Original subtitles

INTERVIEWER: So, what... what happened? Where did it go wrong?

I don't know. It's really hard to talk about, like...

the whole sellout thing.

When the band broke up, when we, uh, when we called it quits,

I remember the thing that I said to, um, to Blake and Chris was,

I was like, "We can't stop this band.

"I have tons of shit of ours that I have no idea what to do with."

That was like the first thing that I thought of.

JESSICA HOPPER: I think I actually remember being mad.

I mean, to be fair, I was one of those people.

ADAM PFAHLER: That's the Jawbreaker mail.

This is the mailbag. It was weird.

People used to take a piece of paper, and then they put it in this...

and then buy from the post office, they sell these...

then they put it in the mail, and then you get it, like, two days later.

BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG: I thought Jawbreaker was gonna be huge.

I thought they were gonna bridge the gap between Green Day and Nirvana.

Um...

So, I used to take pictures of these maniacs that would come to our shows.

I wanted them to be huge, but I also thought they fucked up, kind of.

["BOXCAR" PLAYING]

♪ 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

♪ 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

♪ One, two, three, four Who's punk? What's the score?

♪ Got a friend Her name is Boxcar

♪ Cigarettes and beer In El Sob

♪ Her hair was blue Now it's green

♪ I like her mind She hates the scene

♪ My enemies are...

TOMMY STRANGE: There's something about being able to take those same three chords

and putting a passion behind them that makes it fresh and brand new.

You can see it in Blake when he sang,

and you can see it in Adam when he's drumming.

And it was just there.

There's very few bands

that can make you cry and wanna dance at the same time.

I mean, for me it's The Clash and The Replacements and Jawbreaker,

kind of the, uh, Holy Trinity.

♪ All alone All alone

♪ All alone You're on your own ♪

BLAKE SCHWARZENBACH: Hi, there.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]

[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]

Fishermen's motto.

-INTERVIEWER: Is that what it is? -Yeah. Rough seas, hold fast.

SCHWARZENBACH: When bands break up it's...

really easy to find it kind of outrageous,

what you fought over, and it can seem ridiculous.

You know? But, when you're in them, I think it feels like everything.

[TRUCK PASSING]

PFAHLER: Here we are.

Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences.

I didn't even go there yet and I totally knew who they were and that they were cute.

Yeah. I mean, there was this, like, group of them.

I met Blake up against this wall.

It's not there anymore.

Oh, shit, that used to be a wall.

HADEN: They were just dreamy.

They were just this, kind of like The Outsiders, you know?

Like, the Greasers, you know?

Honestly, I don't think I would've gotten out of high school

had I not come here.

'Cause I was like... I was on the fast track...

SCHWARZENBACH: You were. You were dangerous.

Adam was a very wild little boy.

He was feral.

He was feral, to say the least.

F-E-R-R-A-L.

Feral.

My mom and dad would roll up on people.

You know, they'd roll up on people at the supermarket and be like,

"So, who do you think is better, you know, Nirvana, Peral Jam, or Jawbreaker?"

Total strangers.

And, like, "What the hell are you talking about?"

KEMBRA: I tried to throw him out the window

when he was, like, three months old.

And allegedly, my mother told me that that was a very normal thing to do.

This building, this two-story structure here,

is where I took French. Where I flunked French, actually.

SCHWARZENBACH: I was encouraged, really, from the beginning to be creative.

So I did a lot of drawing when I was a kid,

and wrote stories, and really liked monsters.

And kind of tried to write stories about monsters and draw them as well.

This is the smoking area.

I have a great... Actually, I have a great picture of Red Harvest, our first band,

sitting right there.

WARONKER: Crossroads School embraced the freak.

Had they maybe been in different schools,

they probably would've been beaten up.

And I was sitting in the back row one day,

and I'd always wondered about this little closet.

And I opened the door and there was a guitar case in there.

So I waited till after class and I spirited this guitar case down the stairs.

I fucking stole it. I'll tell you now.

[PUNK MUSIC PLAYING]

SCHWARZENBACH: I'd recently moved to LA and went to, like, one of these punkathons

at Hollywood Palladium.

And it was really violent, you know, it was really scary.

And we thought we could be abducted,

or made to do drugs, or, like, you know?

[CHUCKLES] Defiled in some way, or killed.

And I liked it.

Punk rock was all about, like, you know, you don't have to be a great player,

you could do it, you know?

It was like punks knew how to do things

ethically, but also kind of dangerously.

Joe Strummer and D. Boon told me directly to start a band.

It was kind of surf, kind of noise.

-And kinda goth. -Yeah.

ANTHONY NEWMAN: I remember Blake had bleached his hair out

and it was super white and spiky, and Adam was on drums.

And they were really good. They were...

I mean, back when we were like 15 years old

and stoned at house parties, it sounded really good.

This big building down here,

that was our first show. We played three songs at lunch. You don't remember that?

Everything was in E, all of it was in E.

SCHWARZENBACH: When I really felt like punk was dead,

then I realized it was a good time to be a part of it.

You know, when I first met these guys,

I was mostly like a "hardcore or else" kinda guy.

I had dreadlocks and wore a painted leather jacket.

We'd see him around, and we'd be like, "Who the fuck is that guy?"

You know?

The slime guy made all those clones of Cap'n Crunch,

and I was really worried.

Like, which one is the real Cap'n Crunch? How will I know?

Chris had put up this amazing ad

that cited all these influences and had fangs on it,

and it was this really, like, punk rock flier, "Looking to form group."

So I called, and I got off the phone...

You know, and Adam and I were rooming together. So I was like,

"Chris is a girl!"

Yeah, this is, this is my dirty little secret.

This is the bass, the second Antigua.

The first one got stolen out of the back of a...

out of the back of the van, but...

The bass I played all through Jawbreaker.

I can do intonation, I can do... I can repair the inside of bass electronics.

Um, what else can I do?

Uh... Complain bitterly about all sorts of things?

Yeah, that's many of my skills.

I grew up in rural Connecticut.

I grew up with not a lot. I didn't grow up in a neighborhood.

And I had very few friends,

just because I had very few people in my immediate environment.

My little sister was actually a lot more socially adept than I was.

She bought me the Sex Pistols record for my... Christmas, when I was 17.

So we thought, "This is great." You know, we'll be, like, the coolest band,

'cause we'll have, we'll be a mixed gender group.

We answer the ad, make a date with Chris and we go to his door,

he opens it up and it's that guy.

Crazy pumpkin-headed, dreadlocked punk boy.

There's like 19 layers of paint on this thing. They thought I was too punk rock.

I think we kinda thought he was a poser a little bit.

[PUNK MUSIC PLAYING]

PFAHLER: The first show we actually ever played was for my sister.

We did a performance at La MaMa Annex.

KEMBRA: My guitar player had asked if they would help him score a rock opera,

which was called Under the Bad Star.

PFAHLER: And so the music that we were playing,

it was different than what Blake and I played in high school, definitely.

We were getting a little bit better, you know, with our instruments.

["INCOMPLETE" PLAYING]

♪ We hear your One hand clapping It's music to our ears

♪ You don't like The way we sound

♪ We don't like The way you hear ♪

BAUERMEISTER: The first couple of years we were together, we spent a lot of time sort of

coming to terms with one another's musical tastes.

