on the TV behind him saying Kurt Cobain had died, and he was like, “Oh yeah, that guy killed himself.” And I just looked at him and said, “We knew him, don’t talk like that.” I was just offended. We went to the hotel and we had the TV on and we were watching it. At a certain point we were like, “We can’t do this, this is morbid.”23 The following night, on April 9, 1994, Jawbreaker played at the Firehouse Teen Center in Redmond, Washington, two hours from where Nirvana got its start, in Aberdeen. It is one of their most bootlegged shows. As fans are calling out for “Eye-5” and “Incomplete,” “Boxcar” is dedicated “to people who talk shit everywhere.” Introducing “Ache,” a sombersounding Blake says: “Our van died yesterday. This will be an ode to dead vans.” At the end of the show, Blake says to the crowd: “Thanks a lot for coming. This song is dedicated to Kurt Cobain. Because he was a really cool guy.” The audience breaks into applause, and Blake continues: “It’s not really my right to do a eulogy—but I think that he was a very cool and troubled person, so I wouldn’t hesitate to speak well of him.” Someone in the crowd calls out, “Farewell, Kurt!” The band launches into a glacially slow, sad, heartbreaking version of “Bivouac”: Kurt’s favorite Jawbreaker song, and a fitting, final send-off. It’s hard not to think of Kurt Cobain and the particular strain of melancholy in his songs when you hear Blake sing— Dug my fingers in the earth. Drew you pictures of my pain. They were so pretty. They were so vain. 129

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—and harder still not to wonder what might have been. It was less than six months since the day Bill Schneider had left Blake the note to call Nirvana’s manager. * * * In an ideal world, the death of Kurt Cobain would have brought the punk community to a moment of reflection: as to where music stood in 1994, compared to a few years earlier; as to what he left behind, and who might carry his example forward. Instead, it only added fuel to the fire, and a further sense of siege to a community already cannibalizing itself. As one of the punk scene’s most active bands, and one so recently associated with Cobain, Jawbreaker made an easy, open target. All through 1994, a crescendo of backlash from October’s six shows with Nirvana was becoming hard to ignore: in the sanctimonious East Bay and the pages of MRR, of course, but also in warmer home codes. To some, they were compromised for having whored themselves out to a major-label arena tour; to others, for dropping “Busy,” and the dance-friendly songs from Unfun, or for Blake’s unforgivably altered postsurgery voice—all before a major label was realistically in the picture. Jason White: “To some people they were turning into something they didn’t want—they wanted them to stay the same forever, or what they thought was forever.”24 John Yates: That’s when I think there first started to be grumblings— certainly of Blake’s change in vocal stylings and stuff like that. It just seemed kind of silly, but the discussions about

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any kind of change used to be put under a microscope back then. It used to get pretty ridiculous, especially in a place like MRR when I was there. They very much set themselves up as the lead commentator on any changes that happened with any band or music or scene.25 Three weeks after 24 Hour’s release, during a show in Albuquerque, a “fan” attempts repeatedly to spit into Blake’s open mouth, to protest the band’s alleged decision to sign to a major label. In a band interview that was published shortly after in Rubberband, a fanzine, Adam sounds especially fed up: Our detractors are the most vocal people, they don’t give a shit about us anyway. They hope we, you know, fizzle and burn. The people who were waiting on us to do something like that [Nirvana tour] were the most vocal about it. And I think it was a minority, but they happen to be louder than most. Like, God damn it I told you so. Everything is so reactionary. In terms of like, genres of music, I think that the hardcore people are often the most intolerant, you know?26 Blake: “We’ve had some really hostile crowds and sometimes it’s just horrible because we sit there, play, and take a beating, basically, and get out of there. But in a more resilient state, we try to turn it around and try to fuck with people, or just try to have fun with them.” “People really came down on us for going on tour with Nirvana,” Adam recalled. “They really saw it as, ‘Okay, here we go. This is the first step. The next thing that happens is 131

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that someone from the label sees them and they get snapped up.’ Which is kind of what happened.”27 * * * It’s odd. Jawbreaker was never a political band—after “Imaginary War” and “Seethruskin,” there’s not a single song with a political message, beyond the circular firing squads and insular politics of punk. And yet: on a startling number of occasions, for some reason, the band (or rather, Blake) seems to have felt compelled to speak out about the economics of their working lives—indies and majors, MTV, their more successful peers—unprompted, and on the record. At a Gilman show on July 3, 1993, for instance, when people in the crowd are calling out for “Kiss the Bottle” and “Shield Your Eyes”—romantic songs, about personal desperation—Blake introduces a new song, instead, with the following lead-in: This song is called “Scathing Indictment of the Pop Industry” [“Indictment”]. And, uh, we were in Rolling Stone, and we didn’t know it. And, this song is about not signing to a major label. And, I’m not trying to play to the audience, but it’s actually scientifically proven that you’ll make more money on an independent label if you’re a not-so-great punk band like us. So the smart money stays on an independent and actually gets richer, and you can do it scrupulously. So think about that. March 10, 1994: Fort Worth, Texas. “Contrary to what you may have read in Alternative Press, we have not signed to Sony Corp., and we will not sign to a major label.” A few 132

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days later, in Houston, Blake goes out of his way to diss a recent soundtrack to which Rancid, NOFX, The Offspring, and even Henry Rollins had contributed: “We’re Jawbreaker. We’re not on Epitaph Records, therefore, you cannot reach us through The Chase soundtrack LP. But that is available on Epitaph, along with a lot of fantastic punk rock bands.” And while we’re being unkind—the coup de grâce, from Blake’s tour journal with Nirvana: Finally, it has been my official position since last year (when major labels began expressing an interest in us— oh, those foolish magnates!) to never sign to a major label. I stand firmer in this belief today than ever. The reasons are obvious—they can’t offer us anything we’re not getting already, they don’t deserve us, if we’re going to sell a lot of records (which seems to be happening) it should be for the people who initially put there [sic] faith in us (i.e.— the foolish indy magnates), and, most importantly, major labels are peppered with bullshit artists and yes-persons who have no idea what this shit is about. Again, all of this is odd: it’s not as though they were Fugazi, or Black Flag, and had made their business practices synonymous with their integrity; but it’s as though they felt the need to present themselves as such. (In fairness, they weren’t alone.) Adam: “We were doing just fine on our little indie label, selling 30,000 records or whatever, and touring a good amount of the year. We were making a living. We didn’t see any reason why we had to sign. And we were loudmouths about that.”28 Not only then: as early as 1990, when asked about signing with a major label in their first interview with 133

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MRR, Blake sounds like a cheerleader for the cause of indie music: “No, because the indie scene is so fucking major right now, you don’t need to. All the majors are sweating right now, trying to pick up on the alternative thing. That’s the only reason we’d even have an opportunity—because the indies are kicking major ass.” “It will never happen,” Adam adds.29 It’s not entirely fair to hang someone with their own words, especially from the comfort of decades later. Still, you have to wonder: why would anyone go on the record this way—so vocally, so unambiguously—and then proceed to do the exact opposite? (And just a few months later, at that?) What did Blake and the band think they had to gain, exactly, by digging into their peers, and taking such a militant stance? Didn’t they sense a contradiction between the subtlety of their songwriting and the party-line ideology they were espousing from the stage? How can something so banal as a record label consume the attention of someone so intelligent as Blake, and every other punk and indie musician then working? What was it about the paralyzing self-consciousness of the ’90s that made indies and majors, integrity and authenticity, selling out and keeping it real— everything but the music itself—of such importance? Why not let the music speak for itself? * * * Christy Colcord: “‘Is Jawbreaker gonna sign?’ People in the U.K. would ask me about it all the time, but people over there were less broken up about that; in the East Bay, the battle was really raging.”30

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Dan Sinker: “I think by the fact that [24 Hour] was so good, that made the expectations that were a result of what was happening externally that much higher. But there were any number of big bands at that moment that it was suddenly like, ‘You are our hope,’ for lack of a better term. God, what a fucking awful thing to put on a band.”31 Anthony Newman: “There was major-label interest in Jawbreaker, so there was a lot of talk within the punk community about, ‘Are these guys gonna sign?’ And Blake was really adamant about how they weren’t gonna do that. I remember thinking that was such a strange thing to me: that people cared so much. At the same time, it made you realize, ‘This band is really important to people.’”32 * * * It was the spirit of the age. Unlike today—when only a few music writers know or care which artists are on which labels—for most of the ’90s, it was perfectly common to scrutinize a band or a label’s business practices in a way we don’t scrutinize much of anything in music anymore. In June of 1994, MRR devoted an entire issue to the subject of indies and majors, under the banner “Some of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked: Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About Major Labels.” The issue included Albini’s “The Problem with Music”; impassioned and meandering articles denouncing the business ties between so-called “scam indies” and distributors Caroline, Relativity, and ADA; and even a two-page spread cataloging the ownership of 100-plus labels by the six majors, which are helpfully illustrated as the

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Figure 7.1  “The Big Six: Who Owns Who. The Unrelenting Quest for New Markets, More Power, and More Control Over What You Hear.” MRR, June 1994. (Reprinted with permission from Maximumrockandroll. All rights retained.) 136

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tentacles of a demonic black octopus with a dollar sign on its head. It’s worth remembering that this sort of scrutiny not only misses the point of making or listening to music; it openly contradicts the ambitions of punk’s founders, as a matter of principle and opportunity. Here is the original punk, Johnny Rotten, discussing the Sex Pistols’ experience with indie labels: “It’s really not what you want for a band. You set yourself bigger goals than that; you want to be heard by as many people as possible. Unless you have distribution, there’s no point. . . . If the major stores don’t recognize your label and won’t take your record, you’re doomed.”33 Wayne Kramer of MC5: “We were purged from the White Panther party for counter-revolutionary ideals, because we bought sports cars that our parents signed for. I got a Jaguar XKE. Yeah, man, it was about the coolest thing I’ve ever had from playing rock and roll. I still have dreams about that car. Oh, it was sweet. Fred Smith bought a used Corvette.”34 Jon Savage: “The Clash never thought that they would not sign to a major company, yet had no part in the negotiations: ‘We were completely in the dark,’ says Strummer, ‘we let [manager] Bernie [Rhodes] handle everything. . . . What did we know about record companies and contracts?’”35 Billie Joe Armstrong: “There was almost a socialist aspect to it. It was like, ‘This label is part of the bigger system that kept Noam Chomsky from printing a book,’ or something. It was taken very, very seriously. There was this feeling that if you did this, you could expect to leave your friends behind. All of your relationships with people were over and there was no turning back.”36 137

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You get a sense of the microscope Jawbreaker was living under in Ben Weasel’s MRR column: We’ve seen bands like HUSKER DU become ruined by going for the gold and we’ve seen other bands like 7 SECONDS turn to shit by being naive and ignorant about business. You would think that bands would’ve learned from all that and found some middle ground, but most haven’t. JAWBREAKER is one of the few bands who have. These guys aren’t dummies when it comes to business. They’re also not crooks. . . . While half the punk scene is calling them sell-out scumbags and the other half is wondering why the hell they haven’t made the “smart” move and signed to a major, they’re cruising along doing business as usual. Their ethics are their own. . . . They do their business by their own rules and I respect and admire them for that. Yet while every other band in the country is attempting to rip off their sound, few, if any, are attempting to understand the way JAWBREAKER does business, which is ultimately what gained them their popularity and is probably what keeps them going. . . . It doesn’t have anything to do with marketing or politics, it has to do with priorities.37 This is sincere and well-intentioned, if nothing else, but also a fundamental confusion of categories. It might be true of an exceptional and politically committed band like Fugazi or Bikini Kill to say that the way they did business helped to propel their popularity, but it’s a stretch with Jawbreaker, or almost anyone else. What ultimately gained Jawbreaker their 138

