Album: 24 Hour Revenge Therapy
Artist: Jawbreaker
Label: Tupelo Recording Company and Communion Label (1994)
Runtime: 11 songs, ~37 minutes
Everyone knows this band and this record. Its inclusion in my “perfect punk album” series (defined as no skippable track) surprises no one. Sure, there are some who would argue Dear You. But that’s not the one. It’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy.
I, like nearly everyone I know, has a relationship with this band, and especially with this record. For most, it’s almost as though it was written for them. Their own personal soundtrack to a moment in their adolescence. And 99 out of 100 of those moments have to deal with a heartache, a longing, some early romance. I’ve got two friends with their own version of the same story, at the same time of life (I’ll get to them). 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is the soundtrack to teenage love. And it includes my own.
Whether or not it’s Jawbreaker and 24 Hour, for everyone there is not just a track but usually a band and an album that marks that time when they discovered what it means to fall for someone. What it means to break that person’s heart or more likely have their own broken. What it means to want someone and to have that want left unfulfilled. And for me, and many others, it’s this one.
There’s a 33⅓ series book about this record. I was thrilled when I found it some years ago. I remember reading it whenever I had the chance, on the subway, at home. But it ended up just making me annoyed. I think it’s awful to be direct. Not because it’s badly written per se but because it misses the entire point. I went in reading a book about a record so closely tied to love’s tribulations but it was all mechanics. The sessions, the gear, the decisions that got made in the room. Scene politics, the pre-major label posturing. It describes the machine but lacks its soul. What really makes 24 Hour Revenge Therapy’s lasting impact.
So go read that book for how it was made. I’m going in a different direction here. This one is about what it did. It’s a bit different than my previous perfect punk album posts. It’s presented as soundtrack. Told across most of the album’s songs. And for me, like many others, it was about a girl.
Boxcar
(“One, two, three, four / Who’s punk? What’s the score?”)
But before the girl, there was middle school. It was near the end of the 8th grade, when the first band I was ever in decided to enter our school’s talent show. I was recently 14 and had been playing guitar for over a year, and started this first band, with my friends, John, Matt, and Dan at some point in the spring of 1994. We practiced in John’s basement. I remember being there, practicing, when MTV broke the news that Kurt Cobain committed suicide. We were stunned and did the only thing we could do, we played more music. We mostly did covers. “Boxcar” was one of them. 24 Hour just came out and I was obsessed. I already knew Jawbreaker from Bivouac (again, via my older sister, and, by the way, “Chesterfield King” remains my favorite Jawbreaker song to this day, with “Kiss the Bottle” close behind) and then found Unfun later. I figured out how to play “Boxcar” on guitar at 14, because that’s the kind of song it is. Simple. The verse is essentially just G and C bouncing back and forth (some added chords for turnarounds). The chorus with only a slight variations to A and Em. All power chords. The simplicity isn’t a shortcoming, it’s the entire magic of the song. We decided we’d play it for the talent show.
We had to submit the lyrics ahead of time for approval, which, given what that song says, should have been a problem at 14. I remember being asked to explain them. I don’t know what I said but I gave some explanation about poetic license. Ms. Beck, the cool art teacher who I remember always being dressed in a horizontally striped black and white shirt, ran the talent show and she let it through, smiling.
The talent show was in the auditorium. After the dance routines, gymnastics, and magic shows, we played last. I was on guitar and vocals. And the kids went wild. With the chairs bolted down, I remember a dozen or so kids jumping and running up from their seats and finding some space to slam dance in the auditorium. At the end of the day, it was announced over the loudspeaker that we won.
There’s a VHS of it somewhere.
Three months later, I was entering high school.
West Bay Invitational
(“We’re having a party / Please come / It won’t be the same without you / Please come”)
I was deep into Jawbreaker by then. On all my school books and notebooks, or anywhere really, I would draw the Jawbreaker four Fs logo. I even carved it into my bedroom wall with a pocket knife, much to my parents’ dismay. And I got a great Jawbreaker t-shirt, at one of our local independent record stores, Wonderland.
She talked to me because of that shirt.
First day of high school, I was wearing my Jawbreaker t-shirt, and a senior stopped me about it. Her name was Cristina. I was a freshman. She smiled at me, with chin length jet black hair, and told me “cool shirt.”
I crushed fast and I crushed hard.
She was into some punk (the more pop end of it), writing and literature, and had a sense of humor. She was also in a relationship at the time and I knew it. Of course, as we weren’t in the same grade we had no classes together. So what we had were hallway encounters that weighed enormously on me. That flutter in the chest, and trying to be cool at the same time. We rode the same bus and even though she didn’t need to, she’d often ride it home, and sit next to me and we’d talk music and writing, and our random thoughts. We talked about our favorite bands, and favorite authors. She told someone I was the Jawbreaker boy with nice hair. My hair was long then. I held onto that sentence for years.