They were really into a lot of that later SST kind of stuff when I first met them,

which, complex time changes and stuff that I actually, to this day, drives me nuts.

Chris's whole philosophy, as he'd told us,

and this was a word that Adam and I used to throw around at each other,

was, uh, "contrapuntal."

Chris was interested in contrapuntal melody.

I used to think I needed an eight string bass or something

to have double strings, but you really only need the strings you have on a bass.

And you can play...

[PLAYING BASS CHORDS]

SCHWARZENBACH: He was always trying to find a counterpoint

and a kind of tension through, you know, melody or bass chords against guitar chords.

He'd throw his thumb over the top of the thing and play with his pinky way up here

and be strumming his bass. It was great. He had a lot of good ideas.

And that clash of tones

was where we found our sound.

MARK KATES: I just want them to get their due.

And I feel like if they played, it would happen.

I don't know that... It's not like it would be like the Pixies,

but I think it would be bigger than people realize.

And I think that it's been put to them enough times,

formally, that I think they know what it means.

Adam's always real enthusiastic about it.

And then we both realize the reality of the situation is it's never gonna happen

because not everybody's onboard.

I just wish there was something I could do, but I don't think there is.

But I'm gonna keep trying. And if you guys have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

-[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING] -[MAN LAUGHS]

Exactly.

-PFAHLER: It's been like, what, 11 years? -BAUERMEISTER: Yeah.

-PFAHLER: 12 years? -BAUERMEISTER: Yeah, easily.

BAUERMEISTER: Oh, my God! How are you?

-I didn't mean to barge in. -Oh, please. Come on in.

-Did you get taller? -What's up, man?

BAUERMEISTER: Blake and I, you know, there are weird things.

I haven't really talked to him in a long time.

We got married in 2001 and Lucy wanted Jawbreaker to play at the wedding.

Adam and I were perfectly willing, but Blake...

But... I don't think he even said, "No."

He just sort of vanished.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

...listen to some stuff? Do you wanna play individually...

some stuff? Do you wanna...

We could explain our sound.

Even though we don't have our own equipment.

[CHUCKLES]

-Why don't we go in there? -Yes.

-Why don't we go in there... -And do something.

-Just show us your intro to Parabola. -Okay.

[MAN SPEAKING]

Are we, like, you know... I didn't think I was gonna play here.

I thought we were just gonna go through parts and stuff.

This is coercion.

-It is. You're forcing us to do a Jawbreaker reunion. -What you've done is coercion.

MAN: No, you guys...

You wanna fucking kill the mystery.

-That's what you're talking about. -MAN: Exactly.

["BETTER HALF" PLAYING]

PFAHLER: We made our first demo here.

it cost, like... I don't know. What do you think it cost?

Like a couple hundred bucks or something.

Yeah, I don't remember anything about that. Not that session.

♪ 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 ♪

SCHWARZENBACH: This was the house I think where we had to decide,

in fact I know we had the definitive decision on Jawbreaker

in a meeting here. And we had all our names in a hat.

That's right. Went through a couple of different, uh, you know, name changes.

Um, Rise. There was already a Rise.

Semicoil, for some reason.

We called the New York band, just the three of us,

we were called Terminal Island.

Black Dahlia.

Jesus Chrysler.

No one remembers writing on the scraps that went in the hat.

It got pulled out, "Jawbreaker." It was like someone had slipped that in as a secret ballot.

So we thought, "Oh, that should be the name."

'Cause then none of us will have thought of it.

["BUSY" PLAYING]

BAUERMEISTER: In '89, '90

was when we wrote a lot of the Unfunstuff.

I remember we finished that record and we were like, whew.

Like, that was great.

Unfunis something that...

I don't really like to talk about

the experience of putting it out.

Because it was the first time I put out an album and everything went wrong.

"What do you think?" "Terrible."

[LAUGHS] That was always his reaction to stuff.

-No, his quote, and I wrote it down... -"This is a disaster."

"Not a great record. It's not a great record."

[PLAYING "BUSY"]

When we started Jawbreaker proper it was over, LA was over.

I remember these shows where there was literally, like, four people.

It's, like, the girlfriends of the guys in the band, and their buddies.

SCHWARZENBACH: And there was nowhere to play

and that's when all the pay-to-play bullshit started happening.

BAUERMEISTER: Finally, we had been working our way up, this was a Friday night gig,

and this was, like, the big thing, you know?

Even though we had to pay to play.

And they tried to get us to foot the bill for all three bands.

["DRIVEN" PLAYING]

PFAHLER: I know that Chris really hated it here.

He really disliked Los Angeles as a city.

I think that probably had something to do with the fact

that it was always fucking sunny.

I mean, eventually I got to the point I wouldn't even open my shades.

Like, "It's another sunny day. Oh, yeah."

It divided us a bit, if we weren't already divided because of the...

Because he sort of came in as the last member of the group or whatever.

CHRISTY COLCORD: Adam and Blake had, you know, been together since high school

and were, like ,the cool punk kids at school, you know?

And Chris, you know, came in later. He was like the new guy.

It stayed that way throughout the history of Jawbreaker.

I sort of always felt like some sort of weird fifth wheel.

-I'm having an asthma attack. -PFAHLER: Inhale, dude.

Chris is a character. I think he kinda played to that a little bit too.

It was like, "Hey, I'm the, like, high-voiced nerd." [CHUCKLES]

Okay. This is called a flash.

These used to be, like, a tie thing

that went around and they would hang down.

This is from when before socks had elastics in them to hold them up.

I had these problems, like, you know, trying to fit in,

or not wanting to fit in, and sometimes doing it on purpose.

And so I think I sort of drew the line,

"Well, I'm from the East Coast, and you're from the West Coast."

SCHWARZENBACH: We had to get out of LA.

-I mean, that was clear. -PFAHLER: We did.

SCHWARZENBACH: The people who responded to us were in the East Bay.

-It's true. -We couldn't meet anybody in LA.

We were, like, taken in up there, you know?

It was like our home away from home.

♪ Used to let rumors Do my work

♪ They got around real well

♪ Now they only hurt

♪ It's a liar's quirk

♪ This time I gotta say it straight

♪ I mean to do some good

ARMSTRONG: Now, there's something about that chorus where it was like...

♪ I, I, I I want you ♪

♪ I, I, I I want you ♪

♪ I, I, I I want you ♪

♪ I, I, I I want you ♪

That's the kind of love song that I like. You can get married to that shit, you know?

["WANT" PLAYING]

We played wherever we could. We never turned down a show.

-No. -Wherever.

BAUERMEISTER: I remember a lot of Covered Wagon shows.

I remember a lot of Chameleon shows.

Gilman shows.

Yeah, we played everywhere and anywhere.

JAMES OLIVER CURRY: When you'd go to shows, it'd be the same people,

there was a sense of community.

And San Francisco in particular had a reputation for DIY-ness, you know?

Do it yourself-ness.

♪ I'm gonna cut my strings and kill the puppeteer now ♪

Kind of the Maximum-Gilman network

and the people, bands, growing up around that scene.

Gilman Street was, er, is a nonprofit, do it yourself collective.