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popularity—as it did with Fugazi and Bikini Kill—was the quality of their songs: if the music and lyrics weren’t as good as they were, no one would have cared how they did business, or what their priorities were. That a band’s aesthetics and business ethics could be so thoroughly commingled, or confused, was one of the bedrock punk beliefs of the era, which only it makes its obsolescence within a few years that much more startling. Mike Morasky: “[Steel Pole] were signing to a major label, believe it or not, around that same era, and if we were signing to a fuckin’ major label they certainly should be, right?” Adam: “We had been very vocal about not signing in the year prior, ’cause labels came after us before and we didn’t think anything of it. This time it seemed a little bit more serious because they weren’t just sending a generic letter asking for a demo tape of our band. You could tell that they meant business.” Cali DeWitt: “Mark Kates, who has good music taste and is a good guy, called me and wanted their contact info. He was like, ‘I wanna sign that band.’ And I remember laughing at him and saying, ‘They will never sign to a major label.’”38 But the more that Jawbreaker and their friends and enemies protested, the more it seemed inevitable. In July, the band spent ten days on a West Coast tour with Jawbox—a heavy Washington, D.C. group led by J. Robbins, of perennial Jawbreaker favorite Government Issue—who had recently left the indiest of indies: Ian MacKaye’s Dischord Records. If Jawbox could walk away from a legendarily fair and ethical indie like Dischord, surely Jawbreaker could seek out bigger opportunities than Tupelo/Communion, which 139

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was legendary to no one? Adam: “We must’ve been talking to them about their experience—they had already signed to Atlantic at that point I believe. We were talking to our people about it, kind of putting our feelers out there, and seeing if it was possible—could we do this?”39 In early November, Jawbreaker signed with Elliot Cahn and Jeff Saltzman’s Cahn-Man Management, who represented Green Day, Rancid, and The Offspring. They started meeting with labels and A&R: Gary Gersh at Capitol, Lenny Waronker at Warner, Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, MCA, and Geffen. Bill Schneider: “Jawbreaker resisted and resisted and resisted. They had a hard time with it. They had people beating down their doors to sign them because everybody was looking for the next East Bay thing.” Adam: We met Nirvana’s A&R guy [Mark Kates], and he started calling up. And then it was like, “Oh shit. Okay, people are starting to call us. How do we do this?” We didn’t even know how it was done. So we called Dave [Hawkins], who was then working for Cahn-Man, who managed Green Day. We said, “We’re getting a lot of calls. How does this work? What do you do?” We went back and forth. We labored on it, and we knew that a lot of the kids that were on our side were gonna be pissed off if we did this. We knew that MRR was gonna come out fuckin’ two barrels blazing. And well they should. ’Cause that was their thing. Politically, we knew that was gonna happen.40 With the benefit of hindsight, it seems possible that Jawbreaker might have done what a band like NOFX did, 140

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which was to entertain any and all major-label offers, and to enjoy the expense accounts of L.A.’s many overpaid A&R reps, before opting to stay on the indie they had always worked with: the status quo. But knowing what we do about Jawbreaker as a band—their constant growth from album to album; their years of experimenting with production values and sampling effects; their stubborn, contrarian refusal to play fan favorites that were expected of them, or even music from albums that their fans knew, in favor of songs they had just written—this seems about as likely as them opportunistically writing two-minute pop confection in the style of Dookie. Adam: “I remember me and Blake were at 20th and Valencia, in front of La Rondalla on the corner. We just kinda stopped and stood there for a second and I go, ‘What do you think? Do you wanna sign?’ We were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll go to Geffen.’ And then we just continued walking.”41 * * * What were the advantages of a major label in 1994? It depends whom you ask. At that point in the strange life of indie music, any number of bands had successfully made the jump: R.E.M., Nirvana, Hole, and Smashing Pumpkins, among others. Then again, any number of bands had tried and fallen flat: Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Pixies, Mudhoney. Jawbreaker didn’t sound much like any of these bands—and it’s debatable whether they aspired to the fame of the least known among them—but only the most doctrinaire among us would fault them for wondering if they didn’t belong in that company, or if there wasn’t more to 141

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the world beyond Gilman. In material terms, it wasn’t much contest: dwarfing even the most successful or prestigious of indies, major labels had overwhelming institutional resources, whether in promotion, distribution, recording budgets, radio, or tour support. Into the next century, the majors’ only true counterbalance was the very real suspicion and stigma of the underground. The indie/major divide was fundamentally a matter of scale. In 1989, Lookout was thrilled to sell 2,000 copies of Operation Ivy’s Energy in one year. By 1995, they were selling 2,000 copies of Energy a week—a major windfall, for an outfit with three employees—and Op Ivy wasn’t even the label’s biggest band.42 By contrast, in 1991, The Replacements’ best-selling album, Don’t Tell a Soul, was considered a disappointment to Warner Brothers for selling “only” 300,000 copies—“Not enough,” as someone had underlined in their label file—which was more than Jawbreaker sold of its four albums all together, and the same number that Nirvana and Green Day were once selling every week.43 Promotion and distribution were only part of it: for a sonically ambitious band like Jawbreaker, studio resources were more of a concern. Up to and including 24 Hour, all of their albums were made for a few thousand dollars, and fully recorded in a handful of days: standard practice in the punk world, and unthinkable in the majors. It’s reasonable to ask how more time or money in the studio could really improve a Jawbreaker song. Didn’t Bivouac already sound enormous? But then, you don’t need to hear more than a few seconds of Dookie next to its thinner-sounding predecessor, Kerplunk, to know the difference between a major-label recording 142

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budget and an indie in those days. Having made three wellreceived albums on a shoestring, it’s logical for Jawbreaker to have wondered what a new set of songs might sound like with bigger resources at their disposal; but then, it was not exactly a logical moment. Christy Colcord: They felt like they had maxed out the amount of money they could get to make the record and for what they wanted to do. To grow as a band, they needed money, they needed help for that. So there was never a discussion of, like, “I want to be rich and famous.” It was more like, “This is the record I want to make, I can’t make it now. I want to make the record that I have in my head and then I want people to hear it, and then I want to be able to go see those people.”44 Blake: “There was a genuine curiosity; a willingness to try something totally different. I don’t know if that argument cuts any ice, but I felt like that at the time. We really saw it as, ‘Well, here’s this thing that we have no idea about, let’s try it.’ I think we felt really tired with what we had been doing, and we wanted to do something different. There may have been another way of doing it, but we couldn’t find it at the time.”45 “I really liked these songs and wanted to see what would happen if they went out on a larger level and what the response would be. Are they too weird, too skewed or too smart? I guess we’ll just have to see.” * * *

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Unspoken in all this talk about recording budgets and major labels are thornier questions of artistic integrity and ambition. How big an artist do you want to be, and how badly? When does commercial success boil over into careerism, or compromise? What separates opportunity and opportunism, or selling out and simply wanting an audience for your art? How long can you watch your friends flourish before you wonder what you’re doing wrong? What can you live with? And how far are you willing to put yourself out there for it? Blake: We definitely liked the idea of having a luxurious studio budget, but we weren’t prepared for the apparatus that came with it. I don’t think that part was thought through. I can honestly say that I didn’t think it through that far. I think on one level, I thought we were as good as some of these bands that were being celebrated. There was tons of stuff happening on the radio that was borrowing from punk rock—glossing it up and becoming really big. I think that when you sign, you do entertain the idea that you’re going to be big. For Jawbreaker, and for most indie bands in the ’90s, professional ambition was inextricably bound up with ambivalence: a matter of wanting it only so much, or appearing so. Not coincidentally, 1994 was the year that a fellow songwriter from the Bay Area, Stephen Malkmus, insisted we were mishearing the word “career” in a song (“Cut Your Hair”) transparently about the music business. The lyric wasn’t “Attention and fame so / Career, career, career”; it was actually “Korea! Korea! Korea!,” and about looming nuclear 144

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conflict. As Bill Wyman wrote about the authenticity wars of the decade: What most bands did was draw imaginary lines in their minds: We’ll put handbills up, but not posters. We’ll do interviews, but never say anything serious. We’ll show up for the concert, but go on late to make clear we’re not eager beavers. We’ll do some college-radio interviews— and act bored to be there—but not mainstream ones, and if we do do mainstream radio, we’ll act even more bored! And we’ll talk to major-label people, if they insist, but get drunk and act like the fuck-ups we are when we meet, the better to have tales with which to regale our fans from the stage that night. And sometimes, to reward our really cool fans, we’ll have secret shows, so the uncool people can’t get in.46 (Jawbreaker’s version of this was agreeing to tour with Nirvana and Foo Fighters, and to play a series of festival dates in Australia with Sonic Youth, Beck, Pavement, and so on, while declining an offer to play with the same groups for Lollapalooza 1995.) Blake: My whole Geffen experience was a really intense year of something that I never want to do again. I don’t know that I’m grateful for the experience, exactly, because I know it kind of damaged me, but I have to say that in the end I’m glad that I did it and I’m glad for some of the things that happened. So I think it’s a strange two-way street where, as an independent artist, you want to use some of those channels. Fine, play our song, I hope it does us well as a 145

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band, but you don’t want to do anything for them. It’s a strange relationship. In How to Ru(i)n a Record Label, Lookout co-founder Larry Livermore describes the moment when Operation Ivy arrived at a point much like Jawbreaker’s: Whether they realized it or not, Operation Ivy were reaching a crossroads: they’d soon be in a position—especially if they ever got their album out—to make a decent living playing music. For most musicians, this would be a dream come true. For those who were part of the Northern California punk scene, it could also be a problem. Many scenesters—Tim Yohannan foremost among them—were deeply suspicious of bands who made more than enough money to cover the costs of drum heads, guitar strings, and putting gas in the tour van. When it came to paying rent or buying food, musicians were supposed to get day jobs like everyone else, even if it meant flipping burgers or working for corporations whose principles were utterly antithetical to punk. It was a ridiculous philosophy, one that had more in common with religious fundamentalism than rational thought. But it was pervasive enough to have at least some effect, even on me.47 Isocracy guitarist Lenny Filth: “Back then, it was a no-no. You were supposed to live in poverty your whole damn life. And just play because you wanna play.”48 Christy Colcord: Green Day and Jawbreaker had aspirations beyond that scene, which I think was something people felt and had beef with. Like, it should be enough to just want to play at 146

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Gilman and pack it out. It’s for us. It was like a secret we were all in on. So if you want to go and put out a record that more than 5,000 people can find, or connect with people beyond that, then that’s seen as kind of a betrayal. . . . that’s more hurtful than the money part. Both of those bands hit places in the States where, like: “Okay, we’ve maxed out the next tier of theaters. We sell out the 1000-seater, but we can’t get enough people to find our music to get to the bigger ones. But we’re too big for the smaller ones.” So that’s when you have to make that choice. Green Day, almost ironically, really embraced that [Gilman] scene more, even though they were more forcefully rejected by it. Whereas Jawbreaker were certainly part of it, but. . . I think they wanted to be musicians, rather than just people who played in a band. Fat Mike: “What’s hard is fighting your ego. When everyone tells you you could be bigger, that was the hardest thing. Green Day used to open shows for us all the time. The Offspring paid us to go on a tour with us to Europe. These bands that were smaller than us, they all got big. To a lot of bands, that makes them feel really insecure. ‘All these other bands that opened for us are getting bigger than us. What are we doing wrong?’”49 * * * At the beginning of 1994, in the new song “Million,” Blake wrote, sweetly and optimistically: In my perfect world I’d be signed to a nice girl It would cost one million kisses. 147

