JAWBOX

So coming from such an angle, Jawbox were always gonna be a cool band to interview. Friendly and with an enthusiasm for their music and ideals like never before seen, all our meagre expectations were totally blown away in the conversation that ensued, with eleven pages of sheer heaven slipping out of the typewriter later on.

So, for putting a ten thousand volt shock up the spine of hardcore when Jawbox left Dischord recently for Mr. Big Bastard Major Label, Atlantic Records, we could at least do with an explanation!

Bill: "Dischord, as a label, doesn't really run itself so much like a record label. It never really had that as its purpose, to spend a lot of time and money on promotion and stuff like that, and we found that as a band, we needed those kinds of things to continue functioning. And we kind of hit a threshold where we weren't reaching any more people. We were happy with the people we were reaching, but we were like, where do we go from here? It's really difficult when you feel like you've hit a threshold. You just continue doing the same thing and you don't move on at all. And at the same time a number of changes took place in Atlantic whereby a guy that we knew very well from the Boston hardcore scene for years had become an A&R guy, and really expressed an interest in working with us. And they came up with an exceptionally good deal for us which involves a maximum of pay and control while providing all the support that a major label could support, as in very good distribution, very good promotion and publicity and a recording advance that would allow us to make the record that we wanted to. In Dischord we had to make our records in seven to ten days on two thousand dollars, which is fine but we also found ourselves compromising because we wanted to spend more time doing certain things that we just couldn't do because we ran out of money and time. And this record deal with Atlantic, it had the ability to make the record that we wanted to, the way that we wanted to and still give us freedom to be the band that we wanted to be and to run ourselves the way that we wanted to be.

So bearing in mind the extra ca$h and studio time spent recording 'For Your Own Special Sweetheart', how do you feel the music's progressed from what you were doing before?

"We feel that it's the best record we've made. We spent longer writing the songs for this record, more time reading them out and then finding them before we recorded them. We also spent ten times as long recording it. We spent six weeks working on this record. I think we are functioning together as a unit better now than we ever have before. We've had a drummer change since the last record. Zach is now playing drums with us whereas Adam was with us before.

"And the way that we write songs has really changed to something that we're much more comfortable with now. We're much more jam oriented. We tend to just kind of let things come together on their own accord rather than trying to bring a song to practise and have everyone learn it, which is what we tended to do before; and it's ended up with a much more satisfying songwriting process for all of us. And it also I think shows up in the music because we're all doing things that we're happy with and that we built ourselves as opposed to learning J's song or my song or Kim's song or Zach's song. If anyone ever brings a song completed into practise or mostly completed it's usually J. But the song 'Cruel Swing' for instance, I started with the guitar part for that. It was a completely different song. J and I worked on it and it was something different from that. And we took it into practise and Zach wrote a drum bit and put it in the vibe and we ended up with a completely different song from what I'd ever imagined it to be. 'FF=66' started out with a drum beat that we just jammed to and came up with the rest of the song from there. 'Savoury' on the other hand was almost entirely constructed by J before we even set about playing it. But what we ended up with was something that had all of our individual fingerprints all over it."

With an album they're obviously elated about, their first ever European tour well underway and a recording deal that sounds just great, Jawbox seem to be on a massive high at the moment. One thing though remains close to their collective heart, that they still enthusiastically advocate independence which, coming from their current major label stance, still doesn't quite click at first.

Zach: "It's a really weird position to be in because we decided to go to this major and we're still trying to operate on as independent a level as we can. Independent in terms of saying, "No, we don't wanna be managed by somebody; we wanna manage ourselves." Or, "No, we don't want to tour with the Stone Temple Pilots, we want to go out on tour and bring Candy Machine with us because we think they're a great band", and "We wanna work with a booking agent that we're friends with." So it's pretty weird. It's kind of like we're trying to have our cake and eat it too.