It wasn't just like you were playing, it was also like you were working.

You know, bands had to clean the toilets, work security,

work the door.

And if you were in a punk band in the late '80s,

Gilman was your Mecca and you would, you know, book your whole tour

around a date at Gilman Street.

BEN SIZEMORE: I was in this band, Econochrist, and we had a show at Gilman

and it was Christ on Parade headlining,

and then us, and this band, Jawbreaker, opening up.

Adam and Blake looked, you know, just kinda like college rock,

they just kinda looked like regular dudes.

But then we saw Chris had some tattoos and shit.

So we were like, "All right, they're a little bit punk. It's cool." [CHUCKLES]

BAUERMEISTER: Gilman was getting a lot of buzz

and, I mean, eventually, that was where we ended up playing all the time.

[PLAYING "CHESTERFIELD KING"]

HIRSCH: I think when they came to Gilman

and everyone already knew the lyrics to the songs that they had

it was... I think they got a big charge out of that.

Oh, yeah. I think it made all of us intensely devoted to what we did.

'Cause, yeah, we basically gave up everything and moved to San Francisco

and said we're gonna work on the band.

PFAHLER: That's true.

The first day we moved into Sycamore, as we're carrying our stuff up the stairway...

sharpened screwdriver on the sidewalk...

used condom, hypodermic needle.

♪ It gets loneliest at night

♪ Down at the liquor store

♪ Beneath the neon sky My moonlight

♪ 6:00 a.m. The floor comes alive with lice ♪

SCHWARZENBACH: So we were working in that environment,

and I think it really kind of colored the music in a way.

A lot of those songs on Bivouac are all obsessed with identity.

And that record is about location and identity.

BAUERMEISTER: I mean, a lot of it is about that change, like,

"Where the hell are we, what are we doing?"

-The song's called Bivouac. -[MAN COMPLAINING]

You'll like it. Just take it easy. Jesus Christ, man.

The document of those months where we were just toiling in the Tenderloin.

["BIVOUAC" PLAYING]

SCHWARZENBACH: That was the only year we were really local, I think.

BAUERMEISTER: Right. Yeah. We were pretty much playing constantly.

It was exciting, 'cause we'd go and write a song and we'd debut it in the neighborhood.

♪ I dug my fingers In the earth

♪ I drew you pictures Of my pain ♪

That was... I felt like that was a very significant moment for me in our band.

'Cause I remember us playing it and I was watching the song float.

And I was like, "Oh, you know, it's actually...

"This is gonna work."

I was kinda seeing it go out and not dive.

It was getting kinda transcendent and being...

It was... I'll say it, it was fucking emo.

♪ Let it touch you everywhere

♪ Boat of my father

SCHWARZENBACH: You know what, it's catharsis.

It's the overturning that we speak of in the dramatic arts.

Yeah, we're educated. [LAUGHING]

-That was the problem, we always were. -Yeah.

We started out... We started into this business with BAs.

BAUERMEISTER: That's right.

♪ Now this is home

You couldn't just do it, you know?

Those were pretty primitive conditions.

Like, I mean, tape marks on a board. Like, kinda crazy.

But, uh, that's how it was done back then. We didn't know...

I think we all did interesting things in the studio

just because we were always pressed for time.

'Cause it was a time and a money thing.

Anything you've ever heard that we did,

is in its entirety, that's the performance.

It's not like we took this little piece...

In the time between recording our first record and Bivouac

we had, you know, gotten interested in a lot of new, different kind of music.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[DRUM ROLL PLAYING]

[IMITATING DRUM ROLL]

[BAUERMEISTER LAUGHING]

BAUERMEISTER: Parabola is our homage to Jesus Lizard.

You know, it's a Jesus Lizard song done by us.

You know, so it doesn't quite sound like Jesus Lizard

'cause we can't play exactly like them.

I'm definitely no David Sims on bass.

["PARABOLA" PLAYING]

NEWMAN: I think when you listen to the difference betweenUnfun andBivouac,

it's like you really, really are aware of a band trying to spread their wings.

♪ Some broken glass

-[BACKING INSTRUMENTALS STOP] -♪ And a bleeding hand

♪ The mirror's down

♪ But I'm still standing

♪ Stand Stand ♪

[ALL CHUCKLING]

Just for you. Just for you, buddy.

Blake's voice is what we call raspy. Throaty, scabrous.

He's kind of up there with Tony Bennett, to me, with his phrasing.

You know?

["PARABOLA" PLAYING]

SCHWARZENBACH: There was this ultra-brutality here

that was, you know, became part of our sound.

We had these pop songs and then we had these punishing fucking moments.

-You know? Which is why we're schizo, right? -BAUERMEISTER: Right.

It's weird, it's a weird record. It's certainly not a hardcore record.

It's also the first...

time that Blake, I think, really starting to settle into his, uh...

his, like, storytelling.

[MAN SPEAKING]

We collaborate on lyrics, mostly.

BAUERMEISTER: It was both of us writing.

Sleepis mine and New York Is Burning is mine.

They're the ones that are really blunt.

You know, they really lack a certain degree of the poetic ambiguity.

[MAN SPEAKING]

MAN: He is.

No, I'm not. I never...

What Blake did as a songwriter was to take intellectual

and emotional sophistication

and infuse it into music that was truly, like, gritty, gut-level punk.

It was great. Because everybody was so sick of being dumb.

It's just, it got old, being the dumb punk.

The whole of rock and roll, for the last 63 years,

is basically men singing about loving and losing women.

Any band that was humanizing women in a way that felt real,

that you could identify with, you just felt valued.

You didn't feel made small by their music.

♪ In this ocean I'm a bag of tea

♪ I make some clouds

♪ But they're minor league

♪ Hack at the base Of the largest tree ♪

As Blake got better on guitar, as Blake got better on vocals,

and as Blake got better as a songwriter,

you know, his compositions were more predetermined.

So the vocals and the guitar had the prominent spaces

and then, if you were lucky enough to fit in a fill here and there, or whatever.

[PFAHLER DRUMMING]

BAUERMEISTER: So, do we wanna do, um...

try to do parts of Bivouac?

Out there?

-SCHWARZENBACH: No. I don't know. -No?

Okay. Yeah.

I think you're right.

SCHWARZENBACH: Yeah, but you should get Billy to...

If we're not gonna play it, don't worry about it.

SCHWARZENBACH: Fine. Yeah, I don't know.

-I'm just a passive agent in this. -I know. Exactly.

If people ask me, "Why do you think your band is referenced,"

and why people still seem to care about it,

I would probably say that it has everything to do with the words.

With... Blake's words.

["CHESTERFIELD KING" PLAYING]

PFAHLER: It was another sort of leap of faith

where we gave up our apartment, put everything into storage,

and went off to Europe to go on tour.

No, no, you didn't put it in storage, we put it in my bedroom.

-Storage. -Storage.

That's one of the stupidest things we ever did.

Because we didn't have money, we toured to New York and then flew to Europe.

Which for a little band, is weird, right?

'Cause you're, like, already across the country and then you're going to Europe.

It makes me scared just thinking about it.

SCOTT BRADLEY: I didn't realize how silly they were, you know?

