On the final night of the festival we did gather by the many thousands, on a browning glade ringed by porta-potties, funnel-cake kiosks, and a half-filled Ferris wheel. In the hard darkness that descended from the September gloaming we came to face the last lit stage—twinkle daddies, torch carriers for the pop-punk of yore, and hither and yon the bearers of fading Morton Salt girl and Chesterfield King tattoos. (I suppose a few of us had simply been driven to madness by the wheedlingly saccharine sounds of Paramore or beaten half to a pulp by the food-court rock/rap of supergroup Prophets of Rage.) We had come for Jawbreaker’s first performance in 22 years (apart from two small California warmup gigs this summer), and thus to see the past unveiled.
I’m glad to report that Jawbreaker didn’t feel reluctant at all at Riot Fest. They were surrounded by a sizable ring of fans who’d come up onstage with them, which somehow gave the proceedings a touch of the intimate feel of a basement show, and they thundered through 75 minutes or so of their trademark yearning anthems. And make no mistake, Jawbreaker traffic in serious anthems—the kind only a trio of great songwriters can write. Schwarzenbach is ferociously beloved because his lyrics, shouted through a cracked, two-pack-a-day larynx, give universal weight to the despair of dying love affair or the joy of a raging house party. Not many people can write a lyric about wanting to be a boat (as he does on “The Boat Dreams From the Hill”) and make it sound both poignant and punk as fuck. And at a Jawbreaker show, the crowd add their voices to the songs because they’re packed with great melodic ideas. I can attest to this after years of experience in bars and late-night apartments full of drunk punks: Jawbreaker belongs in the firmament of shout-along bands for all time. On Sunday, being in a crowd of untold thousands doing the same thing gave me chills more than once.