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Back in our imperfect world, on February 17, 1995, Jawbreaker signed a $1 million, three-album deal with Geffen Records, then home to Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, Beck, Weezer, and Counting Crows, as well as Guns N’ Roses, The Eagles, Peter Gabriel, and Aerosmith. (“If you think we changed our tune, I hope we did.”) They were promised total creative control over all recording and production decisions, a promise the label fully lived up to. With their signing advance, the band upgraded its practice space, paid off the remaining balance on its equipment, and bought a new van for the year of touring ahead of them. For the next 12 months, and for the first time, they had enough money left over to pay themselves a modest monthly salary, nine years into their career as a band. (“We could be the next group that you rob.”) Locally and afar, the response to this series of aggressions was about what you’d expect. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Blake sounds uncharacteristically defensive: I really didn’t know that much about major labels. And I’d seen plenty of bad models. But once we checked it out more . . . it was like, well, we could do another indie record, or we could do this. It wasn’t a hungry thing; that’s where some bands shoot themselves in the foot and get into bunk deals. . . . We didn’t just jump into the Geffen deal, like, “This is our shot, let’s go for it!” We got a good deal because we didn’t need it. But it was a really big thing for us, we agonized over it, and we all got really paranoid after we did it.50 For the band’s next hometown show at the Great American Music Hall, Blake wears a shirt with the words ZERO 148

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CRED. Writing in MRR, their friend Ben Weasel—who had promised to eat his hat, literally, if Jawbreaker ever did sign— is hurt, and remarkably perceptive about the band’s future: “JAWBREAKER WILL NEVER SIGN TO A MAJOR LABEL.” When Blake told me that, I asked him to repeat it loudly into the tape recorder so I could have it for the record. When everybody was giving them shit for selling out even though they hadn’t sold a thing and didn’t plan to, I stood behind them 100 fucking percent. They made me look stupid, and for that, I’m kinda pissed. But the guys in Jawbreaker are my friends and I have few friends so I have to cut ’em some slack. And truthfully, I’m more disappointed than pissed. They coulda done it their way. They coulda been the biggest indie band EVER. They coulda talked the talk and walked the walk. It sucks. It’s probably going to mean that their band will end a lot quicker than it should. But in this case, I have to separate business and friendship and no matter how stupid I think this move is, they’re still great guys and they’re still a great band. As a fan of Jawbreaker, you have the right to be pissed as well. They know it and I think they’re prepared to take all the shit that’s gonna be flung their way because they’re men, not mice. But I don’t think I’ll ever again believe a band who tells me they won’t sell, even though they probably mean it at the time, as Jawbreaker did. Either way, the hat is digesting.51 Mark Kates: “I think that kids in the Bay Area for whom that scene was really important were already a little bit 149

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disillusioned by what had happened to Green Day, and I think Jawbreaker signing to Geffen was far more culturally traumatic than we ever could have imagined. I’m not saying that that necessarily makes sense, but it was very real.”52 Adam: “There was huge backlash. Because we were loudmouths. When we 180’d and changed our mind and jumped ship, we took a lot of shit for that. And that was the main story of our band. We were hypocrites, and whatever was gonna become of our band, we probably deserved it.”53 Lars Frederiksen: “We played with Jawbreaker at Gilman. I remember one time watching them and they said, ‘We’ll never sign to a major label,’ from the stage. And then they signed to a major label. I just never got why you would say that.”54 Blake: “lt’s completely indefensible. I say I just changed my mind. Most bands try to claim it’s some kind of distribution issue and I get tired of hearing that from everybody that signs. We did it for the excitement as well. To me being in a band is a kind of adventure and it was a pretty exciting proposition when we realized we could do it the way we wanted to.” Here is the partial text of a flyer that Brian Zero printed and distributed outside the Great American Music Hall show, on January 29, 1995:

Walk Out on Corporate Punk! Just how much does Jawbreaker really care? Many members of the punk scene are asking this question right now. Why? Well, because Jawbreaker has made 150

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a decision to sell out the same community that once supported them, to deal with major record labels. But who cares, right? Doesn’t Jawbreaker, and other bands like them, have the right to do as they please, to make money in whatever way they choose to? Let me ask you another question: in what way is Jawbreaker like Wal-Mart? Currently in the punk scene, trust is being attacked and destroyed by the actions of bands like Jawbreaker. How? Jawbreaker is a band that said time and time again, even on stage, that they had no desire to sign to a major label, and who are now on Geffen Records, a subsidiary of Sony. But so what, so they lied to their audience? That’s nothing new for a band, right? Well, let me ask you a question: why did they have to lie at all? The answer is that they did to the punk rock scene just what Wal-Mart does to a community: they posed as a part of the community, a bunch of friends, people to trust, and then they betrayed the community when it was no longer profitable for their interests. In short they sold our trust out. What this flyer is about: what we are trying to explain is that punk is a community, not just some corporate fad. We are asking you to consider walking out on Jawbreaker tonight in solidarity with those in the punk scene who feel that their trust has been walked all over by this band. This is the language of the jilted lover, the betrayed fan. We can smile or roll our eyes at this adolescent and obsolete strain of earnestness. Or we can grant that their fans were doing exactly what Jawbreaker had been asking of them 151

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all along: to pay attention to the words, and to take their meaning seriously; to believe in “desperate acts, the kind that make me look stupid”—like protesting outside the show of a band that had let you down. It shouldn’t be surprising that Jawbreaker’s fans felt as heartbroken as they did: What other band had so completely staked its name on the terms of full emotional honesty, accountability, and sincerity? “I had a great deal of hateful email forwarded to me,” Blake told Guitar World. “I find it pretty disturbing. On the other hand I’m grateful for the support we’ve gotten from the independent network, especially since I understand that people are really possessive of their bands and that when it becomes a mass phenomenon it gets impersonal.” Adam: “It wasn’t just the indies and the little zines, the mainstream press jumped on that story, too. So whenever we got a review, it was like, ‘This is the band that sold out and shame on them. This is gonna be the undoing of this band.’ And sure enough, it was.”55

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In early 1995, Jawbreaker recorded their last album with producer Rob Cavallo at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. In his first six years at Warner, Cavallo had accomplished little more than producing a well-received if commercially marginal debut by The Muffs, a bratty L.A. pop-punk band. Then, in 1994, he struck gold (or platinum, tenfold) with Dookie, and his career was made. Cavallo’s production had brilliantly highlighted Green Day’s infectious melodic attack of rapid-fire drumming, bouncy-ball bass, and warm, shimmering, front-and-center guitar. That he had signed on to work with Jawbreaker so soon after that massive record was a promising sign of the label’s confidence, and an omen of things to come. Would the new album be Jawbreaker’s breakthrough—their Dookie, or even their Punk in Drublic— or were they destined to stay minor-league, cousins to The Muffs? Despite the luxury of more time and more money, Adam and Chris recorded their parts in just three days, as they had on the earlier albums. Blake, on the other hand, was determined to go about the new album differently. For six

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weeks in February and March, he spent twelve-hour days recording increasingly polished voice and guitar tracks with Cavallo: a studio rabbit hole much like the ones Kevin Shields and Billy Corgan had tunneled down in the making of Loveless and Siamese Dream, though with decidedly different results. Dear You would end up costing the label and band $200,000 to record: then-standard budgeting in the major-label world, and exactly 100 times the cost of making 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. In another first, the band’s new album would come out with a minimum of postproduction down time, in September 1995, a mere six months after the end of recording. They made a video for “Fireman” with Mark Kohr, who had directed Green Day’s videos for “Basket Case” and “Longview.” To celebrate the release date, on the night of September 12, 1995, Geffen rented out a Blue & Gold Fleet cruise ship for the band and 250 radio contest winners, journalists, and hangers-on to enjoy a brief set and a three-hour boat ride into Sausalito Harbor. Even MTV News was aboard the boat on a shill: Booze flowed for those of age, and snacks consisted of chips, salsa, cheese doodles and jawbreakers (natch). Highlight of the trip was a 45-minute set by the band. Performing in a room with 8’ high ceilings made body surfing somewhat challenging, but the hardcore fans at the front of the stage were up to the effort. The band gave a short (due to equipment problems) but spirited performance leaning heavily on the new material. “This song has no sense of irony,” said vocalist/guitarist Blake Scharzenbach [sic] of Dear You’s lead track “Save Your

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Generation,” which was met with lots of restrained pogoing (mind your head). . . . Whether Dear You rocks the country the way Dookie did (nine-plus million copies sold!) remains to be seen, but Jawbreaker proved they can rock the boat.1 The party would be exceedingly brief. As always seemed to be the case, Jawbreaker would have been better off waiting, or merely unlucky once more in their timing: Dear You was dead on arrival. * * * Greil Marcus spoke for stupefied music lovers everywhere when he began his review of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait in 1970 with an infamous lead: “What is this shit?” The two ends of the question encapsulate the mix of disbelief and disgust familiar to anyone confronting an opaque or substandard work of art by one of their heroes. It was the question on the minds of people who love The Bends the first time they heard Kid A, or “Pale Blue Eyes” and Metal Machine Music, as it was for many of Jawbreaker’s fans upon hearing Dear You: “What is this shit?” The question bespeaks trauma as much as incredulity. Note the laser-beam specificity with which Dear You’s early detractors recall their first exposure to the album, as though they’re recounting where they were on 9/11, or the day of the Kennedy assassination. Ben Weasel: “I remember exactly when we heard it. We were on tour in Europe. And we were all like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ We were all jaw-dropped. It was just terrible. I had no idea what Blake was doing with his voice. He did not sound like himself at all.”2 155

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Brandon Stosuy, writing for Pitchfork: I remember driving from New Brunswick, N.J., to Philadelphia to bring my girlfriend a promo cassette copy of Dear You. . . . I got out of the van, showed it to her; she tossed it on the ground, smashed it under her foot. Around that same time, a guy I knew from local basement shows, came into the record store, pointed to the tattoo of the Jawbreaker logo on his arm, and shook his head. He had tears in his eyes.3 Mark Kates: “I have never seen anything like that—before or since. There was a point when they were headlining the Roxy and there were kids sitting on the floor, with their backs to the stage, when they were playing songs from Dear You. I’m not making that up. If you were to try and explain that to somebody now, it would make no sense.”4 Neil Strauss’s review of Jawbreaker’s show at Irving Plaza in The New York Times on October 27, 1995: It’s not all glamour being in a rock band. Just ask Blake Schwarzenbach, who suffered through some bizarre torments when Jawbreaker, the California pop-punk band he sings and plays guitar in, performed with a similarly named band, Jawbox, on Friday night at Irving Plaza. As Mr. Schwarzenbach sang, one audience member in front of the stage kept trying to spit upward into his open mouth. Another leapt onstage during the encore and started violently slam-dancing into Mr. Schwarzenbach as he tried to play guitar. Somehow, during the chaos of