'Cause the band is so serious, and like kinda dark, and emo, or whatever.

and for it to all be, like, crazy inside jokes and stupid road games...

[IN SQUEAKY VOICE] Wow, man, that was some herb.

Come in here and lay down a bit.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

They thought we were ogres.

You know, they were like, "Don't talk to them, they're aggressive,

"they're cagey."

Every rest stop and gas station we stopped in, Adam would be like,

"All right, here's what we're gonna do.

"You go in and, like, try on the mirrored sunglasses or the BluBlockers

"and, like, put on the worst cap that you can find,

"walk around, drop down in the middle of the store and do 20 pushups."

Certain tours are a little bit bigger and they were better

that, you know, more people were kinda hearing about it.

SCHWARZENBACH: I remember having the experience of listening to our band

and there happened to be a lot of people there being into it, it was very... cool.

[LAUGHS] That's the only way I can put it, really.

Can you hear everything? Yeah, cut it.

I'm losing my voice so, sorry about that.

COLCORD: We got through the first couple of weeks of tour

and Blake sounded like he was gargling glass, you know?

It sounded really, really, gnarly.

[SINGING OFF-KEY]

SCHWARZENBACH: So, by the middle of the country I couldn't sing any more.

And we still had two months of Europe ahead of us.

[AUDIENCE CHEERING]

♪ Dreams die today Do you call this living Really? ♪

Because we didn't ever think, one time,

did we ever think, "Why don't we just cancel the tour?"

BAUERMEISTER: No.

COLCORD: When we played the first show in Belfast

he coughed up a clot,

a blood clot that was the size of my fist.

It was really, really bad.

Luckily, we called my roommate and asked if he could talk to,

see if he could find a doctor who could do the surgery.

SCHWARZENBACH: We were really up against it in a way.

It was like, you know, we quit our jobs and gave up our apartments

when we went on this tour,

so, you know, it was pretty intense to be over there

and, uh...

going under the knife.

But at the same time it was kinda like there's nothing left to lose.

♪ A little voice That's not quite your own

♪ Count backwards from ten

♪ Yellow jelly Shot hard in vein

♪ I want to talk to you again

When your main instrument is in jeopardy of never being able to sing again,

that's one of the scariest things. Oh, my God.

To think that he could be possibly losing his voice forever.

♪ Suddenly hear So clearly again ♪

COLCORD: There was at least a week he wasn't allowed to talk.

So we had to cancel the entire British leg of the tour,

which was a really big bummer.

Because we would have made money and people would have really been into it, so...

I don't think I really understood how crazy that was,

and how intense it was.

-[ANDERSON SPEAKING] -[BAUERMEISTER LAUGHS]

-ANDERSON: What's "New Song"? -BAUERMEISTER: It's New Song.

-ANDERSON: What is "New Song"? -BAUERMEISTER: "New Song" is Condition Oakland.

Okay. It was called New Songback then.

It says, "End fade by..."

In the early 1950s,

the nation recognized in its midst a social movement called the Beat Generation.

That's just the room tracks. That's everybody playing live in the same room.

That's so cool.

...the sense of coming night, that engine calling our mountains.

[ANDERSON SPEAKING]

[JAZZ PIANO PLAYING]

And Steve Allen, we should add.

'Cause, I mean, he's half the beat on that.

JACK KEROUAC: ...end of the land sadness, end of the world gladness.

All you San Franciscos will have to fall eventually...

EGAN: I thoughtBivouac was, I thought it was a really good record

but I still think Blake was... He hadn't really mastered the conciseness,

lyrically.

My first was in NYU.

We went down to Film Forum and saw this beatnik film festival

BAUERMEISTER: Oh, right, right. I remember that, yeah.

-And they showed Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy. - Pull My Daisy.Yeah.

And so, when I became a librarian,

we had the Jack Kerouac recordings in a lock case.

It hadn't been checked out in months.

So I spirited the Jack Kerouac recordings out from the library.

And I used to like to listen to the tapes in the morning when I cooked breakfast.

You know, have the kind of sweet spoken word going on in the house.

KEROUAC: Look at all those cars out there.

There's nothing out there but a million screaming

90-year-old men being run over by gasoline trucks.

So throw the match on it.

SCHWARZENBACH: The language, the cadence of the language

in the reading. I'd never heard their words before.

All of that. I had a complete epiphany that night and I came home,

uh, with my girlfriend, and I said, "I know what I'm gonna do now.

"I'm gonna write, and I'm gonna write like that."

[LAUGHS]

["THE BOAT DREAMS FROM THE HILL" PLAYING]

PFAHLER: It's time to record our next record, our third record,

and we decided to do it with Steve Albini.

And, uh, you know, we had admired his work,

Big Black, and Surfer Rosa, the Pixies record that he did.

I called him up and I was kinda starstruck, I was freaked out actually,

to talk to him. It was like,

he's the guy, you know?

ALBINI: I had a studio in my house.

Essentially, I would just answer the phone,

and whoever was on the other end of the phone would book time in the studio.

And we kinda had that inferiority complex of, like, we're this little punk band

and you're this monster, electronic-crushing super genius.

I'm fairly certain that I mistook them for the band Jawbox.

I know that I had this amp and this cabinet

at the time of that Jawbreaker session.

I was talking to Albini about guitar sounds, you know?

"This is like a big chorus, man. You know what I mean?

"I mean, it's gotta have, like, this big, descending melody."

As I recall...

-We're talking about Jawbreaker and not Jawbox, right? -INTERVIEWER: Correct.

As I recall, Jawbreaker had Marshalls.

So I wanted him to, like, break out the big guns, you know?

And he busted out this little, like, RadioShack amp.

He's like, "What if we do it like this?"

[STRUMMING GUITAR WITH AMPLIFIER FUZZ]

Uh, I'm sorry, I don't know any Jawbreaker songs.

♪ So right, so wrong Another winter... ♪

[ONLY GUITAR PLAYING]

-That's it, huh? -Yeah.

SCHWARZENBACH: And then it was quick. I mean, he works fast.

And we had, I don't know how many days, I think it was three days,

but it was, like, really quickly.

["THE BOAT DREAMS FROM THE HILL" PLAYING]

HOPPER: I do remember, like, exactly where I was sitting

in my high school, like, how the sun was,

like, everything, the first time I heard that album.

I think 24is just one perfectly written song after another.

CHEPLOWITZ: I would go to a show and they would perform a song

and I would, you know, go up to somebody and say,

"What's this new song?" And they would say, "Oh, that's Indictment."

Well, this is just getting ridiculous.

Every show they had a song of that caliber.

-[SCHWARZENBACH SPEAKING] -BAUERMEISTER: Yeah.

I felt like I have... I know who I'm in love with, I know I live here.

This is our town.

♪ Seems it never had a chance

-[BACKING INSTRUMENTALS STOP] -♪ I wanna be a boat

♪ I wanna learn to swim

BAUERMEISTER: Blake didn't like the way the vocals had come out.

And, um, yeah. 'Cause Albini doesn't... He's not vocal heavy.

I mean, he's more into the instruments.

Which is, of course, why I like the recordings.

You know, as a bass player, as a part of an ensemble,

of course I'm gonna say music should be recognized

as being a production of an ensemble,

as opposed to a single, you know, singer/songwriter.

