It’s 1997, maybe 1998, maybe 1999. You’re eighteen, nineteen, you’re bored and you got one of those free AOL discs at college. You download something (whatever that means) and a few minutes later you’re chatting with people whose interests are as niche as left-handed redheads who love calico cats and the best Disneyland ride after 10 p.m. Those topics are fine, you guess, but this Internet thing is kind of boring. Until you find the punk chat rooms.
In these rooms, you realize the Internet is not as advertised. Another way of saying that is this: The Internet is as boring as real life, but, similar to the world that used to exist beyond the screen, there are a handful of cool people for every hundred congregated in any one space. How do you find these interesting weirdos, those whose definition of anarchy has more to do with the muscle between their ears and not their fists? They have a screen name that is, to you, an obvious Jawbreaker reference.
Or maybe a Jawbreaker quote on their profile page. Mine was from “Accident Prone,” a six-minute opus from the band’s 1995 Dear You: “It hasn’t been my day/for a couple years/what’s a couple more?” The track might not be that album’s best (that would be “Sluttering [May 4th]), but that lyric. If someone wants to know what Jawbreaker, and, more specifically, Dear You, is about, quote them those self-reflective, brooding, broody lines.
Dear You is what got me — and so many others like me — into Jawbreaker. We were those young people into punk, hardcore, Minor Threat and Bad Brains, fast, angry music and what was this band doing with lyrics that sounded like poetry but more relatable than what high school English teachers assigned? From “Million”: “Would that you could touch this angel in a clutch of snakes?/Oh pretty, pretty, I’m aflame/So excited, so unslept/Somewhat littered, so unswept/You have to sleep before you wake.”
Or what about “Fireman?”: “Dreamed I was a fireman/I just smoked and watched you burn/Dreamed I was an astronaut/I shot you down like a juggernaut/Dreamed we were still going out/Had that one a few times now/Woke up to find we were not/It’s good to be awake.” Those lyrics are as angry as any 90-second hardcore but more impactful because they are targeting a person. This song isn’t about Reagan, the government or the cops — this song is a direct “fuck you” to someone, a “I’m incredibly over you. So over you, in fact, I am going to write a song about you, which proves I’m actually not over you at all.”
Brilliant lyrics should have been enough to please Jawbreaker fans and earn the group a new audience. They weren’t. Instead, Dear You was not well received by some fans when it was released. Many called the trio — singer/guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach, bassist Chris Bauermeister and drummer Adam Pfahler — sell-outs for signing to a major label (DGC Records) when the threesome said they never would. That sort of thing mattered to punks during the early and mid 1990s, and some fans so disapproved that they turned their backs at shows when the group played a song from the album. If paying money to taunt a band you like sounds like a massive waste of time and effort, welcome to punk during the 1990s.
Maybe Dear You upset those who were there when Jawbreaker existed, those who felt betrayed by the major label signing, the layered guitars, Schwarzenbach’s clean, crisp, clear vocals, but those 13 songs kept the band alive for those of us who knew the band was dead, who knew we had just missed them, Jawbreaker, a band as important to our post- high school lives as Nirvana was during middle school.
At one point, Dear You was out of print, making it harder to find than 1990’s Unfun, 1992’s Bivouac and 1994’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. That makes no sense, the major label album buried in a stack of clearance racks across the world while three other records firmly planted in the J section of every punk record store. Such was Jawbreaker’s luck, its appeal and, perhaps, its downfall. The band made easily one of the best records of the 1990s and many people — not even its fans — seemed to care, which made those of us who did care passionate, devoted, maybe a bit clingy. If you were one of those people and you met a Jawbreaker fan at a show or an AOL chat room, that person became your friend because they knew something the rest of the world didn’t. That thing was Jawbreaker.
These people, the people like me, those who missed Jawbreaker the first time, we’re the ones who texted friends at 7 a.m. when the 2017 Riot Fest lineup was announced and Jawbreaker was the headliner. We’re the ones who attended all three Hollywood Palladium shows in 2018. And, presumably, we’re the ones who will be in attendance April 1-3 when Jawbreaker plays Dear You in its entirety at the Wiltern.
We spoke to Schwarzenbach and Pfahler — who attended Santa Monica’s Crossroads High School, making them according to the latter, an LA band — about Dear You, new songs and the impact Los Angeles had on them as musicians.
Los Angeles contributor Ryan Ritchie: What does L.A. mean to you?
Blake Schwarzenbach: L.A. was really formative for me because I was in high school and it’s when I first really went into seeing shows for the first time and really kind of began to identify as a follower of underground music and punk rock music. I still listen to a lot of those bands, X being one. The Dream Syndicate was a huge band for me. And Social Distortion. Seeing them as a young kid was pretty transformative. The other big thing at the time was SST. Meat Puppets and Minutemen were two of my favorite bands.