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the night, Mr. Schwarzenbach ended up with somebody’s blood on his face, most likely his own.5 Mark Kates: “I felt so strongly about Dear You. To me, in my head, it was like the next album after Nevermind. Which did not mean it was going to sell tens of millions. But it did mean that it was important and dynamic, and could not have been greater in my mind. . . . these are the moments that you’re really lucky to have once in your life, in any realm, as a human being.” Cali DeWitt: “They signed, and I was excited to be [at Geffen] when [Dear You] came out. It was when I really felt the truth that I had already been told about that world— like the whole company was so excited about that record, everyone was talking about it. But because it wasn’t an explosive success, it took like less than a week until everyone in the company never uttered their name again.”6 * * * There are some things that money can’t buy you, but a massive-sounding rock album is not one of them. With fresh ears, Dear You sounds today like a perfectly decent record—in parts, it’s among the band’s best work— but it’s not even faintly a mystery why Jawbreaker’s fans responded as badly as they did. The production is slick, glossy, radio-ready, professional-sounding: in a word, expensive. The guitar is chunky, massed, way up front; the drums are crisp, and heavy, but the bass is buried, nonexistent. Most of all, Blake’s voice is noticeably—some would say shockingly or unrecognizably—altered from before: cleaner,

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fuller, more of a “proper” singing voice, but indisputably a changed instrument, with little of the hurt, grit, feeling, and vulnerability that tugged at you pre–Dear You. It’s easy to see why their enemies would suspect the worst. Was this not a blatant example of a band transparently changing their sound, right after signing to a major label? How could Jawbreaker put out an album in which Blake sounds nothing like he used to, and Chris is barely heard at all? How was this even the same band that had released 24 Hour a year earlier? Had they really capitulated so fully, and with so little fight? Surely, someone had made an honest mistake somewhere—at the soulless major-label pressing plant, perhaps? Grasping for explanations—and surely hoping to extend the benefit of the doubt—some pointed out that Blake had undergone throat surgery in the not-so-distant past, which of course was true, and had the benefit of exonerating everyone. That had to be the reason: why else would he sound so different on two albums released in consecutive years? Before the internet, minus any semi-reliable source other than Maximumrockandroll—to which Jawbreaker were now outcasts—all you had to go on was hearsay and the evidence, which at that point was the records. It was one of those chronic misunderstandings and chronological flukes that seemed to accumulate around Jawbreaker. Remember that Blake’s throat surgery in London happened back in the fall of 1992, three long years before Dear You—before even Bivouac had come out, and six months before they set foot in Steve Albini’s studio. By the time Bivouac was released, the band had already moved on 158

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to playing 24 Hour songs in concert: this is how two albums written concurrently happened to come out two years apart. This made 24 Hour, and not Dear You, the post-surgery record, which was precisely the opposite of how most fans understood it then and now. (Comparing the albums, you can hear why.) Even without comparison to a near-perfect album, Dear You is clearly the work of a band that has achieved a kind of mastery, but also lost something: a sense of playfulness, exuberance, invention, or delight; a certain empathy, or generosity; a unity, confidence, or swagger. The seamlessness that characterized Bivouac and 24 Hour is gone, as are the humor, warmth, sass, sweetness, and boyish wonder of the latter. Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise: if you or I had lived through the year that they did, we probably wouldn’t have made the lightest or cheeriest of records, either. For all its shortcomings, Dear You is also a record that doesn’t fully reveal itself on first or second listen, which is more than most people gave it at the time. With distance, we can appreciate the album on its merits, of which there are many. “Sluttering (May 4)” is easily one of Jawbreaker’s best songs—cutting, wounded, propulsive, with an unrelenting instrumental build, an acid-burn chorus, and an unforgettable ending. “Chemistry,” “Million,” and “Lurker II” show the band reaching for new instrumental structures, and Blake new lyrical ground in his diction, syntax, and phrasing. And at the album’s peak, “Accident Prone” and “Jet Black,” which unquestionably belong on any list of Jawbreaker’s most powerful songs, to which the rest of Dear You ascends and backs away. 159

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All of which is to say: the heartbreak, hostility, and confusion of Jawbreaker’s fans—take your pick—should have surprised no one. “Jet Black” and “Accident Prone” are overwhelming, career-highlight songs. At the same time, in their misanthropy and minor-key gloom, they sound worlds closer to Perfect from Now On-era Built to Spill, Swervedriver, or even Spiritualized than the Jawbreaker of 24 Hour or Unfun. To anyone who observed Jawbreaker from the start, or even between Bivouac and 24 Hour, none of this should have been surprising, either. “Bivouac” and “Condition Oakland” laid the foundation for “Jet Black” and “Accident Prone” long before Rob Cavallo was remotely in the picture. And isn’t this precisely what you want of a band? To move forward, learn, grow, and evolve, rather than retreat to the safety of repetition? We can ask this calmly today: but we can also see why fans wanting more of “Boxcar” or “Boat” wouldn’t have responded all that well. Where the best moments on 24 Hour were love songs, the best of Dear You are the hate songs. In their comparative sweetness and sourness, you almost wonder if the third album shouldn’t have been called Dear You, and the last one 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. * * * In December 1995, Jawbreaker flew to Australia for five shows as part of the traveling Summersault festival, which would play to 50,000 people under scorching heat in five cities. In April, they kicked off their final tour, reuniting with Nirvana’s Dave Grohl for a run of dates with his new band, Foo Fighters. Like their six shows with Nirvana, the Foo Fighters tour would be a disorienting experience, but for all the wrong 160

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reasons. Where the October 1993 shows saw Jawbreaker in the ascendant—midway between Bivouac and 24 Hour, soon to release their best album, and playing better than ever—by 1996, the band was exhausted, disillusioned, and fed up with each other. Between the Geffen signing and Dear You, they had lost a large part of their most devoted fan base, and were now playing to indifferent radio and festival audiences. Adam: We would play those radio station shows where they get a shitload of bands together. We were playing with Oasis and Radiohead and No Doubt. We really had no business being there. They would do these promotional things, where kids would wait and you’d sign your posters promoting your record. I remember feeling really embarrassed about that. It was just weird. Because we were coming from the punk rock thing, where anyone in the crowd could walk up onstage at any moment and take your guitar away from you, and you’d be fine with that. Or you could fall into the crowd, and that would be cool.7 Chris: “We played this radio show in Berkeley and Billy Idol goes on before us and it was hilarious. We were there with Billy Idol. Radiohead was there. They were in the dressing tent next to ours. But by that time I was really dissociated from the band. I spent most of those tours writing Christmas cards with my wife Lucy.” A week before the end of the Foo Fighters tour, things fell apart. Chris: We had agreed ahead of time to drive all night so that we could get home. I just really wanted to be away from the 161

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band and retreat to the safety of my home. Adam wanted to do that too, since he had me drive him to the airport to catch a flight home that night. Anyway, when I got back from the airport, there was Blake hanging out with the Foo Fighters, and while I was gone, everyone made the unilateral decision that we were staying there. We leave the show, we’re driving along, and I start explaining my case, which was that I thought we had agreed on going home. The next thing I know, Blake spits his gum into the back of my head. I freaked and thought, “Wait a second. What just happened?” I hated Blake so much at that moment. I had had it. I threw the van in park, took off over the back seat, and somehow we ended up on the sidewalk, rolling around. I was trying to squash him into the sidewalk, just swearing at him, calling him a prima donna—all of it. The next thing I know, we’re surrounded by a bunch of frat guys screaming in drill-sergeant voices because we had rolled out of the van into the front of some keg party and these guys didn’t want the cops coming out to arrest us. So they chased us back inside the van. It was very bizarre.8 Blake: “Chris and I had a conversation a month before, after having an actual fistfight on the Foo Fighters tour—that was just so ridiculous and so painful. It was really fucking sad. We just looked at each other and thought, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ To come to blows seemed so far from where we began. The day after that happened we talked about stopping right there.”9 Samiam guitarist Sergie Loobkoff: “They played with Foo Fighters at the Warfield in San Francisco—and that is when 162

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I knew they were definitely going to break up. It was their hometown; they had put out the big major-label record. But then you’re looking around and it was like no one cared.”10 Adam: “When it comes to that point, you know it’s going to end soon. That last tour I thought, ‘I wonder if we are going to do that thing where we take three months off and no one talks to each other, or are we going to throw in the towel?’ Eventually, we had a meeting at my house. And whenever you have a band meeting, it’s never good.”11 Blake: “I called Adam and went over to his house and just told him that I couldn’t do it anymore. When I said it, I think he knew—or had known—this day was coming.” Chris: “We walked in and Blake said, ‘I think we should break up.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think so, too.’ I hadn’t really thought about it at that point, but it was obvious that I didn’t want to be there with them. Adam was really kind of resistant. But we just decided that we were done.”12 * * * Jawbreaker played their final show of the Dear You tour on May 19, 1996, at the Capitol Theater in Olympia, Washington. There is no publicly available footage of that night, but there is of the night before, at the Crocodile Cafe, in Seattle. Surprisingly, for a band playing its second-to-last show for what would turn out to be two decades, they sound as precise and ferocious as ever. The band walks on to jazzy house music and a rowdy, upbeat crowd. Blake says: “We’re at the very end of our tour. We’re totally fatigued and had the shit beaten out of us. But that’s cool because now it just doesn’t matter, we’re just going to have a good time with you. 163

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This song is called ‘Jinx Removing.’ It’s about a fucked person and how much I regret it. Love her. Love her!” Before the next song, “I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both,” he says: “This song is dedicated to the same girl, three years later.” For most of the show, Blake is talkative, and sounds like he’s having an excellent time winding up the crowd. So, yeah! Not only are we going to perform for you this evening, we’re going to talk to you. We’re going to tell little anecdotes from our travels around this country. Basically, we’re going to bore you—just when you feel the need for rock, we will give you the words. And then when you want the words, we will start to rock. The band rolls into “Indictment.” Later, during “Save Your Generation”—introduced as “the song that they hated at Spin magazine, so it must be okay”—someone in the crowd lets fly a beer bottle in the direction of the stage. From then on, the mood of the night shifts. Immediately after finishing the song, as though torn between wanting to defend himself while not seeming like too much of a scold, Blake alternates, hilariously, between imposing order and making light: Alright. I have—uh, okay. Now. In this afternoon’s minutes, I would like to bring up two things. First of all: whoever threw the beer bottle at us . . . [someone points him out]. . . . Oh! and you’re . . . . Okay. Whoever ratted out the guy who threw the beer bottles at us: Don’t narc, ever. [The crowd cracks up.] And then second of all, to the guy who threw the beer bottle at us: You’re weak, dude. That’s not cool. Don’t even think about coming up

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here. We’ve had knives pulled on us, we’ve had guns fired at us, beer bottles ain’t shit. But we don’t appreciate it. And second of all . . . . Chris steps up to the mic and says that if another beer bottle gets thrown, he’s going to stop playing and leave, and encourages the audience to kick the shit out of the bottle thrower; they cheer. Blake adds: “It’s just, like—MTV punk dictates that you throw bottles and flick people off. But real punk is, like, a support network, where people are cool with each other, ’cause they like their bands, and they like their ideas. It’s a pretty far-reaching concept, I know, to enjoy what your friends do. It’s kind of maudlin.” Toward the end of the night, with the crowd responding enthusiastically after a searing “Face Down,” Blake pauses to tune, and has to talk over the audience to say what comes next. From the recording, it sounds like there’s at least a few exceedingly drunken bros in the house. Blake’s voice is first lightly mocking and then serious as he fumbles toward something personal, with several pauses throughout: Oh, thank you. So, do you often think about—what it’s going to be—like, what you get from a band, you know? Forgive me—we’re concerned with musical issues now because, this is what we do. So: what do you get from a band? What do you get out of [inaudible]? The crowd starts hooting: “Punk rock!” “Boring.” “WHATEVER, man!” Blake goes on: “And, you know, what you get from a band is that, occasionally, people, like, get you, and that’s the feeling of being gotten that you strive for