ANDERSON: I do remember feeling at the time

like we weren't doing justice to the things you played on bass.

Like, you play a lot of notes,

and I remember being sort of flummoxed as to how to get that across.

A totally ferocious rhythm section,

like, you know, nothing I've ever seen.

JIMMY BROUSTIS: Shit, I think he's one of the best 12 drummers in the world.

Able to hear a song and he pretty much knows exactly

how it has to and should go right away.

BAUERMEISTER: When we first played, I remember the early shows,

like, was it you who said, "We all, each wanted to be the only person in the band"?

Here's the thing, when you first start your band,

-you're playing way the fuck over your heads. -BAUERMEISTER: Right.

You're like, "I'm gonna put every trick that I just learned...

"Quadruplet? Cool. That's a great place for 15 of those."

SCHWARZENBACH: When you're three people as neurotic as we are too,

seriously, none of us trusted that anyone would carry their slack.

So it's like, "I'm gonna be responsible for this whole song."

And then we were each kind of like...

[WHISPERING]

-[BAUERMEISTER LAUGHING] -Yeah. Everybody had their own little, like...

And they killed us for it, didn't they?

-They hated it. -[BAUERMEISTER LAUGHING]

BAUERMEISTER: Yeah, you used to say, "One, two, three, four."

ANDERSON: Those were great. That's the stuff.

♪ 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 ♪

This was the first thing that was in the paper about them.

This is from Spin Magazine.

Said they played "soft-edged hardcore with an East Coast sensibility."

[CHUCKLING] I always loved that.

♪ I'm coloring Outside your guidelines

♪ I was passing out When you were passing out Your rules ♪

CHRIS SHIFLETT: That was just the soundtrack to whatever year that was.

I mean, I listened to that record, I wore the cassette out,

and I wore the CD out, I just listened to that record all the time.

♪ Got a friend Her name is Boxcar ♪

PAM MOORE: That's when everything exploded for them.

I would look inFlipside Magazine and see,

"I'm looking for a bass player, band influences: Jawbreaker."

♪ I was passing out When you were passing out Your rules ♪

HOPPER: When people think about punk rock in the '90s,

generally they think Green Day is the band that changed everything.

But the band that really changed everything was Jawbreaker.

♪ You're on your own You're all alone

♪ You're on your own You're all alone

♪ You're on your own You're all alone

♪ You're on your own You're all alone ♪

I hear there's some new band called Nirvana just starting out

and, like, they're really big in Seattle.

I have a feeling they're gonna be huge.

They... Looks good.

["ASHTRAY MONUMENT" PLAYING]

PFAHLER: 1993 was a really... That's when we started making money.

You know, I mean, you could count on a show being pretty well attended,

we were getting more popular.

We get a call about going on tour with Nirvana.

CALI DEWITT: I was taking care of Kurt and Courtney's kid

and Jawbreaker was one of my favorite bands.

And they, being much older than me, whatever, like, five years older than me,

or he was,

would always check out my new records.

And Jawbreaker was one of the ones that stuck with him.

It was a no-brainer. In fact we were, "Of course."

♪ You'll be lucky If you're at ground zero ♪

BAUERMEISTER: Nirvana, Mudhoney and us.

It was like this. It was just like, "Wow, neato.

"Weird art on the side of that one, like airbrushed, you know?"

Boom. The piece of shit.

-The loading dock was taller than our van. -Yeah.

I remember trying to figure out how to put the...

PFAHLER: You could walk on top of a...

SCHWARZENBACH: We'd play like 25 minutes every night,

and I think we all agree we were playing everything triple time

'cause we were so stressed.

-And that started off a little bit of a backlash. -Right.

There were some people that were like, "Oh, man, I can see it.

"You know, the writing is on the wall.

"They go out with Nirvana and some A&R dick is gonna see 'em

"and be like, 'Oh, dude,'" you know.

And, you know, of course that's exactly what happened.

[BAUERMEISTER LAUGHING]

PFAHLER: I remember people being really disappointed

that we were going out on tour with Nirvana.

It's like, "Are you kidding?"

Like, we get to watch Nirvana from the side of the stage

every day for a week. Like, what did you do that week?

I mean, certain people stopped talking to us. Like, uh, Radley.

The punk underground, it was DIY and it was no major label.

And, uh, Nirvana was, of course, major label

and they were playing big stadiums and stuff.

It was a sign that they were going to sign to a major label

and they were gonna sell everybody out.

It hadn't occurred to me that that's corporate.

A sign of heresy, really.

Once they went there they weren't really welcome at Gilman Street.

SCHWARZENBACH: I was shocked that someone thought that we could be unmade

by doing that.

You know, by getting in bed with the devil, I guess.

We didn't think Nirvana was the devil.

BAUERMEISTER: Now that we were on the big stage,

I don't know what happened, but my string broke and I had to tune it up,

and after the show, it was like, "Don't ever do that to me again on stage!"

I was like, "What the hell?"

["ACCIDENT PRONE" PLAYING]

We had so much tension built up during the day,

just driving and putting up with bureaucratic shit.

-We really gotta load. -BAUERMEISTER: That's a good idea.

Now. Not make movies, load.

Jawbreaker seems to be in constant turmoil,

both, personally, the members themselves, as well as professionally.

EGAN: Really, if you look at it, they always look like

they're on the verge of kinda falling apart.

You know? They're always a disaster waiting to happen.

I don't wanna drive anymore, I don't wanna read anymore,

I don't wanna stop at any more McDonald's, or whatever, Denny's.

Their eccentricities were like, you know, sort of eating away at each other.

-No, I would put on Black Flag and you would say... -Lose my mind.

"I fucking hate Black Flag," is what I'd say.

-Okay, that does not make the picture. -No.

It's out.

In the studio with me, Jawbreaker.

I'm not even gonna begin to try to pronounce their last names,

because I can't.

Chris did not suffer foolish interview questions.

That used to put me on edge, I'd be like, "Chris, man, be easy on this guy."

Like, "It's okay, he loves your band."

-First names Blake, Chris and... -PFAHLER: Adam.

-Adam. -BAUERMEISTER: A, B, C, got a mnemonic...

I usually got that to point that after like, what, two, three weeks on tour,

I'd slowly descend into evil Chris.

Oh, well, when Chris or Adam would be like, "Oh, you know, no one wants to talk to us,

"because, you know, we're Blake's backing band."

BAUERMEISTER: They actually told me I was not allowed to talk to interviewers,

'cause I said stupid things and I'd talk about things,

and I didn't represent, you know...

I don't know if they wanted... You'd have to ask Blake what he meant by it.

Please, go ahead. Ask him what he was thinking. I have no idea.

I think at that point, Chris and Adam didn't wanna do press.

And we kinda just divided duties,

so that I would, like, speak.

JON LIU: Yeah, tensions were definitely apparent.

Just meltdowns

and rants

and tantrums

-and screaming.-BAUERMEISTER: Hey, old man, there's no fucking green light!

BAUERMEISTER: I think it was one of the reasons we, um...

made the move to try to get signed to a major.

We decided... I don't know if you've talked to Blake about that.

