5 Records with Jawbreaker’s Blake Schwarzenbach

Jawbreaker’s third full-length, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy paints sharply insightful portraits of love, loss, and languor in the margins of a run-down but creatively fruitful Oakland and San Francisco of the early ’90s, from the house party of “West Bay Invitational” to the night-time train tracks and Keruoac of “Condition Oakland.” On the one-two punch of songs “Indictment” (originally “Scathing Indictment of the Pop Industry”) and “Boxcar” — with its chorus of “1-2-3-4, Who’s punk? What’s the score?” — Jawbreaker turn their literate, self-aware version of pop-punk on the punk scene’s own precarity and hypocrisy on the edges of “selling out.” These were punk songs with pop hooks, but they were also raw emotional tunes that set one important early template for the wave of emo to come in the later ‘90s and ‘00s.

On the 30th anniversary of Jawbreaker’s album 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, we sat down to talk about the records that were on heavy rotation during the making of the album and in 1994.

“In the neighborhood we were in, the Mission, Epicenter was the punk rock shop. That was right around the corner from our house, so that was a go-to. Amoeba, of course, which was in the East Bay at that point, and Telegraph had some really good places for used records. And then just at shows, at Gilman or wherever, there were always people selling records – bands that were playing, but also just tables with local product.”

“I have a lot of records now that I’ve had for most of the last 30 years, a couple thousand LPs probably.”

“Sonically and structurally, we were really into Superchunk. No Pocky for Kitty is just a great sing-along record, just anthemic as hell.”

“Another really important one from that era was Seam, The Problem with Me. Seam was Sooyoung Park from Bitch Magnet, who were a favorite. I mean, they were why we signed to Communion/Tupelo [for Bivouac and 24 Hour]. Gary from that label had put out the Bitch Magnet records, and we loved that sort of loud/soft/loud stuff. So, this was his later band, and it was just very melodic, very Chicago post-rock kind of noodling, meandering guitars, and depressed lyrics. A good bummer album to mope along to. 

“The sound of the guitars, if you listen to it now, seems to really anticipate a lot of the Chicago rock after it–the clean guitars doing interesting stuff. You could get to American Football from there pretty easily–it’s edgier, but still that kind of beautiful guitar, and everything is pretty.”

“And then just always in the background for us as a band, were both Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. They were just like part of the civilization that we kind of cherished having come from New York and seeing those bands live. The first time I saw Sonic Youth was in downtown L.A., probably in the Evol era, or even before that, Bad Moon Rising? That album, they played outdoors, and it was a really cathartic experience for me, because I hated them while I was watching them. I was so livid. I was like very punk rock, ‘If it’s not Black Flag, it sucks, these guys are posers, they’re totally pretentious.’”

“And as soon as they finished, I felt like I was on hallucinogens. I went walking around downtown LA, alone, just like tripping off the music. And it just caught me. I ended up going back to them and then I fell in love with that band. It’s like they dosed me. You know, I didn’t understand how rad what they were doing was, it just infuriated me, and then I absorbed it. I was made a lifelong fan. So, those cinematic passages that they have, I mean I think you can hear in some parts of Jawbreaker, we would sometimes try to have a languid Sonic Youth part, we’d be like, ‘we just need one good breakdown.’”