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in relationships and everything, is, like, do you get me? Do you get my fucking bad jokes?” On the bootleg, you can hear someone close to the recorder using Blake’s heartfelt moment as the occasion to persuade someone reluctant to smoke pot. Blake starts to ramble a bit: And, um, I’m actually very grateful to all of you for being here because most of you are in the 21-and-up category, and we play all-ages traditionally. So it’s kind of cool to see people that are—above 21, like ourselves. I’m turning 29 in two days. [The crowd cheers.] This is my birthday party. We’re going to do a funeral—kind of a funereal number. If anyone has noticed the transition in Blake’s intro from birthday party to funeral, you wouldn’t know. He’s only been speaking for 45 seconds, but the crowd is conspicuously restless, chatty, drunk. In the background, you can hear someone yell “FUCK YOU!!” at the volume of a football game. Sensing that he’s losing the crowd, Blake’s mood turns to sarcasm: “So, anyway, I can see that point was not lost upon you all.” The bros get rowdier. “KNOCK IT OFF!!” “BREAK IT UP, MOTHERFUCKER!!” Blake: “Like I said, the feeling of being got. That they know what you’re about.” The potheads are still at it: “I’m, like, addicted to smoking.” After a few seconds of mounting din, Blake’s voice is either dripping with scorn, or utterly defeated: “And it’s that feeling, that—that feeling that people are understanding what you’re trying to do, that is so special.” He’s barely audible. Bros: “FUCK YOU!!” “That makes you want to keep playing music.” Sounding like a zombie. “BORING!!” By now, the crowd volume is indistinguishable from a frat party. 166

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“YEAH!!!” In classic form, Blake introduces a song for the party, but not before a direct address to the bros: “Alright. Well, Chris is going to tune his bass. And if you guys want to take it outside and just fuck each other, that would be cool.” The crowd eats it up. Finally, he gets to the song: This is, uh, hopefully the most depressing song we’ve ever written. We’re going to try it out. It’s always an experiment in terror. Either it works or it sucks. I’m hoping for the former. Let’s make it work. It’s called “Jet Black.” We’re just gonna tune up the bass and then drop it down about five—five years off your life. * * * “Within a month, I was working at the toy shop,” Chris recalled. “I had been on tour, playing in front of thousands of people. And here I was, working as a toy shop clerk. I was devastated.”13 On the 4th of July, they made the news official: just shy of its tenth birthday, Jawbreaker was no longer. Blake had recently turned 29; Adam and Chris would soon be 30. In their accounts of the breakup and the months preceding, there is more than a hint of Marlon Brando’s wistful character Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, who insisted, “I coulda been a contender”: Blake: “I felt like Jawbreaker had to end—we broke up for very clear reasons—but toward the end, I would see moments of recognition [for Dear You]. People were excited when we played certain songs off the record. I don’t know. . . .

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Sometimes I think it could have happened—it could have caught on.”14 Adam: “We had been together for a long time and we were pretty much at the end of the line. There was some stuff we still could have done. There were half a dozen songs that we never recorded in a studio that I think were really good. We never got a chance to live with those songs. . . . I don’t regret the way it ended. That’s just how it went.”15 Chris: “Friendships, relationships—these things change. The band broke up not because of any one person’s desire. Jawbreaker broke up because different people were being pulled in different directions to do different things. It would have taken changes in all of us to make it survive. Who we were then and with what was going on then, I don’t know if it could have been saved. I don’t think so.”16 Blake: “I felt like I really had to change my life and I didn’t see being in the band as a way to do that. Being in Jawbreaker, there was no way to figure my way out of it. I was consumed by the projected identity of who I was as a member of Jawbreaker. I just couldn’t be that person—that person is a lot more romantic than who I am in my real life. My life was so empty at that time that I just felt like I had to completely restart it.”17 Christy Colcord: If it had all happened five years later, it would have been fine. When they put out Dear You, people were—it was just vicious. Like, they were such sellouts—not only because they had taken the check, but because it was so nice. And then of course, five years later, all of those

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people were like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I fucked up and boycotted their show, when this record was so great.” And part of that is place, and part of that is age. Because, later you don’t really care about the scene politics anymore and you’re like, what the fuck was I thinking? Mike Morasky: With Jawbreaker we kind of all thought that somebody would help them get over that hurdle and that it would take off; to have all those kids turning their backs on them at shows and shit-talking, I just never got it. I always thought there was a certain element of jealousy there—who doesn’t want to have some success and have the world tell them that they’re great. . . . Having already watched Nirvana do their thing and then Green Day, it was kind of like, “Don’t we want the purveyors of mass culture to be Blake Schwarzenbach?” I fuckin’ do! I would much rather have him be a superstar than some idiot who just lied his way there.18 Mark Kates: “This is probably obvious, but—the humility and lack of ego about them was part of what made them great, and not caring about their own greatness, I think, made it larger.” It was a commonplace in the punk community that bands who aspired to anything bigger than Gilman were doomed to failure. In the circumstances of their breakup, Jawbreaker was, for once, entirely typical of the scene to which it ambivalently belonged.

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Fat Mike of NOFX: “For every Green Day there was a Jawbreaker: a band that signed, got dropped, and lost all their fans and credibility. For every Offspring there was a Samiam; for every Rancid there was a Seaweed.” But not everyone remembers it this way. Billie Joe Armstrong: “Jawbreaker got it worse than we did. What happened to them was brutal. It was bullshit.”19 * * * It’s hard not to wonder what might have been. If all of this had happened a year or two later, it’s safe to say that Jawbreaker would have been free to ponder their future under less of a microscope, and in a very different context. By 1996, the center of indie music had shifted, happily, away from Seattle and California punk, in favor of fresher currents: hip-hop, electronic and dance music, psychedelia, classical minimalism, post-rock, and indie-folk. If Dear You had come out in 1997 or 1998, Jawbreaker would have been reviewed next to more traditionally indie and intelligent major-label bands—Built to Spill, Luna, Modest Mouse, Wilco, Neutral Milk Hotel—which is closer to who they should have been considered alongside anyway. Or maybe Jawbreaker had run its course, and four albums is plenty to ask of a band. John Ashbery once wrote: “It is the fate of some artists, and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation,” which goes a long way in telling Jawbreaker’s story. Two decades after their breakup, their admirers have grown exponentially; their critics have fallen silent; and the tempest that they and their moment kicked up are a thing of the past. 170

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Past decades come into vogue at regular intervals, at the point at which people who experienced those decades as children and adolescents attain positions of power in the world. In their years of struggle they primarily looked to the future; having both achieved their goals and failed to realize their fondest wishes, they have the rue and the leisure, the complacency and dissatisfaction to look backward, and the means to broadcast an idealized version of the remembered past, from which, however, the grime of history cannot entirely be washed. —Luc Sante, Low Life 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is an album that wears its obsolescence lightly. In its lyrical content and imagery, no one would mistake it for an album ahead of its time. The songs overrun with mentions of TV, books, bills, letters,

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pictures, pens, phones, “home codes,” calling, reading, and writing: all indispensable parts of modern life that would soon evolve into something else entirely from the world 24 Hour sought to capture. In this sense, the album is a kind of time capsule, from the moment just before the internet and email became ubiquitous; when handwritten letters were still reasonably common; when watching TV wasn’t something to advertise about yourself; when a photograph was still a physical object, something that could be lost or destroyed; when the phone was how you called someone, or waited for them to call you back, and nothing more. But the album is also a kind of ethical time capsule: of the last moment when artists and fans genuinely cared whether a big corporation or a small indie label released their music; when the underground and the mainstream were still distinct entities, not yet merged; when the terms of ambition, compromise, and success in popular music meant something far different; when lovers of music still paid a certain kind of attention to bands and labels—or still paid for music, period—in a way that seems alien today; when the ethos of punk and DIY was understood to have something broadly in common with independent thinking, rejecting mass consumerism, and not accepting things as given. For all its cynicism, 24 Hour is indisputably a relic from a more naive and idealistic moment: when art and commerce were still considered distinct, if not fundamentally opposed, pursuits; when recorded music had a value that has long since eroded; when artists felt accountable to their fans and peers in a way that now seems quaint or charming; when authenticity, integrity, and corporate power were still a matter 172

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of very real importance to artists, critics, and listeners. In other words, when those two awful words—selling out—still meant something. No longer. Two decades on, the ethical values of 24 Hour’s historical moment, and especially of “Indictment” and “Boxcar,” would seem to be laughably obsolete—fossils from a bygone era. Is there anyone outside the MRR offices and Steve Albini who still cares if an artist is on a major label? Is there a single artist alive who agonizes over whether to sign to a major, or to license their music for an ad? Does anyone in the real world know or care which of the remaining record labels is owned by whom? And is there anyone who seriously thinks the words “punk” or “independent” still mean something more than a marketing hook today? The authenticity debates of the ’90s were based on assumptions that no longer command much credit: that no self-respecting artist would sign to a major label for reasons other than greed; that indie labels are inherently more virtuous than the majors, or that people who work in advertising are necessarily evil; that indie musicians are only supposed to earn so much, and not succeed in a way that might be seen as overly, well, successful. The battles that so consumed the underground in the ’90s turn out to have been based on a belief that would soon turn out false, and disastrously so: the music industry’s certainty that there would always be an audience willing to pay for music. In 1993, when Kurt Cobain introduced the first song in Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York—“About a Girl,” from

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their debut Bleach—he said: “This is off our first record. Most people don’t own it.” At the time those words were spoken, “Most people don’t own it” was a comparative statement of status: our first (indie) record is harder to find than our second and vastly more popular (major-label) record, therefore, most people don’t own it. But today, those same words are a statement of literal fact. Many people are familiar with Nirvana’s first album, but they do not, in fact, own it, or any others; and if they are familiar with it, it’s almost certainly because they can stream it online, or download it illegally. In 1998, two years after Jawbreaker’s end, the music industry was still one of the world’s most profitable, taking in $38 billion a year at its peak. Into the late ’90s, Lookout, Epitaph, and Fat Records were still selling tens of thousands of albums per release, with limited marketing, and a label logo was enough for fans to take a chance and put their money down on an unfamiliar artist. Beginning in 1999, sales of recorded music fell an average of eight percent annually, and continued falling for the next thirteen years, when it rose all of 0.3 per cent. It’s hardly by chance that these milestones correspond exactly with the obsolescence of “selling out.” What does it mean for an ethical system to go obsolete in ten or twenty years, and what does this rapid obsolescence say about its legacy, in hindsight? What does it mean that the scaffolding all this time for punk’s oppositional, anticonsumerist ethos was, in fact, record sales—in other words, capitalism? What does it say about punk in retrospect that the debate over authenticity ended the moment when people stopped paying for music, and began illegally downloading or streaming instead? It’s not merely a matter of idle 174

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wondering, or nostalgia: embedded herein is the question of whether music will ever mean as much as it did in 1994, or 2004; whether the all-consuming stakes and seriousness of Jawbreaker’s era will ever be seen again, and whether that absence is or isn’t a good thing. * * * Reading over the letters, editorials, and reviews of the punk press in the early ’90s, you sometimes get the curious sense you are poring over a stack of dusty and yellowing small-press newspapers from the 1930s, with anarchists, Trotskyites, and Marxist-Leninists doing knockdown drag-out ideological battle. There is the almost comical zeal of the polemics, the byzantine phraseology, the false equivalencies, paranoia, and unquestioned certainty. Consider “The Route to Corporate Media” (MRR, February 1995): When you’re a snake oil salesperson, you have to convince your audience that what you’re selling is not in fact some water mixed with artificial flavoring plus a bit of your own urine; it is a magic potion, an elixer [sic] of love-making prowess, an ointment of eternal life, or even a cure for baldness. But in order to convince them of anything, you have to first gain their trust and in order to do this, you put on a mask—a mask that represents an image you feel will find favor with a set target audience. In this way, you can become an arch-conservative, a tiedye wearing hippy, a Doc Marten–clad member of MTV’s Alternative Nation or whatever. Besides allowing you to fit in with a target audience, wearing a mask also hides