Maybe I should... You know what? At this point I think I should stop talking on film.

["WEST BAY INVITATIONAL" PLAYING]

HOPPER: A lot of people, when they look at punk rock in the '90s,

what we see is, you know, the sort of, like, nuclear moment of Green Day.

PFAHLER: It was the feeding, it was the post Green Day feeding frenzy.

Samiam was going through it,

Jawbox was going through it.

But the thing that everyone really wanted was Jawbreaker.

I found about Jawbreaker because they went on tour with Nirvana.

And I could act like I was, you know, at Gilman Street back in the day,

but I wasn't.

The only thing anyone was talking about was, "Is Jawbreaker gonna sign?"

Because, at the time, they were kind of...

the last thing that really felt like ours.

CHEPLOWITZ: I was at a show once,

and Blake said to the audience

that there rumors going around that they were signing with a major.

I heard this rumor just hit Chicago

so I'll take the opportunity to dispel it right now.

So, he says that, and from my perspective, I was like,

"I'm the only person here that has signed a major label contract."

So I was like... Talk about being the loneliest guy in the room at that point.

And he said that the rumors were not true

and that Jawbreaker would never sign with a major.

I guess it was printed in a couple of places that we'd signed to a major label,

and, uh, that's not true, actually.

I was going, "Dude, don't say that." Don't say, like...

Because you never know.

I think it was about four weeks later that they signed with a major.

We changed our mind, that's what people do. That's what we did.

We changed our mind.

HOST: So you guys are on Geffen now, right?

-SCHWARZENBACH: Well, we're not yet. -HOST: Oh.

-SCHWARZENBACH: But probably within a matter of days. -HOST: Okay.

Uh, any chance you can talk about the contract?

SCHWARZENBACH: Well, we're getting a shitload of money.

HOST: Okay.

SCHWARZENBACH: And... I mean, I'll just be upfront about that.

Because, you know, there's no way to play it off.

HOST: How much is a shitload?

-SCHWARZENBACH: Um, I don't... That I don't...-HOST: Okay.

SCHWARZENBACH: It's hard to say that, 'cause it wouldn't make sense.

HOST: Okay.

-SCHWARZENBACH: But it's enough to make a record. -HOST: Okay.

SCHWARZENBACH: Pretty lavishly.

Was it in retrospect we decided we were, like,

either we're gonna do this or we're gonna break up?

That was really... That's what we said.

-Yeah. I mean, yeah. Exactly. -That's exactly what we said.

SCHWARZENBACH: As I recall, I mean, the decision seemed very kamikaze. It was like...

maybe we won't go on as a band, or we're gonna do something really different and...

like, sign to a major label.

Not long afterwards, Jeff Saltzman called me up and said,

"We're managing Jawbreaker and they wanna talk to labels."

And I'm like, "Can I get on a plane today?"

["SAVE YOUR GENERATION" PLAYING]

From then on it was pretty much... Things started happening really quickly.

And then it was, like, months of, you know, the process of signing.

All of that sort of... That whole courtship thing is pretty vivid in my mind.

They'd say shit to us like, "Guys, you gotta sign with us. We love your band."

It was like, the opening paragraph was the same at every single place.

"We really love what you're doing." Blah, blah, blah.

"We would make you our number one priority."

If you were to turn to them and say, "What's your favorite song?"

-They'd be like, "The one. You know, that..." -Yeah. That one.

"That one you guys do."

I remember one guy said, "Listen, you guys, I'm a fucking maniac and I hate to lose."

We weren't really that open to, like, losing things.

We weren't open to losing bands to other labels.

PFAHLER: So we're just kinda laying there, just like,

oh, man, what the fuck? Are we really gonna do this? Like, are we really doing this?

I mean, the thing wrote itself. You know what I mean?

It was like, "We know how this is gonna end."

Because it happens to everybody.

It's like, you start out with this little tiny... Rags to riches to rags.

It's gonna happen to us. It's probably gonna happen.

Dear Youtakes three months to record...

That's just the recording. I think it actually ended up being, like, ten weeks.

Using the Green Day formula, which had been proven,

we got Rob Cavallo.

KATES: I didn't know Rob Cavallo at the time, so this is funny, but

I'm like, "Wow, he's gonna produce them? Like, what's up with that?"

Yeah, well, Rob Cavallo is...

uh, one of the most esteemed record producers in the history of rock music,

you can easily say at this point.

["SAVE YOUR GENERATION" PLAYING]

Guitars are great.

There's only three. There's only three guitars.

[BOTH LAUGHING]

In hindsight, I think it's the album I tried to forget the most.

And it's the album I was probably, in a lot ways, least involved in.

It seemed like five days or something that those guys did pretty much all their stuff.

And then there was another month of, like, guitars, vocals,

uh, so I was in there a long time.

You know, at the time, I resented the fact

that, you know, he had written the bass line, more or less.

You know, I felt that he'd written the bass line.

I think I had some leeway, but, um...

PFAHLER: Obviously the arrangements and the tempos, and, you know, we...

Things change. It wasn't like we didn't have our say or something like

he was lording it over us.

-Yeah, but I mean-- -It was just different, you know?

-It was like pouring out. You know what I mean? -Right. Exactly.

I remember they played me one song and I can't remember what song it was,

but it sounded like an ocean of guitars.

The guitars on this song are like...

I think they're actually some of the best I ever did.

And I was like, "Oh, my God, this sounds so good."

♪ A near miss Or a close call?

♪ I keep a room At the hospital

♪ I scratch my accidents Into the wall ♪

What I remember most is driving down the main turnpike back to Boston,

blasting that record as loud as the stereo could go,

and it honestly wasn't loud enough for me.

PFAHLER: I thought we had a beat.

I really did. I really thought, I was so confident.

When we were done with that record,

I was so confident that we made a good record.

When we put it out, we thought it's just gonna be like a clutch of robins

flying out into the world, you know? Like, "Here."

And everyone's kinda like, "Whoa,

"this is really clean."

Or, I remember them saying, like, "The vocals are so rich.

"This is... something new for you."

Like, they were a little freaked out.

I don't know if it was the album, the production, the songwriting,

I don't know what it was.

Something went wrong.

I hated everything it represented, I hated the way it sounded,

I hated the lyrics, I hated...

I didn't like anything about it.

I remember thinking...

"Well, if you want Green Day part two,

"maybe this is your idea of how to...

"how to turn that into that."

["FIREMAN" PLAYING]

♪ Dreamed I was a fireman

♪ I just smoked And watched you burn

♪ Dreamed I was an astronaut

♪ I shot you down

BAUERMEISTER: God, we tried.

What, we had the same agent as Green Day,

we had the same video producer as Green Day,

we had the same, you know, audio producer as Green Day.

We tried... Whatever.

I think it was a stupid move, but...

HIRSCH: This guy played me the new Jawbreaker record

and I said, "What's that?" And he goes...

He goes, "It's Jawbreaker." I'm like, "What happened?"

It sucks, man. When you do your band... You got to take a picture of your band.

We ended up using, you know, us hanging out on Blake's couch.

Like, I can see that. We probably had hung out on Blake's couch before.

But, you know, did we ever stand up on top on an abandoned bus?