That impression went beyond Cristina as well. At some point near the end of my freshman year, I formed Network 34 with my friends Tim on drums and vocals, and Jeff on bass. We played loud, chaotic, start/stop, screamy music. After our first show people were stoked and telling us how into it they were. Several of them said the same thing in surprise: they thought we were gonna sound like Jawbreaker.
Cristina and I had a running joke. We’d pass each other in the hall and one of us would say, hey, did you hear Jawbreaker broke up? That was the whole joke. We did it for a long time.
I don’t understand now why it landed or why it lasted. Maybe because we both felt how much that band mattered to each of us, and to whatever was taking shape between us.
Condition Oakland
(“I rode down to the tracks / Thinking they might sing to me / But they just stared back”)
When I was small, living in New Jersey, I could hear a train whistle outside my window as I fell asleep. It was a comforting sound. The rumbling, the whistling. The sound of people and things in motion. And yet, a steady presence. It would help me clear my mind and ease to sleep.
I have always been drawn to trains.
Trains ran through Newark, Delaware too, where I lived as a teenager. We all used to spend time on their tracks. So much so that on two separate nights, two different people I knew got hit by trains coming down those tracks, losing limbs but fortunately surviving,
At 14 I’d go up on the rail overpass cutting across downtown Newark with a bottle of red Mad Dog 20/20 that I’d get from an older punk kid in the scene, or by asking someone outside the liquor store. Sometimes with a pack of Camel Lights (was this a common Gen X thing to do at so young of an age?). I’d go with friends or sometimes just sit by myself. I loved to climb up there, the feeling of gravel under my feet, the wind cutting through more clearly, and find a place to sit, there above the road and cars, where things felt a layer removed. Listening to the evening fall into night, the heat leave the streets, and the sounds shift while listening and feeling for the rumbling coming down the tracks.
I looked down those long rails, thinking of them static yet propelling things back and forth, and look for answers. About school, about growing up, about Cristina. Everything I was feeling about her had gathered into a knot I couldn’t undo, and I remember thinking that up there, somehow, it would come clear.
It didn’t.
(“Read and I felt so small / Some words keep speaking when you close the book”)
Instead, I turned to writing. In fact, those first years of high school, I fell deep into writing. I’d always done handwritten short stories and comics as a kid, but this was when I found out there was a thing called literature and poetry. I started where any punk boy starts. The Beats, Bukowski, Vonnegut, Neruda. Often reading them up on those train tracks.
I was trying to make sense of what was happening to me by writing it down and reading what others wrote. I couldn’t really say it out loud yet. But writing and reading felt like tapping into something. Like I could see it better, and hold it, and with any luck let it go.
Mostly I failed. I did enter a short playwriting competition on a whim, and won it. But mostly, I filled notebooks failing.
And then here was this record. Made by a guy who studied English literature and creative writing at NYU, where the band formed (a fact that definitely weighed on my decision to go there too), who had already found the sentences. Not sentences about a feeling like mine. Sentences for it exactly.
I, like many people, was pulled in by the way Blake crafted his lyrics, his wordplay, his imagery, his sense of irony that could switch between playfulness and resignation. This is on display all across 24 Hour. And what’s more, it’s delivered in his singular voice, filled with emotion and stretched to its limit. It’s not exaggeration to call Jawbreaker punk rock literature. His lines weren’t just lyrics, but a language I didn’t have yet.
In Sadding Around
(“When I throw myself at your feet / You know it’s to be walked on”)
Then she found out I wrote, and it became something else.
We wrote short stories back and forth. Shared our poetry. We’d talk about our favorite authors. I talked about Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” and she gave me a copy of Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse.” When she found out I was reading Bukowski, she gave me a copy of “Post Office.”
We also made mixtapes for each other. That was my first real signal, a hope that seemed to be more than just mere coincidence, that perhaps she liked me too. Mixtapes carried their own secret meta-language at the time. We pretended they didn’t mean anything but mixtapes were coded love letters. They weren’t just a way to transmit our favorite bands or songs, but messages we hoped the other would decipher and dare to believe. I still remember she kicked the mixtape off with “Dare” by the Wedding Present, followed by Superchunk’s “On the Mouth” (song not album), and then “Want,” off Jawbreaker’s first album. A solid first three, and surely, I told myself, expressing more than simply that.
We talked about writing to each other using nothing but Jawbreaker lyrics. We never quite did it. What happened instead was that their lines kept turning up in the notes and the stories anyway, because they were already the words we had, and an inside reference between us.