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your true face and ambitions, and when people find out what you’ve really been selling to them and come looking for you with a rope, you simply take off the mask and put on another.1 Or a Tim Yohannan column from the same issue: These days, we get to see Rancid playing a “Live 105” show with Big Audio Dynamite and Adam Ant. Barf. After Madonna saw them play and sent them a nude Polaroid, asking them to sign to her label, they then seriously negotiated with Epic, but ultimately decided to remain on Epitaph for at least one more LP. Yes, it’s great they stayed on an indie, but the game they played leaves not only a bitter taste but a real doubt as to their outlook. And then Bikini Kill opened a Bill Graham Production show for the Go-Go’s at the Warfield, a $20 door, sponsored by Budweiser. Green Day made the papers recently with a headline: “Green Day to keep ticket prices under $20.” Whoopeefucking do. And Jawbreaker have signed to Geffen, contradicting everything they’ve been saying for years. The lesson here is watch for the telltale signs of a band undergoing a change in principles when the money and fame gets waved in front of them. If they start playing shows with major-label bands at clubs with major-label door prices, don’t believe what they say—it’s their actions that reveal their ego shift.2 Today, most of this reads as youthful ephemera: heated, quixotic idealism and militancy, a keepsake from one’s more strident and radical days. No one will ever subject a band to 176

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the censure and open hostility that Jawbreaker endured for signing to a major label, or going out on tour with Nirvana, and certainly no one would want to go back to that odious moment. All the same, you can’t help but wonder if we haven’t surrendered something vital with the loss of that idealism and intensity. Music, after all, has been utterly ground down and devalued in the twenty-first century. Think of the musicians who shaped modern times—Stravinsky, The Beatles, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin—and who today rates by comparison. As Norman Mailer wrote of the diminished role of literature in our time, one can reasonably fear that, in another 10 or 20 years, the long-form composition or the consciously sequenced, full-length album will bear the same relation to modern people as the classical sonnet in iambic pentameter does today. 24 Hour is proof of a time when music had a distinctly different meaning and value than it does today: when a band could still write a line like “You’re not punk and I’m telling everyone,” or “People from bands and labels: the good ones,” or “They’ll laugh about it at the warehouse,” or “I’m coloring outside your guidelines,” or “It means nothing. Selling kids to other kids,” or “If you think we changed our tune, I hope we did.” That this moment was two-and-a-half decades ago—longer than some Jawbreaker fans have even been alive—is a reminder of how rapidly the world has changed, and how dramatically our values have shifted during that same period. It is tempting to think of this obsolescence as another historical curiosity, or scenery from a time long past, and more edifying to look for ways in which the seemingly obsolete world of 24 Hour holds lessons for our own. 177

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How can so much have changed in so little time? And how did we get here, from there? * * * IN WHICH YET ANOTHER POMPOUS BLOWHARD PURPORTS TO POSSESS THE TRUE MEANING OF PUNK ROCK3 As early as the 1970s, independent labels were seen as a utopian alternative not only to mainstream music, but mainstream thinking and politics, if not capitalism itself. “We always saw distribution as a political thing,” Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis told Jon Savage. “If you only have W. H. Smith selling books, then you only get a certain kind of book. If you set up a viable system that sells other kinds of literature, then you give people a chance to decide for themselves.”4 Albini: “[Touch and Go, Dischord, Merge, Simple Machines] are all labels founded on the principle that the people involved are not doing it as a business venture, but because they feel like they’re part of a community and that that community is about making records and art.”5 Lester Bangs, writing about The Clash in 1977: At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they’ll be creative about it, and do something good besides. Realize their own potentials and finally start doing what they really want to do. Which also presupposes that people don’t want somebody else telling them what to do. That most people are capable of a certain spontaneity, given the option.6 178

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This understanding of punk has another name: humanism. It is an extension of the sixties’ belief that music was an engine for free thinking, political engagement, and dissent, not merely entertainment or a consumer commodity. Music had an ethical dimension, and a moral imperative, of liberation and social change: “That decade was one where people felt enormously committed and enormously identified with music and culture, where people felt like it wasn’t just a background, it was your life,” says Guy Picciotto. “It was part of the fiber of what you did.”7 Here is Ruth Schwartz, talking about the birth of MRR in 1982: We wanted to change the world. We wanted to spread DIY attitudes, and we wanted the people to rise up against their oppressors and party! And do right and do better. Everything that was published in the magazine was about that. It was what punk rock was all about, making noise and being crazy and changing the world every day. Without letting corporate culture have its way on us.8 As Michael Azerrad first noted in Our Band Could Be Your Life, the truly extraordinary aspect of DIY and indie culture was the onus it put on the audience to figure things out for itself, and to participate as something more than passive spectators, even more than the bands and labels: They were falling for bands who weren’t on commercial radio and would never be on the cover of Rolling Stone. They had to overcome a lifetime of training in order to get to the point where they could feel like a scruffy, bibulous indie band from Minneapolis with an album called Let 179

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It Be was just as valid as the band that first used the title. What they realized was that the great band down the street was just as valid as the superstar acts (and maybe even more worthy). And what’s more, seeing the great indie bands play live didn’t require $25 and a pair of binoculars. That was positively revolutionary.9 The partly hidden, self-starter quality of this world tended to attract a certain type of person: someone who would seek out “the little radio stations to the left of the dial that didn’t have such great reception, who would track down the little photocopied fanzine, who would walk past the sprawling chain record store with the lighted sign and go across town to the little mom-and-pop that stocked the new Camper van Beethoven record.”10 Such independence of mind inevitably bled into the political sphere: The American underground in the ’80s embraced the radical notion that maybe, just maybe, the stuff that was shoved in our faces by the all-pervasive mainstream media wasn’t necessarily the best stuff. This independence of mind, the determination to see past surface flash and think for oneself, flew in the face of the burgeoning complacency, ignorance, and conformism that engulfed the nation like a spreading stain throughout the ’80s.11 Paradoxically, punk was both a driver for self-enlightenment and a catalyst for community, or the sense of belonging one can only find in a circle of sympathetic, like-minded souls. This is the promise inherent in punk: that any band of three or four isolated misfits can find each other, and change the 180

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world. They don’t need to be from the big city, and they don’t even need to know how to play all that well; they just need to want it bad enough, and to have the right attitude. Mike Watt and D. Boon, speaking in archival footage from the documentary We Jam Econo: I think it was because of our experience with arena rock, and going to the gigs at the [L.A.] Forum and Long Beach Arena, and just being so much a spectator, that when we came up on this new scene, it wasn’t about spectators. It was more about totally being a participant. So what’s really the question is, “What is to be done where you’re at? And how are you going to do it?” (Mike Watt) We come from working-class families, and we play our music the way we want to do it. We just want to let people know that there should be a band on every block. There should be a nightclub on every other block, and a record label on every other block after that. (D. Boon) Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü, writing about the same topic: Most people are passive consumers, the ones who hear something all over the radio and then buy the record or see the band at Madison Square Garden. Then there’s the questioning, investigative type of person, the type who seeks out the new music—and that was us. . . . Those people were nonconformists, freethinkers—the kids who were probably ostracized in high school for reading poetry, for listening to different kinds of music, for being artistic. A lot of them came from broken homes, looking for a surrogate family. This was our fan base, the people 181

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who launched us; they were dissatisfied on virtually all fronts and they were looking beyond the normal forms of entertainment. That stuff was exclusive in that it was invisible unless you knew how to find it. Finding the music meant finding like-minded people. Then networks got built, bands got put up, notebooks got shared. Infrastructure and community.12 As Mould and Azerrad note, the curiosity and investigative zeal required to navigate the pre-internet landscape of indie music was, in effect, a silent rebuke of mass consumerism: “Independent music required independent thinking, all the way from the artists to the entrepreneurs who sold it, to the people who bought it.”13 Much like the role of the public intellectual as described by Edward Said, the anti-corporate ethos of punk and indie music was one of permanent skepticism, revolt, and opposition to the status quo. This mindset would survive until the turn of the century, or whenever we want to date the spread of digital music piracy. In 1997, John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker: “The artists of the next generation will make their art with an internal marketing barometer already in place. The auteur as marketer, the artist in a suit of his own: the ultimate in vertical integration.”14 Writing in 1999, Naomi Klein could still plausibly argue in No Logo: The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!). . . . Rather, it is an attempt to capture an anti-corporate attitude that I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a 182

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simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brandname secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high brand-name recognition.15 By 2001, when Our Band Could Be Your Life was published, the all-important value granted to indies, majors, and big corporations in the ’90s still obtained, as the taxonomy of the book’s introduction shows: This book is devoted solely to bands who were on independent labels. So R.E.M., for instance, didn’t make the cut, since the band’s pre-Warner albums were recorded for I.R.S. Records, whose releases were manufactured and distributed by A&M (which in turn had a business relationship with RCA) and later, MCA. . . . “Independent” has several definitions, but the one this book uses is the crucial question of whether a label distributes its records through one of the corporate music behemoths—in the period in question they were the so-called Big Six: Capitol, CBS, MCA, PolyGram, RCA, and WEA—which allows them entrée to vastly more stores than the smaller, independent distributors.16 Azerrad’s nomenclature is telling: note the surgical precision with which distributors, manufacturers, business relationships, and “corporate music behemoths” are comprehensively detailed. Nor is he being pedantic or extreme with his distinctions. In 2002, the Montreal instrumental band Godspeed You! Black Emperor released an album, 183

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Figure 9.1  Back panel of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Yanqui U.X.O. This version corrects a factual error in the initial pressing. (Reprinted with permission from Constellation Records. All rights retained.)