You know, at sunset, looking tough?

Probably didn't happen.

And yet there we are, doing just that.

JEFF SALTZMAN: The band had a great video, a great single at radio...

some huge tours...

and it didn't sell that well.

Some of us have never really recovered from the disappointment of that.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

Well, you know, um...

Lou Reed's Transformer didn't sell very well...

either.

PFAHLER: No one bought it.

Huge backlash in the punk rock world.

I have a really great flyer here that's like, how Jawbreaker is like Walmart.

"Just how much does Jawbreaker really care?"

You can go to the hardware store on your block or you can go to Home Depot.

COLCORD: "Currently in the punk scene, trust is being attacked

"and destroyed by the actions of bands like Jawbreaker."

So people would be... Go through like a vogue,

where you'd be really popular for a while and suddenly you would be a pariah

and you had done something bad.

It was like the equivalent of the Bob Dylan thing when he went electric.

You know, it was like our generation's version of that.

COLCORD: "But so what, 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?

KATES: At the Roxy, kids showed up

and literally, like, sat with their backs to the stage

when songs fromDear You were performed.

People who had paid.

"In short, they sold our trust out."

You don't own me.

There's no rings on these fingers.

For kids to have their backs to the stage at a show that they bought tickets to...

I mean, that's a pretty intense thing.

The crowds were just sort of...

had paid the price of admission in order to express their disappointment

with the band.

BROUSTIS: All these people who had loved them

and dedicated practically their life to them

were like, "They're the worst thing in the world."

It's like, "Wait a minute, they're the same people, you know?"

You trusted these guys, listened to their music for ages, like,

why don't you listen to what they're saying, you know?

["FRIENDLY FIRE" PLAYING]

There is this whole degree of who paid off who

and who's getting radio airplay and, you know,

which company has decided to promote which person's band.

Plus all of this, you know, bullshit that you have to go through,

that I had no idea until I did it,

where, you know, Live 105 will play Jawbreaker's record

if, you know, Green Day will give us, you know,

some single five seconds before somebody else.

I mean, we were pursuing it, we were trying to make the big time.

You know, and we did.

They were like heroes, I think, at the record company

until, like, three days after it came out.

It hadn't sold a million copies and then they were just, like, ghosts.

They put a couple... They gave a couple of singles to radio

and it didn't work, so they just basically gave up on it.

Dear You and the subsequent tour was probably the...

the last stage in me becoming really disengaged.

You know, I don't know what kind of... What was the reaction to.

-We were losing Chris. -Yeah.

I was, you know, I was doing other things.

I was realizing, you know, I didn't wanna do this forever.

There was a really notorious night in Providence where we flew Lewis Largent in,

because we thought maybe if he saw the band play

we would do better at MTV.

It was, like, a disaster

in every way imaginable. It was not a good show.

Okay, hi. Thanks a lot for waiting and enduring the heat

and everything. We're Jawbreaker.

Last night was definitely the worst show of our career, ever.

I remember when they played those shows on the Jawbox tour

and it was just... It was uncomfortable.

There was kind of this weird unspoken feeling

that it was all kind of wrapping up.

["JET BLACK" PLAYING]

PFAHLER: I think we were tired. Tired of, you know, just the grind.

I don't know, kinda like...

we were getting to our wits' end, I think.

-PFAHLER: That's all it is. -BAUERMEISTER: It's all right.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

The descending, you were talking about the descending...

Yeah, I'm not doing that one.

Let's just cut that.

INTERVIEWER: Yes. Okay.

[STRUMMING]

Like, I don't even know what it is.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

Um... No.

Hmm.

[BOTH CHUCKLING]

You can say no. I'm just asking.

No, I don't actually. I don't.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

-Was there any stuff... -I'll tell you, you know,

I'll tell you why this is hard for me.

Let me tell you, honestly.

This is what Newton did to the rainbow,

and the Romantics talk about this.

That Newton tried to isolate the colors of the rainbow

and name the colors,

thereby... crucifying the mystery.

See what I'm saying?

Separating out the colors of the rainbow.

And I think Jawbreaker is actually this kind of aggregate of energy.

And when you pull away the parts they become less interesting.

I think at that point, quite honestly, Blake had kind of moved on.

Like, I think he...

realized that he wanted to grow as a singer and a songwriter,

and as an artist, outside of the confines of the band.

I think that would give me pause.

Like, that's sad to me.

You know? Because you have to be...

always, like, moving to the new.

HOST: Since the band formed has it been pretty smooth?

SCHWARZENBACH: No, it's been war, all the time.

HOST: In, like, what sense? Any stories?

SCHWARZENBACH: Well, yeah. I mean, there's a lot. I don't know.

We would, like, fight like crazy and...

and then, uh, we had some pretty brutal tours.

SCHWARZENBACH: So I guess you want me to tell the story

of the end of the band in front of the cemetery?

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

Well, in my... defense,

I would say, I was really drunk.

[CHUCKLES] And I know that's a poor defense.

BAUERMEISTER: It was the Foo Fighters tour, uh, '96.

Spring of '96.

It started off pretty good.

And then, I don't know, something went wrong.

BRADLEY: Blake was being a kind of a jerk.

I remember he was never a big fan of Chris's driving.

And Chris was driving the van.

And then Blake spit gum in my hair.

I was kind of like, "Oh, no." [CHUCKLING]

I was like, "You know what, I've had it.

"I'm sick and tired of being a servant to your primadonna, you know, ego."

I'm told that I screamed, "You've been ruining my life since I met you."

[CHUCKLING]

And I don't remember that, but I do remember the sentiment.

And I threw the car into park, and I went for him.

Chris pulled over and just kinda jumped at Blake.

You know, went full on, just like... You know, like, with choke hands.

We tumbled out of the van to go fight. To, like, have it out.

Anthony was, like, pulling Blake and Chris back into the van.

And they were both kind of swinging wildly and, like, you know, hitting me instead.

It's kinda like the dam just broke.

PFAHLER: Anthony called me and told me that they had this big blowout.

And I was like, "Is that it? Like, should we even play the rest of these shows?

"Did we break up? Is it over?" You know?

SCHWARZENBACH: I remember walking from my house on 22nd

in San Jose, and we were having a meeting.

I said, "I can't. Just can't do this anymore."

And, uh...

it was almost like...

a Quaker wedding, where you just sit there

and there was like a lot of weight in the room.

And I was kinda like, "Are you sure?"

Like, do we owe it to ourselves to, like, maybe take a break,

and, like, kinda owe it to ourselves to do this band?

I remember Blake saying, "Dude, I think we owe it to ourselves

"to stop this band right now, before it gets any worse."

'Cause, yeah, we weren't friends by the end.

We weren't... I mean, we hung out sometimes, but, you know, it wasn't...

It was mostly for music.

And so, it was... you know, it was a really honest moment.

But also it was... painful.

COLCORD: So, at the end, those kind of personalities,

that became the excuse, you know?

It's like, "We can't get along, You know, everybody wants to do something different."

And all of those things that had just been kind of novelties and quirks,

you know, the whole way through, like, became the reason

to not go on.

KATES: They had their own principles,

they had their own way of doing things.

And probably the ultimate demise of the band

was that they couldn't... They weren't happy.

