The common refrain about the 1990s major label gold rush is that bands were seduced and abandoned quickly, and longtime fans were appalled by their beloved groups selling out. Still, in reality, artists’ creative visions evolve all the time, so many of the records that seemed like radical shifts might have happened. For many bands, more time and money for recording helped them fully realize their creative potential. Several beloved ones made their best record on a major label. With hindsight, even the staunchest critics have conceded that major label records like Jawbreaker’s Dear You, Shudder to Think’s Pony Express Record, and many others are indispensable.
For Jawbox, the revered Washington, DC-based post-hardcore act, working with a big label produced a definitive record. It provided them with a masterclass in recording courtesy of vaunted producer Ted Nicely, whose enviable resume includes Fugazi, Girls Against Boys, Dead Milkmen, and Tommy Keene. For Your Own Special Sweetheart, their major label debut, is their most beloved album, a perfect marriage of songwriting and production that sounds as thrilling today as it did 30 years ago.
“It was a defining moment. As I get older, I look at my younger self and take stock of moments in my life. I think we all knew recording Sweetheart was a big deal,” singer and guitarist J. Robbins said.
“We were all too in it to document it. It was a more overwhelming time than we realized.
We don’t even have many pictures from recording, not even just us hanging out on the couch during downtime,” said bassist Kim Coletta.
“Working with Ted was like a pilgrimage. We were huge Fugazi fans,” said Robbins. “We admired all of his production work to that point. To my ears, those were the best-sounding records coming out of DC at the time.” Today, Robbins is among the most revered and admired indie music producers. Now, artists talk about him the way he did about Nicely.
Securing Nicely was one of the advantages of having a big-label deal. “Our previous producer was on the team. He slept on the couch and flew out to us for recording sessions. Previously, Ted had been out of our budget. He had a reputation for being very detail-oriented, but he was always professional and cordial. We knew we would have time and money to record,” bassist Kim Coletta said.
Initially, Jawbox thought that the six weeks Niceley planned on was overkill, but that turned out to be driven by their previous experiences. They had practiced meticulously and entered the session with all the music written for Sweetheart, so they thought the recording would go quickly.
“We mostly recorded live in the studio before this. We all thought we had played so much that we would just go in and knock it out. Playing live, we were very good at stopping and starting on time, but Ted wanted to get more of a groove-and-pocket tightness. It was an incredible education, putting a microscope on my guitar playing and singing. It was tough to solve all that during these sessions, though,” Robbins laughed. “It was extremely tense.”
“Part of why we budgeted more time was because we had never played with a click track. I couldn’t do the click track initially. It is wild to me to look back at it. Now, when I do production work and we are going to use a click track, I always tell the band to start playing with a click track before we get to the studio. I have a vivid memory of Zach working out ‘Cruel Swing’ against the click track. I could see the frustration building.”
Eventually, however, they won the battle with the click track. “I am still really impressed when I listen to it. It is in tune and on time, and I think we grew as a band,” Robbins said. “We learned a lot about how we were going to write the next songs and record. I think it helped us make a more dynamic record after that. The next one wouldn’t have been as good without the Ted Nicely boot camp”.
Robbins also credits the Sweetheart sessions with helping him hone his production skills. “After Sweetheart, I had a whole arsenal of tools I didn’t have before. I became more conscious of tuning and timing after that. I took all of that detail orientation on board,” he said.
But sometimes expertise is about reading situations and trusting instincts. “I took it so far on board that I’m now more excited to just hear a band play together. If I feel the feeling, I don’t want to chip away at things”.
“John Peel was very one-and-done, but that’s why some of those sessions are so amazing, the energy in the room. When we recorded Revisionist [an EP of re-recorded classic Jawbox songs] together, that felt good to me,” Coletta said.
As for lyrics, they came after recording the music. They were a team effort, with Barbot writing the parts he sang and Coletta and Barocas chipping in as well. Highlight “Cooling Card” was written by Coletta, who saw a situation in Robbins’ life and wrote about it. At the time, unlocking what Robbins was singing about was part of the fun of being a Jawbox fan, but over time, his newer projects’ lyrics have developed a directness.
“For me, some of it is wanting to be intentionally cryptic. In Jawbox, I was struggling to get things out. I was writing about things I couldn’t look in the face myself, or I was writing about situations where I didn’t want to hurt other people. Sometimes, I was actively trying not to be understood. Sometimes, I borrowed from literature and threw those ideas together. It was more about trying to get into a stream of consciousness,” Robbins said.
