Winamp Wednesday is our continuing celebration of all the songs I loaded into that music player in the wild-west days of the MP3. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today’s track…
Jawbreaker, “Save Your Generation (Live)”
I was originally going to call this website “Dear You”, but I wanted something more inscrutable that Pitchfork would give higher than a 2.3.
If there’s one thing Winamp Wednesday should make clear it’s that we here in the Labyrinth don’t have a lot of cool music opinions, but maybe the most heretical one held here is that it’s boring to complain that a band’s new record sounds “too clean”. We’ll talk about this in September when we hit the twenty-fifth anniversary of Guided by Voices finding out you can sing into the mic, because Do the Collapse is a much better record than it was given credit for at release. We were all listening to Pitchfork a little bit in 1999 because having in-depth and scathing criticism in a year where pop went the world felt like a bit of a miracle, but even back then I felt confused as to why being able to hear the music on a record was such a bad thing. I loved some lo-fi recordings but I couldn’t fathom how “finally having enough money to properly mic your bass” was an automatic selling-out bingo. But that’s how it was for a lot of indie bands in that climate.
And if it was one part of the story for a band like GBV, it was the whole damn novel for Jawbreaker. For a long time all I knew about Jawbreaker was that “Boxcar” was their magnum opus (yeah, absolutely), that the band had broken up during a fist fight between members (normal rock shit), and that fans of the band had openly wept listening to Dear You, considering the clean production a betrayal by the band (holy parasocial, Batman). Look, is Dear You is not as good as 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. Most albums aren’t as good as 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. But I’ve heard tell that when Jawbreaker went on tour for Dear You and played the new stuff that fans would sit down on the dance floor in protest until the songs were over. Hey, you know what that reminds me of?
There are lot of albums I love that nobody else likes: Devo’s Shout, XTC’s Apple Venus (both one and two), Spin Doctors’ Turn It Upside Down, even that Speech solo project that’s just another Arrested Development album. Few records are fully devoid of good tracks, and most songs that are even halfway decent will come alive if the band believes in them. Which is to say that I’m a bit of a hypocrite here, because I came to “Save Your Generation” not through the original album version but through the live cut. This one was foisted upon me by well-meaning music guru friends who were nudging me away from my worst purchases; at fourteen I used actual money to purchase Don Henley’s Actual Miles, so lord knows I needed some kind of guidance. “It’s the guy from Jets to Brazil, his old band” I was told, and that’s all I needed.
I’m a sucker for a good starter lyric and for homophones and for oroboros in statement. “I have a present: it is the present. You have to learn to find it within you” hits the trifecta, and when you’re a kid and you’re looking for some mission statement for who you’re supposed to be something this galvanizing is undeniable. Last time we talked about the search for a message at the end of the 90s, and Live 4/30/96 showed up in November ’99 to bring that message in like a fist to the face. “If you could save yourself you could save us all” lasted into the Millennium and past post-9/11 and into my college days. Something universal became something personal became something universal because we all had to save ourselves. Jawbreaker hadn’t made it out of 1996 but they felt desperately of the moment.
And as much as the album version works it has nothing on this live cut. This performance is leaner and frantic with a guitar you can feel in your teeth. The message feels more real when there’s occasional spikes and pops in the treble, when each cymbal hit feels like it’s going to wreck the board. Everything feels raw like it should. I try to imagine fans sitting down through this and I just can’t. They wanted Jawbreaker to sound this raw and they were right. A great song is better when it sounds like it’s about to rattle apart right there on stage.
Maybe I was wrong about my too-clean opinions. Especially when I live in a world where Fall Out Boy’s cover exists.
The track ends with a weird bit of stage banter, a confirmation that a lot of punk musicians are truly awkward in a wonderful way. There’s not much of an audience response, which on first listen I thought was a trick of the mic and mixing. Now I only think of sitting fans. Maybe I’m exactly the target audience, but “Save Your Generation” makes me want to move and change and create like none other. Hi-fi or lo-fi, live or in studio, the song is always the thing. It’s a leap of faith to love any song and then find out what both the world and the fans think of it, but at the end of the day a song is yours alone. That never goes out of style.
Next Time: If you need me to be sweet then I could give you what you need.