Near the end of that school year she proposed that we each write a letter to the other as if the other person was in a coma, and to be handed over at the last week of school. To be honest, I don’t remember what I wrote because I couldn’t stop thinking of what she wrote me.
In hers she quoted this song. I remember it was the line, “Little demons by my bed / Whisper secrets / The kind you never hear.” She went on to open up about her bigger feelings for me.
(I did try to get Jawbreaker to come play Delaware in ‘96, but failed!
Jinx Removing
(“Someone said your name, I thought of you alone / I was just the same, twenty blocks away”)
The school year ended, she graduated, and went off to school near Chicago. I was devastated as I was in pretty deep by this point. Our relationship continued on though. We wrote letters to each other and I even visited her once. I was 15 and then 16, a sophomore in high school. The feelings felt immense. Swallowing me whole. I remember telling my parents about it and I remember they listened but didn’t really know what to do. I talked with my older sister and she told me that saying about letting a bird go from its cage to see if it comes back or not. A well-traveled saying but to a 15 year old, it was poignant. I also continued falling deeper into music, playing shows with Network 34 and eventually helping launch Eldritch Anisette. Courtney (from Eldritch Anisette) and I began spending a lot of time together, trading music and writing, and I confided in her about all of this.
Throughout this time, I would come back to this album, as it felt like the best way to communicate and process what it was I was feeling. I remember having to cut the grass at home and only ever listening to this album. Each time this song came on, Cristina would launch into my head. I would sing the lyrics out loud, fighting the mower’s motor. Thinking this song was written for me about her.
Eventually, the school year ended and summer came. I was 16, and got my first real job as a stock boy at a local grocery store (after a short-lived effort as a dishwasher at a cafe). I would end up getting fired from this job about five months later for throwing cans of tomato juice and soup up into the industrial ceiling fan in the stock room to see if I could hit it and watch the contents explode. I did. I didn’t think about the mess it would cause. But well before all that, Cristina returned home from college and got a job at the same grocery store.
We picked up where we left off and then some. Our feelings for each other much more upfront until eventually we confessed them, dared to kiss, and started dating. The next few months over the summer were a whirlwind. We’d see each other often, not just at work, but in the evenings afterward. Time going to her house, not too far away, or her coming to mine. I would drive over in my giant ‘76 Caprice, which leaked oil, feeling terrible about the mess made outside her curb, and we’d watch movies, listen to music, spend time close together. It felt easy, natural. We had fun, laughed, and confided in one another. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening but it was. I had imagined this for so long at this point it also felt very familiar already and like it was meant to be. How could it have been any other way?
Ache
(“Lean your head on mine / Like you used to. (Used to your lean) / I don’t mind if you’re faking it. (Make it seem real)”)
And then, summer ended and so did the relationship. I forget exactly how it ended or how it was communicated, but it just did. Just like that. It was over. I vaguely remember her saying she was in college and needed to be with people her own age, or something like that, or maybe that’s how I tried to explain it to myself. It was hurt and confusion at the same time. I’d spend many nights at Courtney’s apartment listening to music, writing and sharing poetry, talking about all of this. We’d also go to Eagle Diner, drinking coffee, eating french fries (I was straight edge and vegetarian at this point), which I would stretch out over hours, while writing poetry in notebook after notebook. Some of these lines even ended up as anguished backing screams in Eldritch Anisette songs. Courtney remembered it well, in fact. When Eldritch got reissued nearly 30 years later, and we had to write out our lyrics, she looked over at me and just said, “Ohh, Cristina.”
That Fall semester, Cristina and I stayed in touch, however. Our romantic relationship didn’t end badly, it just ended. In fact, I went to visit her in Chicago after we broke up, ostensibly to look at colleges.
On the trip, I brought her a book I’d made for her. A book of poems, hand bound, each page individually crafted and designed, every one different, most of the poems typed out on my manual typewriter.
Writing that sentence now, I can see I was a bit much.
But I’d comb through those notebooks I had, go to the local stationary store to get different kinds of paper, stamps, envelopes, crafts. Some pages were collages, others paintings, others still with drawings or images.
I remember handing it over to her. All this time, all this craft, all this emotion. She knew much of it had to do with her. She also knew how I still felt about her. But she dismissed it all quickly, with a passing comment saying she was simply my muse.
That night I slept on the floor of her dorm room, right next to her bed. Maybe I was in a sleeping bag, but I think it was just the ground and a blanket. I remember the darkness around me and the sense that she was so close and so far away. I remember wishing she’d soften and open back up to me. But that didn’t happen of course. There was a door that was firmly shut.
