Following the breakup of D.C.'s Government Issue in June 1989, ex-GI Jay Robbins made the switch from bass to guitar, and within a month JAWBOX began rehearsing. By September of 1989 JAWBOX had played its first show, a sold-out housing rights benefit with local bands Shudder To Think and Fugazi. The band released its self-titled debut EP in March of 1990, on the collective DeSoto label, with help from Dischord Records. The first full-length JAWBOX release was 'Grippe' on Dischord in June of 1989. December 1990 saw the addition of second guitarist Bill Barbot and 'Tongues',the follow-up to their debut LP. The single was produced by Iain Burgess, who also produced the band's following album 'Novelty', their second for Dischord. The cover artwork is an X-ray of Bill's knee, taken after falling off a stage in Montreal during a guitar jump. $4000 later, it's STILL messed up, but hey, it makes good artwork. 'Novelty' was recorded in January of 1992 at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Virginia.
Some describe them as:
"A weird, melodic, emotional trip." - SPIN
Others as:
"A raging storm of activity, hard, harsh and melodic." - SPIRAL
SCRATCH
By all accounts they
are energetic but always sustain a fragility.
Forever in the business of tossing curve balls at their devoted fans,
JAWBOX spent three and a half weeks in their ultra-secret subterranean
bunker squeezing out the first twenty seconds of 'Motorist'.
(How they got it to sound so inordinately crappy we will leave up to the
listener's imagination, but let's just say it involved refrigerator magnets
and several cups of cold coffee.)
It is on the flipside, 'Jackpot Plus!', that Jay and Bill truly crank
it up. Zach Barocas, makes his vinyl debut here by bashing the cans much
more intelligibly than Jay renders the lyrics the pair of them co-wrote.
Both cuts feature the patented and mercifully short `Tradin' Licks' guitar
solos of Jay and Bill, and the inevitable thunderin' low end of bass player
Kim Coletta.
They have since gone on to record a split 7-single with the handsome Chicago outfit Tar, a few Simple Machines projects and then signed to Atlantic.
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