“I don’t mind more obtuse lyrics. I love the moment when the listener takes what they want from them”, Coletta said.
“Exactly. Then there’s a line that stays with you, and your own life informs it. It is cool to leave space for people to step into”, Robbins added.
“I get the human compulsion to know, though,” Coletta laughed.
Robbins continued, “I am a huge fan of John Cale. I was listening to a podcast interview with him, and he was asked what his motivation to write lyrics is, and he said, ‘To help me live my life.’ That just knocked me right out. It was so cool to hear him say that. I wasn’t just flailing around in the dark, pretending. It is very real to me to have a catharsis and to get something out. When it becomes something that involves other people, I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
When it was time for Sweetheart to meet the public, Jawbox largely had control over how that happened. “We benefited a lot from the timing. When Nirvana blew up, the labels decided they could exploit it. The real underground blowing up was so eclectic and weird that there was a brief moment where they had to trust the artists,” Robbins said.
“We were a little naive, but we were also adamant that we would only do this move if we were in charge of our destiny. We tried to draw a line about not letting people interfere in our creative decisions. The label wanted us to re-record [Novelty track] ‘Static’, but Zach put his foot down. He joined after Novelty, and he was adamant that this record only be music that was made by the four of us.”
“We really did band together on creative control matters. I felt bad at times for our A&R Mike Gitter, having to balance the pressure from the label and our wants,” Coletta said. “We got really lucky with the boots on the ground people at the label. We didn’t have to play many of those big radio showcases, but we did do a lot of in-stores. I have a video of a young Jeff Probst from Survivor interviewing us, and we had our Beavis and Butt-head moment,” laughed Coletta. “Bill and I did a press junket in Europe during the World Cup in Germany. It sounded fun, a free trip to Europe, but there wasn’t much sleep, and there was a lot of talking about ourselves.”
“We got a few months when they believed anything could happen for any band. The labels were betting that anything could take off. We got a small push on MTV and the Stone Temple Pilots tour, but it was our most abrasive record,” Robbins said.
Jawbox enjoyed their time on the road opening for Stone Temple Pilots. “It was difficult only because we were in a van, and they were in a bus. We had to keep pace with them and were always in danger of missing our set time. Often, Robert and Dean [DeLeo from Stone Temple Pilots] were helping us get our gear on stage,” Robbins said. “I never aspired to an arena tour. We just wanted to have the resources to have different types of experiences. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.
“Sometimes we would play, and we thought no one got us. But we got to play the Gorge and Red Rocks. We got to play with the Meat Puppets, too. It was exciting to see how a big tour like that happens,” Coletta said. “Legally, I secured the rights to the vinyl so I could also get all of our rights back from the label.”
Having the rights meant that Jawbox could reissue Sweetheart in 2009. They worked with Bob Weston to beef up the low end. That release was marked by an appearance on Jimmy Fallon. It also contains some bonus tracks, including “68”, one of their finest songs. Why didn’t it make the original cut? Blame it on the age of the CD maxi-single.
“We knew we were going to have an EP, so we decided to leave ‘68’ for that. We didn’t want just to use scraps for the EP since fans would buy it,” Robbins said.
Despite these exciting developments for Jawbox, in Atlantic’s eyes, Sweetheart wasn’t the smash they hoped for. After that, Jawbox were shunted off to imprint TAG, along with other groups who didn’t meet Atlantic’s expectations. “Sweetheart sold around 60,000 records. To me, that’s a shitload, but not to Atlantic,” Coletta said. But that wasn’t the point for the band. They were in it for opportunities to do what they do in an optimized way.
Jawbox released one self-titled record on TAG before disbanding. Jawbox had several potential hits on it, but the label were no longer paying attention. Soon after, Robbins returned with Burning Airlines, then Channels and Office of Future Plans before his current J. Robbins band, who released this year’s excellent Basilisk. Barocas also played in several groups and is currently playing with Robbins in the jazz ensemble New Freedom Sound. As for Jawbox, they have intermittently played shows over the years, embarking on short tours. They will perform at this fall’s Best Friends Forever Festival in Las Vegas.
“Personally, the cultural model of aiming for rock superstardom, like your aunt and uncle think, wasn’t ever the point. That’s not what got me into punk rock. It was the community and the possibilities. We hit it really hard as a band. We invested everything. Instead of rushing through the process, we wondered what it would be like to spend seven weeks in the studio. It was different than we expected, but we got excellent results,” Robbins said.
“The record was about getting an idealized capture of what we sounded like when we were playing flawlessly. I count it as an unqualified success.”