"To me, it's an interesting thing. I'm in a really weird position because I definately want to advocate independence, and the band's doing what they do within this sort of network of independent thought, right? But at the same time it's been very frustrating because, regardless of all the hype, the only way

"for a band to work and to be able to sustain themselves from doing their music is to just tour constantly because that is something you have control of. Live on tour you'll happen to eventually play for somebody who if they like it then somebody else will hear it and that's the only thing you can count on. It's like, starting the ball rolling. It's just weird, because I've noticed that for us, having toured the United States eight times, now we've signed to Atlantic, on this last tour that we just did the attendances at the shows were just great. We sold out a bunch of shows and they were much bigger shows and they went really awesome. And I wonder whether it's because we toured seven times before or whether Atlantic was behind it."

Do you think it's become an access thing? Like, now the big chains will stock you, whereas before, if you put out a vinyl seven inch on Dischord, it's harder to get. If we wanna buy underground American records, stuff like K label singles, it's really difficult to find them. It's like, pay lots of money to get hold of them, you know?

J: "But that's always been the way that the independent scene's worked. In a way, one of the things I always thought was sort of cool and peculiar about the independent music scene is that you had to dig a little bit to find the bands. And then when you find a band, like I remember I got Racer-X EP by Big Black and loved it, I just like, fucking loved it to death, and in the Racer-X EP, Steve Albini listed all his friends' bands and he was like, 'If you like this record, you'll like these bands too...', and in the list was Naked Raygun, Effigies, Savage Beliefs, all these mid-Western punk bands, and through that list I discovered all these bands that... I mean, I had to dig for them. I had to look for Effigies records everywhere 'till I found them. But then I was like: The Effigies! I love The Effigies! The Effigies are My Band!! And I took it very personally. And in a way I think that's kind of cool, because that's a sort of investment of time and effort to get into something that you're going to take very personally, instead of just turning on the radio and then you hear it and just go out and buy it.

Zach: "I think Beat Happening in America is a really great test case because if it was just a matter of people hearing a great song and then thinking, "Oh My God! 'Red Head Walking'! Who does that song? Oh Man! That's Great! I'm gonna go buy their record!" And then suddenly this groundswell of opinion happens where everybody likes Beat Happening, then Beat Happening would be huge. Beat Happening is really successful on college radio at this indie rock level in America, which is probably all they want. Like Fugazi too. They're probably already bigger than they want to be.

"You know, I think it must have screwed up somewhere between here and there. I think for most indie bands, commercial success at this massive level, like Nirvana, or even Sonic Youth, is something that most of the bands that I know react to with a degree of suspicion, and are a little bit worried and a little non-plussed about it. To me, it's like striking a balance. But the point is, you play because you love making music and it's something you know you have to do, and then you go out and do it. And then the most fun is when people respond to it and it's on a level where you can feel that response, and there's an energy, and it doesn't sort of go running away from you like a runaway train. But I don't know if it would be the best thing in the world if Beat Happening were on everybody's turntables everywhere and your grandmother was humming Red Head Walking. Maybe it would be, maybe it wouldn't be! I don't know!"

Bill: "It's kinda like the flipside to the argument that punk rock and the underground is more special when it stays underground. But of course, there's a double edge to it too, because when finally everyone has access to your records, then you run the risk of becoming huge, and bands like us and Superchunk, Fugazi or anybody find themselves losing control of their audience and their size and everything. It's so frustrating because Fugazi want to charge five dollars to get into a show but they have to play the Hollywood Paladium, and the overhead there is immense, so they have to lose money to play shows. It's really a bizarre situation to want people to like you and have access to your music but not to get it out of control. It's a fucking tightrope walk."

So the influx of underground bands onto major labels isn't necessarily a bad thing?
"The so called underground in the states has changed so radically in the past couple of years that now there are a million kids who... It's not really their fault that they havn't discovered hardcore music, they've just never been exposed to it. And now they just have the opportunity of knowing that we exist, that they can buy the records, and the record companies knew that. That's why they started signing bands like Nirvana and us and The Melvins and Surgery and all these, Drive Like Jehu and Rocket From The Crypt, they knew that kids were gonna go for this stuff. I don't ascribe to them any other motive purely than wanting to sell records; they have no vested interests in punk rock. You know: "We all really wanna help punk rock out". They don't wanna do that. They wanna sell some records and make money. And we do that."

So Jawbox leave us to head out into the mainstream world of shite music with the Dischord code of independence under their arm, out to capture the unconverted and suck them into the underground. A job that needs doing. Good luck to 'em!