Yanqui U.X.O., whose artwork included an arrow diagram linking the four major entertainment conglomerates to arms manufacturers and the global military-industrial complex, along with a photo of falling bombs. Although the diagram was later partly corrected, the link between 184

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one’s entertainment consumption and the unexploded ordinance (U.X.O.) in the album title—a reference to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had just started—was hardly the most obvious of artwork themes, and a telling marker of the distance traveled, or regressed, since then. * * * Very little of this, it seems fair to say, is still on the minds of musicians, or the dwindling number of people anachronistically willing to pay for music today. That is: if anyone in music other than Godspeed, MRR, and Steve Albini still thinks this way about indies and majors, the big entertainment conglomerates, or capitalism generally, they don’t have the visibility or audience they once did. Even for the rare popular musicians who do concern themselves explicitly with national politics—Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, A Tribe Called Quest, or, on a smaller level, Killer Mike, Devonté Hynes, Merrill Garbus, John Darnielle—the question of being on an indie or major, or whether they license their music to advertising, seems essentially beside the point. Maybe this is a symptom of the general passivity and quietism of always-online American life in the twentyfirst century; or maybe it’s just another example of settled debates, bygone values, and obsolete terms. In the music and media industries today, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a band in possession of a good single must be in want of a fortune. In a time when almost no one still buys albums, and tens of thousands of streams will earn a band pennies, the reasoning goes, artists deserve to get paid any way they can manage, and rightly so. Who are 185

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we to blame them if the only people still paying musicians their true worth are corporate advertising and branding companies? It’s a difficult claim with which to argue, which is why almost no one ever still does. Such is the extent of this deafening silence that, when a semipopular artist does venture an opinion about the quaint notion of selling out, it’s instantly news. In 2016, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—who himself appeared in a campaign for Bushmills whiskey, which he later admitted regretting, though presumably not before depositing the check—denounced Beyoncé’s sponsorship deal with Pepsi as inconsistent with her professed feminism: Like, I’d prefer Beyoncé didn’t do a Pepsi tour. Do not take two million dollars from Pepsi and be a role model for young girls. Do not do that. That stuff does anger me. . . . I grew up loving bands like the Indigo Girls, and they stood for something, doing benefit shows and talking about shit and changing culture or changing people’s mindsets and raising awareness. What’s music for? It’s not about having a bunch of CDs. The following month, Anohni—one of the few contemporary musicians to make any sort of comment on the age of drone warfare under Obama—went further, and more ­selfcritically, implicating herself: It’s just gotten worse and worse over the last 15 years. The income streams of musicians have all been upstreamed into the pockets of computer corporations. Sound recordings are little more than free crackerjacks inside every computer or cell phone that you buy. 186

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Musicians have been stripped of the ability to effectively sell our music as an object. Now we are being herded into all these shady situations. So, now, say the focus of your music is social justice—social justice becomes a big part of your “brand.” You do some TV shows and get lots of followers on Twitter. As soon as you have enough followers, the corporations come knocking to rent out your brand, which they then turn around and use as a pheromone to sell their products. You use that money to make a music video and pay your recording costs. But now your record has a logo for Nike or Apple on the back. Do we really want to front for these multinationals? It’s been such an insidious transfer of our agency. Having diverted our income streams into their own pockets, they now siphon the “lucky” ones back a tiny lifeline of resources to keep us going. And by taking the bait, our credibility is conjoined with that corporation and their business practices. It’s exhausting. You see artists hailed as a new generation of independents, only to be enlisted to leverage product. I’m as guilty as the next person in having signed up for this.17 * * * Do the questions “Who’s punk? What’s the score?” still mean anything? Is punk itself anything more than a marketing term, or a museum showpiece? It’s incredibly easy to pile up evidence for the prosecution: by now, the litany is as familiar as it is depressing. Barney’s sells a Black Flag T-shirt for $265. In Boston, the Hotel

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Commonwealth, which occupies the former site of The Rat, a legendary punk club where Jawbreaker played, has a punk-themed luxury suite for $500 a night. In New York and San Francisco, a once-central community of artists and musicians has been priced out to the periphery, if not to other cities entirely. In 2014 alone, six DIY and allages spaces were forced out of the same industrial stretch of Kent Avenue, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The culprit was not tech millionaires, as in the Bay Area, but one of their own: the formerly “indie” countercultural media empire Vice. Among people who live in cities big and small, the simple act of going out to a concert, or listening to a new album, sometimes feels like an endangered and increasingly restricted activity. And yet: there are reasons to believe punk is more resilient than it seems. Now in its third decade, incredibly, 924 Gilman Street is still in operation, still holding endless membership meetings every first and third Saturday, and still faithfully presenting all-ages shows and bands from around the world for obscenely low ticket prices every weekend. That it has done so while remaining a nonprofit, all-volunteer operation— while dozens of for-profit clubs in the Bay Area have gone under and unremembered in that same time—makes it that much more remarkable. In 2015, Gilman lifted its ban on major-label acts for a night to host a secret benefit show by Green Day, making their first sanctioned appearance at the club since 1993. Appropriately, they played songs dating back to their earliest Gilman shows, in the late ’80s, and brought

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on Tim Armstrong for a cover of Operation Ivy’s immortal “Knowledge.” Maximumrockandroll is still publishing monthly: 120 cranky pages of reviews, letters, editorials, and scene reports per issue, all printed on obsolete newsprint—and declining any and all offers to cash in on San Francisco’s real-estate boom. In 2016, they launched a fundraising campaign to undertake the MRR Archive Project: a comprehensive digital archive covering four decades of out-of-print magazine issues and reviews. When I asked the exceedingly polite MRR volunteer who helped me dig up old issues from the early ’90s if he or anyone else in the office still debated the virtues of indies and major labels, he paused and smiled patiently. In New York, the most successful, dynamic, and forwardthinking cultural institution to emerge in the last decade is AFROPUNK, which originated in a 2003 documentary highlighting the overlooked black presence in the American punk scene, and has since grown into an international phenomenon, with annual festivals in Brooklyn, Atlanta, London, Paris, and South Africa. A self-consciously progressive, inclusionary outfit, AFROPUNK describes the core of its mission as “the punk principles of DIY aesthetics, radical thought and social non-conformity,” and itself as “a voice for the unwritten, unwelcome, and unheard-of.” In its overwhelmingly African-American audience and musical programming, AFROPUNK would seem to be a million miles from Gilman Street. But this is the sign that greets you upon entering the festival, below. Improbably, the only band to displace Drake from the number-one sales position in 2016 was Blink-182. Mudhoney 189

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Figure 9.2  “The rules” (circa 2017) at AFROPUNK, Commodore Barry Park, Brooklyn. (Reprinted with permission from AFROPUNK. All rights retained.)

is still around and playing, as is Rancid. Green Day is writing musicals on Broadway, and in 2015, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In his acceptance speech, Billie Joe Armstrong concluded by saying: “We come from this place that’s called Gilman Street. It’s a club. It’s in Berkeley. We are so fortunate to be able to play there because it was all-ages, and it was nonprofit. It was just all of these goofballs. It was like Romper Room for degenerates. It was so great. And what a great scene.” And in April 2017, Jawbreaker announced their first show in 21 years: a headlining appearance to close out that summer’s Riot Fest in Chicago, on the same massive stage 190

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where Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age would perform on the two nights prior. In an interview, to the question of why the band had finally decided to reunite, Blake answered: I actually had nowhere else to go. . . . My life was just stopped completely. It was just this huge thing that was sitting right in front of me the whole time. I kind of hit a moment where I was like, I can either apply for 100 jobs and not get them. I mean—dog walking—I couldn’t get hired. Which is just a reflection of our economy, I think? Nothing against me or anybody else. I couldn’t believe what I couldn’t get. Adam wrote as he does every year and goes, “I just gotta tell you what’s being offered right now.” Just how ridiculous the stakes are. It was just a matter of feeling the other guys out and then seeing that everyone wanted to do it and making a plan to meet up. We didn’t agree until we practiced and thought that this actually sounds like us enough that we can pursue it.18 On the night of Sunday, September 21, 2017, it finally happened. With conspicuously little fanfare, and the single most expectant audience I have ever stood among, an older, wiser, and clearly enthusiastic Jawbreaker took the stage: Blake, in a black T-shirt bearing the English and Arabic words “Gaza on my mind”; Chris, the former graduate student of German militarism, in an orange “Antifascist Action” shirt; and Adam, as ever, behind the drumkit in a plain, workmanlike black T. Over 75 minutes, they played everything you would want to hear, and then some— “Bivouac,” “Parabola,” “Want,” “Kiss the Bottle,” nearly all 191

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of  24 Hour  and Dear You—and they sounded absolutely glorious. Of her own experience at Riot Fest, Emily Flake wrote in The New Yorker: I went, in honor of fifteen-year-old me. The crowd went bananas from the first note. I burst into tears. I was struck by an emotion so powerful and raw that I had a hard time identifying it at first: grief. I stood there in that ecstatic crowd and mourned. I mourned all of us dumb kids. I mourned our graying hair and slackening bodies. I mourned some unnameable forgotten truth I used to know . . . I’d thought that I was there for nostalgia; turns out I was there for an opportunity to grieve that I didn’t know I’d needed.19 * * * By any measure, Jawbreaker is an exponentially more popular band today than when they broke up. Part of this is simple math: by now, at least a generation of bands have grown up acknowledging their influence, and most of us who first heard them as teenagers have little punks of our own. The rest is old-fashioned longevity: despite being firmly of their historical moment, the songs persist in having a stubborn currency and relevance. Where most ’90s punk (if not ’90s rock, period) seems to have aged poorly, 24 Hour still sounds fresh, and sonically undated, even as its lyrics tether it to the end of the last century. Like The Replacements—the band they most resembled, in their intelligence, lyrical virtuosity, and professional ambivalence—Jawbreaker was always a little 192

PEOPLE FROM BANDS AND L ABELS

too self-conscious or self-defeating to become truly popular when they were together, which are precisely the virtues that have served them so well in the afterlife. It was Jawbreaker’s unsolicited fortune, as a Bay Area band in 1994, to be reluctantly strapped to a seat at ground zero: the equivalent, as it were, of a popular, high-functioning band in Seattle circa 1992, or London in 1977. As tragedies go, this is fairly minor. How many people can say they were in the eye of such a storm, or so close to breaking through? Today, Jawbreaker is a telling example of how, sometimes, artists can get caught up in forces beyond their control: despite their best intentions, and despite superlative work; a seeming exception to the rule that the good stuff generally rises to the top. After Jawbreaker, none of the band would ever make music with the same success, devotion, and immediacy of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy; but for that short time, they were as good as it got.

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Notes

Introduction 1. “Rock Candy,” Spin, April 1, 1994. 2. Marcus, 4.

Rainy days drop boyish wonder 1. Azerrad, 16. 2. Grubbs, 104. 3. Schwarzenbach, Serial Optimist. 4. Ibid. 5. Geek America, 1996. 6. Grubbs, 106. 7. Kelley, 79. 8. Ibid.

NOTES

How can I do this better? 1. Kelley, 79. 2. Ibid. 3. Paradise Lost, Book III, 40–50. 4. Kelley, 79. 5. Spitz, 24. 6. Kelley, 79. 7. Ibid.

The clarity of Cal to break your heart 1. “Blake Schwarzenbach on Jawbreaker’s Bivouac and Chesterfield King reissues,” Giant Robot, December 10, 2012. 2. Sinker, 102. 3. Galil, 74. 4. Ibid. 5. Kelley, 80. 6. Ibid. 7. Galil, 75. 8. Kelley, 80.

These things go wrong so often 1. Galil, 75. 2. Galil, 77. 3. Kelley, 102. 196

NOTES

  4. Galil, 77.   5. Galil, 78.   6. Ibid.   7. Galil, 79.   8. Galil, 78.   9. Galil, 79. 10. Ibid. 11. Spitz, 81.

This is all we want from life   1. Teju Cole, “On Photography: Luigi Ghirri’s Brilliant Photographic Puzzles,” The New York Times Magazine, June 28, 2016.   2. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Belknap, 2002), 104.   3. The New York Times, February 19, 2012.   4. Sinker, 102.   5. Galil, 75.   6. Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991), 6.   7. Doe, 58–59.   8. Doe, 199.   9. Galil, 79. 10. Galil, 78. 11. King Lear, Act I, Scene V, 40–44. 12. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, section 26. 13. Ricks, 201.

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NOTES

Our enemies will laugh and be pointing   1. All journal entries in this chapter are excerpted from the fanzine My Letter to the World #8, December 16, 1993.   2. Galil, 81.   3. Boulware, 361.   4. Ibid.   5. Kelley, 81.   6. Galil, 81.   7. Rollins, 148.   8. Kennedy, 3–5.   9. Weasel, 54–56. 10. Boulware, 388. 11. Spitz, 90.