And they couldn't do it, as most bands do,

for many, many, many, many years

after they decide they don't like each other.

I miss them as a band. I miss the energy, that crowd energy

where they had everyone convinced that

they could actually do it themselves.

Yeah, so, I, whenever I get anxious I make a sticker.

Because...

I don't have any other way to express myself right now.

Well, this is my new one. It's real small, though.

"I miss the truth."

I'll just do it spontaneously in the early morning or in the middle of the night.

You know, if something needs to be said.

And then I take 'em out on the subway

and, um, kinda put 'em up and track their progress.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

Uh... "Fuck you."

[DRUMMING]

PFAHLER: Play with both hands.

This is how my kids know about Jawbreaker.

I'm not... I don't force feed them my band.

But this is... Um, this is what this one, what Mimi used to sleep with

when she was a little baby.

And she loved it because of this silky stuff here.

But it's basically made out of tour T-shirts and...

PFAHLER: I basically, like, slept it off.

I just kind of like hibernated.

Hibernated for, like, probably, like, two solid months

before I kinda climbed out and was like,

"Okay, let's start this next chapter of my life."

The question is, uh, "What do I know about Jawbreaker?"

And I hadn't heard of them until Adam started working here at the video store.

Not a fan. Apparently not a fan. So maybe we should take the microphone off.

So Christy, Dave Hawkins and I got together and were like...

"Uh, how about a video store? Maybe we could do a video store?"

Is this okay? Here, that's good.

Jawbreaker, not a fan, right?

Well, now I am. Because I have to be.

[CHUCKLES] Otherwise I'll get fired.

-[BAUERMEISTER SPEAKING] -[ANDERSON SPEAKING]

Olympia, Washington. I've been married...

We met at Blake's, a Thanksgiving party

at Blake's, 14 years ago this November.

And, uh, I'm a homemaker.

I take care of a 16-year-old cat and try to keep the house clean

and I cook and do the shopping.

Good man. Good man.

BAUERMEISTER: I think part of the reason I started getting pissed off

was I came to the realization that I had peaked.

And just watching, you know, you take off as an artist,

was, in some ways, I think it inspired envy

and... some degree of malice,

and I think that's what sort of fucked up our relationship.

Sorry, I don't mean to bum you out.

No, no. I mean, I don't have any...

-See, that's what I'm saying. -I don't have any bitter animosity, really.

Exactly. See, that's what... [STAMMERING]

I realized that when I actually talked to you.

Yeah. I just want to apologize.

Yeah, well, we did the job.

[CHUCKLES] We did the band.

[CHUCKLING]

That's true.

♪ I have a present

♪ It is the present

♪ You have to To learn to Find it within you ♪

DEWITT: And then the next time I heard anyone

talking aboutDear You, it was this lost classic.

It wasn't long after they broke up that people were, like,

trying to get copies for, like, you know, $100 or whatever.

It's like everybody wanted to buy the album on eBay after it was gone, you know?

♪ Flattered that you

♪ Think I warrant ugliness

CAVALLO: It was just a record that was a little bit ahead of its time.

It probably would have fit better in '98 or 2000.

It was like five years ahead.

PFAHLER: I went through a long process of hunting down the masters

and trying to get through to people. It took me years to get that record back,

but I finally got the record back.

So now it's back in print and back on vinyl and stuff.

People wanted... People wanted to hear it.

♪ You have to learn To learn from your mistakes ♪

It was my second tattoo. This moment in time needs to be documented

and this band saved my life.

SHIFLETT: People look at it and go, "What does that say? 'A-che'?"

No, it's a fucking Jawbreaker song, man.

KATES: We are now, whatever, 16 years on?

Of all the records I've worked on in my life,

it's the one I listen to the most.

I've come to really like the record. I think it's a good record.

It's a great record. [CHUCKLES] You know, what can you say?

♪ If you could save yourself

♪ You could save us all

The way the three instruments interacted, it had a very unique sound to it.

That uniqueness is part of why they're still remembered so fondly today.

I mean, there are still so many Jawbreaker fans

that can paraphrase every single Jawbreaker lyric.

♪ Never goes out of style

ANDERSON: One of those sessions, really.

I mean, it was what it was, man.

Like, it was a good time, we're all the same age, roughly,

more or less. It was a good time for being 23, 24, 25 years old.

Pretty legendary music, you know? I think.

I mean, I hear a lot of bands now that are influenced by Jawbreaker.

There's, like, hundreds of bands that obviously grew up listening to you guys.

But who was thinking about that?

-PFAHLER: See what we have and see if you fit in there. -BAUERMEISTER: Sure. Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: So, like, do you guys still get upset?

PFAHLER: We kinda grew up musically together.

- So, and it's all documented. -BAUERMEISTER: Yup.

Those like are our, literally, our family albums.

Right.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING]

[LAUGHING]

-Right here, right now. -PFAHLER: Yeah.

["CONDITION OAKLAND" PLAYING]

♪ I rode down to the tracks

♪ Thinking they might Sing to me

♪ But they just stared back

♪ Broken, trainless And black as night

♪ Climbed out onto my roof

♪ So I'd be a poet In the night

♪ Beat the walls off my room

♪ I saw the big room That is this life

♪ 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? ♪

SCHWARZENBACH: Not being in a band makes me believe in bands.

And so I miss that. A lot.

PFAHLER: The narrative should end with that and not the...

The rags to riches to rags,

"punk band sells out, shame on you," you know?

Okay?

["BOXCAR" PLAYING]

♪ You're not punk I'm telling everyone

♪ Save your breath I never was one

♪ You don't know What I'm all about

♪ Killing cops And reading Kerouac

♪ 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

♪ One, two, three, four Who's punk? What's the score? ♪

♪ 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 the ice plant ♪

♪ It gets loneliest at night

♪ Down by the liquor store

♪ Beneath the neon sky

♪ Our moonlight

♪ 6:00 a.m. The floor comes alive with lice

♪ The pan's dried up so tight

♪ With hardened beans We're hungry ♪

♪ A near miss Or a close call?

♪ I keep a room At the hospital

♪ I scratch my accidents Into the wall

♪ I couldn't wait To breathe your breath

♪ I cut in line I bled to death

♪ I got to you There was nothing left

♪ I got to you There was nothing left

♪ I got to you There was nothing left ♪

JULIEN BAKER: Thank you.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]

♪ I wanna be a boat

♪ I wanna learn to swim

♪ Then I'll learn to float

♪ Then begin again

♪ I wanna be a boat

♪ I wanna learn to swim

♪ Then I'll learn to float

♪ Then begin again

♪ Begin again

♪ Boat remembers the carpenter's sure hand

♪ Missing fishy flutter On its rudder

♪ Sold at an auction On a dolly ever since

♪ Sometimes rainy days Drop boyish wonder

♪ He keeps patching it And painting

♪ Thinking about His pension plan

♪ But the boat Is out to pasture

♪ Seems it never had a chance

♪ I wanna be a boat

♪ I wanna learn to swim

♪ Then I'll learn to float

♪ Then begin again

♪ I wanna be a boat

♪ I wanna learn to swim

♪ I wanna learn to swim

♪ Then begin again

♪ Begin again