Back when Jawbreaker's tattoos were scandalous
Here's a very weird newspaper article that ran about the band's ink 33 years ago today.
Hello and welcome to REPLY ALT, the only and therefore greatest email newsletter about music which is sometimes related to my forthcoming book SELLOUT: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994 - 2007) which is out in just 10 days!
As I’ve mentioned previously, researching SELLOUT brought me down a lot of strange holes. Sometimes I’d be watching old Youtube interviews of TRL performances, other times I’d be trying to track down grainy scans of ancient fanzines. If you’d like an idea of how deep these holes went, here is a screenshot taken while researching the chapter about Jawbreaker, from frontman Blake Schwarzenbach’s high school yearbook:
But my favorite information hunts were when I got to comb through my library’s archives, digging for any mentions of bands in local newspapers or weeklies. One of my favorite and most unexpected discoveries was spotting the members of Jawbreaker in a random trend piece about tattoos that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988—33 years ago TODAY, in fact!
Now, for the record, trend pieces never age well by their very nature. I’m sure ten years from now, all of today’s trend pieces about why so many Gen Zers are discovering The Sopranos or why people are horny for a 12-foot skeleton on TikTok will seem laughably antiquated. Hell, these cultural snapshots will probably seem ancient by next year or even next month. So I will cut this intrepid Inquirer reporter of the 80s a little slack for pitching a piece about how more and more young people are—get this!—getting tattoos! GASP! Here’s the headline:
TATTOOING IS RISING AMONG AFFLUENT YOUTHS
“Affluent youths,” you say? Yeah, some of the Jawbreaker members met while attending this hip prep school in Santa Monica, which Vanity Fair once described as the “elite, anti-prep mecca for entertainment-industry offspring.” Other notable alumni include Gwenyth Paltrow, Jonah Hill, and Zooey Deschanel. Wild, right? (This is all documented in SELLOUT, by the way. Buy it, dammit!) So as early adopters of ink, the teenage Schwarzenbach and bassist Chris Bauermeister were used as examples of youths! getting tattoos! on their bodies! Dear heavens!
Here’s the lede:
Alexander Blake Schwarzenbach isn’t in a gang, the Navy or prison, but the day he turned 18, this senior at Crossroads, a private high school in Santa Monica, Calif., got a tattoo - a symbol often associated with those other institutions. Schwarzenbach, now an English major at New York University, is among a growing number of the young, educated and affluent who are choosing to be tattooed.
“Tattooing is now very clearly moving into the middle and upper class,” said Clinton Sanders, associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of a book on tattoos scheduled to be published next month. Sanders sees tattooing as a “symbolic disavowal of the things associated with middle and upper classes.” Youths from these backgrounds are practicing “conspicuous outrage” by violating the conventions of their class and taking on aspects of the lower class. Sanders described this as a way for them to “thumb their noses” at their parents.
Amazing. In 1988, the three types of people apparently associated with tattoos were gang members, Navy members, or prisoners. Nowadays you can walk into any Jo-Ann Fabrics and the 60-year-old woman behind the counter named Doris probably has a very cute tattoo of her cat Mr. Bunches that that she’d like to show you. But back then, it was novel enough to get your name in the paper. But wait, there’s more. Because, you see, Blake was not just any tattooed teen. He had… two tattoos!
Schwarzenbach got his second tattoo, a Buddhist endless knot symbolizing the rising of the eastern sun, in Los Angeles.
“I had $80 loose change in my pocket, and it was Christmas time,” he said. “It was pretty random, to tell you the truth. I think it’s great. I think it’s a little hallmark of youth.”
But for suburban youth, the tattoo is more than a symptom of age. “It’s definitely a little statement,” he said. “I’ve just taken myself down three brackets in class. This is gonna make me a proletarian.”
Tattooing still seems to appeal more to men than women, but it’s not exclusively a male prerogative.
“A lot of young conventional or ‘progressive’ males might become a little upset if they found their girlfriend adorned with a flying tiger,” said Schwarzenbach.
And what about Bauermeister’s tattoos? Here he is entering the chat with a great one-liner:
Chris Bauermeister is a 21-year-old NYU English major from Connecticut. He says he makes his money the old fashioned way: “I inherit it.”
When he showed his father the $65 tattoo of a star exploding on his arm, his father, a prison psychiatrist, said, “criminals have tattoos.”
'“My father said he was worried that I’d never get a good job or find a nice girl because of my tattoo,” Bauermeister said.
What a funny relic to have dug up. I don’t know that it matches MTV asking blink-182 what they thought of Saddam Hussein’s capture, but it’s up there. What’s especially funny about this article in hindsight is that both Blake and Chris have since gotten large neck tattoos. In fact, I asked Chris about the meaning behind his (an FTW on one side and a WTF on the other) when I interviewed him, and the story made it into my new photo zine, MAJOR LABEL DEBUT.
Being early adopters of alt fashion makes me think of one of my favorite Jawbreaker lines. Not so much for its lyrical content, but how it’s delivered:
Drink beneath the 405 in the ivy
And think about that girl.
Two grades below
She pierced her nose, way before it was cool.
Some older guy with a motorbike
Picks her up after school.
In our interview, Blake told me about how many hours he spent in the studio with producer Rob Cavallo, trying to get those vocal and guitar takes just right on Dear You. It sounded, to borrow Jawbreaker lingo, unfun. Just workmanlike and methodical. I think at one point in the book, Blake describes himself as feeling like a nocturnal factory worker clocking in for a shift every night. But you can’t argue with the results. Twenty-five years later and some idiot is out here writing a book about it.
Did I get so hard up for live music during the pandemic that I opened two different browsers to watch Blake play this song from two different angles? Uhhhh… maybe!
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Any idea what that tattoo is wrapped around Chris's left arm?🤔