Selling kids to other kids   1. Galil, 90.   2. Noisey, April 2, 2015.   3. Boulware, 382.   4. Boulware, 326.   5. Boulware, 327.   6. Livermore, 207.   7. NOFX, 348.   8. Boulware, 379.   9. Galil, 93. 10. Ibid. 198

NOTES

11. Boulware, 360. 12. Sinker, 103. 13. Gina Arnold, “Jawbreaker Swallows Deal with Geffen,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 17, 1995. 14. Galil, 88. 15. Savage, 405. 16. Savage, 278–79. 17. Galil, 87. 18. Azerrad, 497–98. 19. Maximumrockandroll #128 (January 1994), “Record Reviews.” 20. Galil, 94. 21. Boulware, 281. 22. Savage, 420. 23. Galil, 93. 24. Galil, 99. 25. Galil, 93. 26. “A Conversation with Jawbreaker,” Rubberband #4, March 1994. 27. Kelley, 81. 28. Boulware, 361. 29. Maximumrockandroll #87 (August 1990). 30. Galil, 94. 31. Galil, 97. 32. Galil, 88. 33. Rotten, 155. 34. McNeil, 112.

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NOTES

35. Savage, 304. 36. Boulware, 381. 37. Maximumrockandroll #129 (February 1994), “Columns: Ben Weasel vs. The World.” 38. Galil, 97. 39. Ibid. 40. Boulware, 361. 41. Galil, 99. 42. Livermore, 215. 43. Mehr, 485. 44. Galil, 97. 45. Sinker, 103. 46. “Kurt Cobain and a Dream About Pop,” Salon, September 24, 2001. 47. Livermore, 63. 48. Boulware, 380. 49. Boulware, 383. 50. Gina Arnold, “Jawbreaker Swallows Deal with Geffen,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 17, 1995. 51. Maximumrockandroll #141 (February 1995), “Columns: Ben Weasel vs. The World.” 52. Galil, 97. 53. Boulware, 361. 54. Boulware, 382. 55. Boulware, 383.

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NOTES

It’s a long way down again 1. “Jawbreaker Goes to Sea,” MTV News, September 14, 1995. 2. Kelley, 81. 3. “Jawbreaker: Bivouac,” Pitchfork, January 9, 2013. 4. Kelley, 81. 5. “ Pop Review: When it’s Dangerous to Sing,” The New York Times, October 31, 1995. 6. Galil, 99. 7. Boulware, 362. 8. Sinker, 110–11. 9. Sinker, 107. 10. Kelley, 81. 11. Kelley, 82. 12. Sinker, 107. 13. Kelley, 82. 14. Sinker, 104. 15. Sinker, 115. 16. Sinker, 111. 17. Sinker, 107. 18. Galil, 96. 19. Boulware, 361.

People from bands and labels. The good ones 1. Maximumrockandroll #141 (February 1995), “Route 666: The Route to Corporate Media.” 201

NOTES

 2. Maximumrockandroll #141 (February 1995), “Columns: Tim Yo Mama.”   3. (With apologies to Lester Bangs, whose formulation this copies verbatim.)   4. Savage, 515.   5. Sinker, 151.   6. Bangs, 258.   7. Azerrad, 7.   8. Boulware, 167.   9. Azerrad, 10. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Mould, 61. 13. Azerrad, Nirvana, 17. 14. “The Big Sellout,” The New Yorker, October 20, 1997. 15. Klein, xviii. 16. Azerrad, 5. 17. The Creative Independent, October 10, 2016. 18. Missing Words podcast, July 10, 2017. 19. Emily Flake, “Young and Dumb Inside,” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017.

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Postscript: Hey, I remember that day

A wise song says: “No one wants to hear what you dreamt about, unless you dreamt about them.” Similarly, no one wants to hear how you first heard your favorite album, period. Still, it seems wrong, somehow, to write about an album as private, confessional, and intimate as 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, and not to own up to something personal—sort of like making a movie about Steve Jobs with an old typewriter. By putting this here, I hope I’ve made it easy to skip over. Like any number of men, I was introduced to Jawbreaker, and 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, by an infinitely cooler woman. She was in my grade, in high school, and had recently moved to our white-bread suburban town in South Florida from Long Island. She was the kind of person that other people liked to gossip about, someone you tended to notice: she wore punk clothes, and cut her hair short, and seemed to have no problem sitting by herself at lunch with a book. Needless to say, it didn’t hurt that she was almost comically beautiful. As idiotic boys are wont to do, I tried to get her attention. In American history, when our teacher would pause the class for a cigarette break in the teacher’s lounge next door, I looked for open seats close to where she was sitting, always

POST SCRIPT: HEY, I REMEMBER THAT DAY

in the back of the room, and passed her notes, or asked her what she was reading, and if she knew whichever show-offy title had just popped into my pea brain. I looked for her in the hallways, and leaving school. Of course, my friends made fun of me: How’s it going with the punk girl? Whether she was amused or merely tolerating my blatant fumbling is no longer a reliable memory. Somehow, though—persistence or sheer surrender—and monumentally to my surprise, she gave me her phone number, and we started hanging out. She was not only the kind of person others enjoyed gossiping about: she loved music, and long drives, and used-book stores, and writing letters, and spending time with her younger cousin, who was autistic. She was always enthusing about something: a book she had just finished, or a new album, or a visit from one of her friends up north. Some days, she would look at you in a certain way, and make you wonder what you had done right, to deserve such good fortune. She was the kind of person who would write you an eleven-page letter with the lyrics to every song on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy in longhand around the margins of the page, and close it with only one line repeated: “I love you more than I ever loved anyone before, or anyone to come.” As idiotic boys are also wont to do, I completely fucked it up. She gave me another chance, and I fucked it up again. And that was the end of it. We lost touch. Every so often, I would hear about her whereabouts from mutual friends: after college, she had moved to California, got married, and had a little girl. I heard that she was working as an organizer, for a national immigration and domestic workers’ advocacy group, which 204

POST SCRIPT: HEY, I REMEMBER THAT DAY

surprised me not one iota. A year or two later, someone told me that she and her husband had another girl, and moved back to South Florida, to be close to her family. On an overcast summer day in 2014, I was doing my part as an insufferable resident of Brooklyn, and giving a tour for two friends making their first visit to town, from Berlin. We were walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, and getting close to the Manhattan side. I must have been pointing out a landmark to my friends, or mouthing off about something or other, when, all of a sudden, I felt the slightest tap on my left shoulder. Thinking it was yet another tourist asking to take their photo, I turned around, mildly annoyed—and there she was, right on the Brooklyn Bridge, standing next to her husband, and grinning bemusedly at me. If I ever understood the meaning of “shock and awe,” reader, that moment was it. It was the first time I had seen her face in almost twenty years, and it was just as luminous as I remembered. There I was—my mouth more or less hanging open, and my powers of speech incapacitated—when one or both of them took pity on me and broke the ice. “Ronen, this is my husband Darren,” she said. “Darren, this is my old friend Ronen.” We shook hands. Equally needless to say, he was tall, and handsome, and infuriatingly friendly. We made small talk for a minute or two—if you can call my stuttering that—before I remembered my friends from Berlin, and introduced them as well. By then, the five of us were causing a minor obstruction on the bridge, and I had finally recovered enough of my linguistic skills to say that it was a treat running into both 205

POST SCRIPT: HEY, I REMEMBER THAT DAY

of them, and that I would try to drop her a line soon. We said goodbye, and I resumed walking with my friends toward Manhattan. When they asked me, “Who was that?” I said, involuntarily: that was the first person I fell in love with. As chastened adults are sometimes fortunate to do, I sent her an email, and made plans to get lunch the next time I was back home. She showed me photos of her two girls, who were now starting grade school, and predictably exquisite. The next time she was back in New York, for work, I took her out for a drink, and asked about her husband, her family, and her job. I told her I was sorry, and also grateful to be her friend again. Hey, A.: I miss you.

206

Acknowledgments

This book and its author were fortunate to find early readers in Ben Ratliff, Matty Karas, Allan Kozinn, Sam Stephenson, Jon Liu, Henry Owings, Rosalia Ludricks, Tucker Rinehart, and Brian Bourque. Grace Ambrose and Brendan Wells from Maximum­ rockandroll in San Francisco granted full access to MRR’s archive. For help with musical analysis, research, and interview transcription: Caleb Burhans, Christopher Cerrone, Zan Emerson, Josh Intrator, Mark Giese, Liz Garo, and Piotr Orlov. Finally: Chris Bauermeister, Adam Pfahler, and Blake Schwarzenbach all graciously answered a stranger’s many intrusive questions for far longer than required. In particular, none of this would have been possible without Adam’s continuous help and courtesy in allowing me to get the facts straight. I hope they feel this book has done their story justice.

208

Bibliography

This book is indebted to the online resource of the Complete Jawbreaker Page. Evan Kransdorf started the site in 1995, and in 1999, handed it over to Alex Bender, who maintained and expanded it over the next decade. The site, which lived at loosecharm.org from 2006 to 2011, is now archived at the Wayback Machine. Alex’s comprehensive archive of the band’s discography, recording sessions, live and demo recordings, interviews, and chronology was invaluable. Primary Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day (New York: Penguin, 2009). Leor Galil, “An Oral History of Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy,” Pitchfork Review, Winter 2015. Eric Grubbs, Post: A Look at the Influence of Post-Hardcore, 19852007 (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2008). Trevor Kelley, “The Oral History of Jawbreaker,” Alternative Press #266, September 2010.

BIBLIO GR APHY

Blake Schwarzenbach, “How I Spent a Week with Nirvana and Lost All My Punk Rock Credibility,” My Letter to the World #8, December 16, 1993. Blake Schwarzenbach, “What Turned You On?,” Serial Optimist, August 30, 2013. Daniel Sinker, ed., We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, The Collected Interviews (Chicago: Punk Planet, 2008). Author interviews with Chris Bauermeister, Scott Bradley, Christy Colcord, Mark Kates, Cassandra Millspaugh, Jon Liu, Adam Pfahler, Robin Taylor, and Blake Schwarzenbach.

Secondary Gina Arnold, Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997). Michael Azerrad, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993). Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001). Lester Bangs, Blondie (New York: Delilah/Simon and Schuster, 1980). Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Vintage, 1988). Aaron Cometbus, Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2002). Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006).

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BIBLIO GR APHY

Dave Dictor, MDC: Memoir from a Damaged Civilization (San Francisco: Manic D Press, 2016). John Doe and Tom DeSavia, Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk (New York: Da Capo, 2016). Brian Edge, ed., 924 Gilman Street: The Story So Far (San Francisco: Maximumrockandroll, 2004). Jon Fine, Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) (New York: Penguin, 2015). Randall Kennedy, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (New York: Vintage, 2008). Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000). Larry Livermore, How to Ru(i)n a Record Label: The Story of Lookout Records (Kingston, NJ: Don Giovanni, 2016). John Lydon, No Irish No Blacks (New York: Picador, 1994). Greil Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999). Ruth Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me (New York: Grove Press, 1997). Bob Mehr, Trouble Boys: The Replacements (New York: Da Capo, 2016). Bob Mould and Michael Azerrad, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody (Jersey City, NJ: Cleis Press, 2013). Henry Rollins, Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag (Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publications, 1994). NOFX, The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories (New York: Da Capo, 2016). 211

BIBLIO GR APHY

Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming (London: Faber, 2001). Marc Spitz, Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day (New York: Hachette, 2006). Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). Ben Weasel, Punk is a Four-Letter Word (Chicago: Hope and Nonthings, 2003). Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

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Also available in the series

Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 1.

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder

ALSO AVAIL ABLE IN THE SERIES

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris

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58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

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89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

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119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker

123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay

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