I wondered whether she had any idea what I was feeling. At sixteen it was so immense that I couldn’t believe no one else could feel it too, being right there, a foot away, in the same room.
I slept badly.
Ashtray Monument
(“After all, it’s not that bad / I still have pictures, I look back / At all the things that we once did / You said I love you, I guess you did”)
Eventually, as these things happen, it all passed by. I moved on. Dated other people. Fell in love again, and fell in love harder. Life moves forward. But in that junior year of high school after we broke up, I remember still trying to make sense of what happened and why, until I came to a simple acceptance: it just is. My friends helped, writing helped, and playing music helped, but ultimately like in this song, I learned that sometimes love can unexpectedly hit you, and grip you so closely that you can’t even breathe or think about anything else, and then just as sharply, simply go away. By the end of that school year, Cristina and I stopped talking. I think the only interaction we had was one time we saw each other at an event in New York City when I was in my early 20s.
The Boat Dreams from the Hill
(“I wanna be a boat / I wanna learn to swim / Then I’ll learn to float / Then begin again / Begin again”)
So, what is all this?
Music can attach itself to something you feel deeply and take on its identity. For years I couldn’t put this record on without being back in that hallway, that year, that ache. That’s changed.
I’ve said in this series that music is a time machine, and I stand by it. But this one doesn’t work that way for me anymore. When I’ve listened to it over the past few decades, it doesn’t bring those feelings back. No, those are long over. I’ve been lucky to love again and even find my real, lifelong love. Instead, it lets me look at those feelings from a distance, like an artifact in a display case at a museum. Behind glass, well lit, labeled, not mine to touch.
And for me now, and even across this piece, what I see is that what’s behind the glass isn’t Cristina. It’s a younger me. A young teenager, growing up fast, with long hair and a t-shirt, an explosion of new feelings, trying to make sense of what was happening to him through music, and through this record.
A few years back Jawbreaker got back together and played their first dates in New York. It was in February 2018 at Brooklyn Steel.
I told my friend Sean I was going and he was dismissive about the whole thing. To be fair, this was the time right when a lot of the bigger punk and hardcore bands from that era started doing reunion shows. Nearly everyone that went out to the shows were older, in their late 30s through early 50s, who had grown up with the music. Rather than a new crowd discovering it. A batch of nostalgia, he said.
I thought about that for a long time. I wondered whether he was right. Whether that’s all this is, a room of people in their forties paying to feel fifteen for two hours.
I don’t think so.
I went and I sang every word at the top of my lungs, and it wasn’t for the band and it wasn’t for the girl. It was for the kid. The one who was so earnest about finding love. The one who believed a teenage romance was going to be the whole of his life. The one who wore his heart on his sleeve where anybody could get at it. The one who thought sincerity would solve everything, and yet who was still had no idea who he was himself or what he actually felt or anything meant. The one who thought this unknown feeling could never be matched let alone surpassed.
It was a chance to look at him and say: hey. It’s ok. You’re ok. It all works out. Things get way better.
That’s not nostalgia. Nostalgia is a longing to go back to a romanticized time and stay there. This was going back to that time to say goodbye.
And I am sure that I was not the only one in that room doing it.
When I told one of my guy friends’ chat groups that this album was on tap for my next entry, the responses were immediate.
My same friend Sean who dismissed the reunion shows as nostalgia told me it was the soundtrack to his most tumultuous summer of love and drama in high school, when he broke the heart of the nice girl he was dating because he was enraptured by the troubled punk girl (thankfully, his troubled punk girl era is long gone).
My friend Steve, a former-monk-turned-potter and still punk in that Dischord style way (and may I add single and a catch!), put it better than I have in this entire piece: a perfect album made more perfect by being 15 and heartbroken.
That’s what this record does. What it’s a soundtrack too. And that’s what the 33 ⅓ book left out.
As a recap on the “perfect punk album” series so far:
#1: Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County
#2: Sunny Day Real Estate’s s/t (aka The Pink Album)
#3: Lungfish’s Rainbows From Atoms
#4: Superchunk’s No Pocky for Kitty
Check out the rest of the site for other posts as well, and let me know what you think!
hello,
Commenting as a person of the same age as you, growing up in a different continent and enjoying your output. I bought this record while travelling in Toronto in 2018 after hearing about it for years, playing it back at home and not enjoying it as much, thinking something like "I need to check it out again later because it probably takes time to get into it". I still have to do it. Life is strange, I only started going to punk shows a few years later than you, but the band Fiya from Florida really had a huge impact on me back in 2005. That same year, I was really into the band Tiny Hawks. Turns out both of these bands have ex-Spirit Assembly members. I really need to check it out again then. Thanks for all the reviews / Cédric