Film Review: ‘Don’t Break Down’ — Digging to exhume the mystery of Jawbreaker after a ‘Jet Black’ funeral

FeaturedLeave a comment

“Sunday night! Nobody goes to work tomorrow. General strike, fuck this country.” Some of Blake Schwarzenbach’s first words on stage during Riot Fest in 2017.

This call from the singer and guitarist of Jawbreaker came loud to the audience between “Boxcar” and “Sluttering (May 4th).” It was possibly one of the most powerful sentiments spoken on stage in over twenty years, or it just gave Chicago the chills.

Jawbreaker taking the stage was an intense moment of anticipation and a release of decades of discontent into the Illinois air. The crowd went crazy, they knew all the words and the sing-a-long that night was an event for a community of punks and never punks alike. 

mJawbreaker image

How did we get here? A fan might wonder, but “Don’t Break Down: A Film About Jawbreaker,” will set your wonder straight. It’s out now, available digitally on iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon. Streaming will be available on Amazon Prime.

Directed by Tim Irwin and Keith Schieron, the pair also directed the film “We Jam Econo” about punk gods the Minutemen. Someone looking for a strong documentary will find one here. It’s about the evolution of smart punk, musical storytelling, poetic writing and good context on culture in the nineties. 

Blake Schwarzenbach, bassist Chris Bauermeister and drummer Adam Pfahler are telling their own story through this film. It’s the very real journey of a band on the verge of breaking down or breaking up at any minute of their entire existence, until arguably their greatest professional moment, and then — they did just break up.

According to co-producer Dan Didier “Don’t Break Down: A Film About Jawbreaker” was filmed through the years, beginning around 2006 and into 2007. Filming continued around 2011 and the edit began at that time. DIY in its own way, this is a self funded film. When Didier, who is also the drummer of The Promise Ring and Maritime, got involved around 2015/2016 the edit started over leading to its premiere in August 2017 in San Francisco. The additional screenings led to funding the wider digital release.

In a powerful interview scene, a cold walk through what looks like New York where Blake Schwarzenbach lives today, Schwarzenbach explains Bauermeister’s music philosophy, “It was contrapuntal, Chris was interested in contrapuntal melody.”

Contrapuntal is an adjective that means of, relating to, or marked by counterpoint according to Merriam-Webster dictionary.

The interview with Schwarzenbach, cut into pieces and juxtaposed with a Bauermeister interview explaining his four string bass style. Pfahler is then edited in between them both, explaining Bauermeister further. 

“He had a lot of good ideas,” as Pfahler is seen on screen illustrating the way Bauermeister is able to clutch the neck of a bass guitar. 

Schwarzenbach goes on to explain the tension created by the bass player’s ability to play bass chords and melodies. He describes how that worked against his guitar chords.

“That clash of tones was where we found our sound,” says Schwarzenbach. Then the film dips to black.

This transition scene may be metaphoric to their lives. There’s a ton of point and counterpoint debates and lots of artistic arguments on display in the film. It seems the music held their emotions like the sky holds rain before a storm. The scene is 11 minutes into the picture. Fade up and away we go into the life and music of Jawbreaker.

The film’s highest moments are magnificent studio takes with the band from 2007, a decade before Riot Fest. There is a ton of tension in the frame. It’s like the alchemy of Jawbreaker is oil and water create fire. They are mythic fire waiting to explode.

“You want to fucking kill the mystery,” that’s Schwarzenbach’s sentiment to the directors and the audience.

The documentary is glued together with first hand accounts by musicians like Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day, Chris Shiflett of Foo Fighters and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes — lots of others. Recording Engineers like Steve Albini, as well as, other record industry executives and producers. There’s tour managers, friends and family interviewed. They all corroborate and add color to the history. Lots of very intelligent and insightful musical people dissect and validate Jawbreaker’s art.

Pfahler has many insightful and peacemaking scenes driving his car, then parked in his car. 

“If people ask me why do you think your band is referenced, why people seem to care about it? I would probably say it has everything to do with the words, with Blake’s words.” Pfahler almost laments as he reflects.

The film crescendos with Dear You, their major label debut. Dear You sold 40,000 copies before being taken out of print by Geffen Records. Retrospectively, it’s seen as a masterpiece. 

It’s arguable the mid-nineties wasn’t ready for a fully formed Jawbreaker. Conversely, Jawbreaker may not have been ready to stand by the perfection of what they had created. The film is incredibly vulnerable and gets to the heart of what it means to be a band, to be an artist and to be judged for your choices as an artist and a band.

“Don’t Break Down: A Film About Jawbreaker” is metaphorically as if the contents of the mailbags, Pfahler shows off early in the film, are spilled all over the floor and dug through. It’s a time to triangulate these memories and put the band back on a map. The film exposes a passageway back to the band’s genes through their own words with affirmation from those who were there.

See ‘Don’t Break Down’ Here and the best places that stream

Like listening to a lost record, a visual Etc., the album of B-sides and rarities, Jawbreaker’s release from 2002, the film is a gift. Blake Schwarzenbach speaks volumes about discontent, it’s in his DNA. His words are poetry, in song, in this film and live on stage back at Riot Fest 2017, a compass to the roots of radical music. Chris Bauermeister’s bass and perspective give the journey melody. Adam Pfahler never let go of Jawbreaker’s backbeat, their archive or the place in the heart of punk Jawbreaker helped to find. The documentary allows the trio to flow together, hopefully, from the same strange spring the music originated. The film is musical, it’s contrapuntal — stolen from Bauermeister — and it’s as inspirational as the music itself.

  Editors Note: The title of this piece and other elements have been updated for clarity

Interview: Josh Allison of Cry Baby Cycles — Building with dedication to family and traditions of motorcycle culture

FeaturedLeave a comment

Greeley, Colorado  — One week after Josh Allison left his job building high end custom classic cars at The Forge in Loveland, he’s hard at work doing his own thing. He’s building motorcycles for himself and his family at Cry Baby Cycles in Greeley. Labor Day seems like a fitting time to take a look at Josh’s work ethic. Here’s how he got to be a winner of this year’s Denver’s Choppers first place Custom Class for his Panhead build. Looking back, he did it one thoughtfully turned bolt at a time.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

He’s been around motorcycles, Harley Davidson, his whole life. He builds from the ground up. He’s not just shaping metal or turning wrenches without carefully thinking about design and function. He rides what he builds. His dad Warren showed him the way. Josh is quick to praise his influence,

“He was building bikes back in the ‘70s, going to shows, back when the diggers and the long bikes — all that stuff that’s popular now.”

“I remember my mom being pissed because

I would blow my bike apart and rattle can it.”

Allison’s dad worked for BNSF. The railroad moved his family around a lot when he was young from Colorado to Wyoming and back. His family moved like a coal train across the plains. He recalls his first motorbike,

“Got my first dirt bike when I was six years old. I was walking in the alley in Windsor [Colorado], and this guy had this old ‘70s Yamaha “80,” my dad actually went and knocked on the door and bought this bike from this dude. We got it, we got it running and then it kind of changed the course of my life.”

From his first bike in Colorado to bombing around in Wyoming later on, experience taught him to throttle through, he says,

“These towns had five hundred people, dirt roads. They were kind of bummer towns, but I could get on my dirt bike and just go rip. It was cool as a kid because I had a lot of freedom.”

Back in Colorado, as a teen, he excelled at motocross. He puts his skill in context,

“My buddy had five acres and we started doing this freestyle motocross thing and it was hardcore. I got fairly decent, but it got to the point. I could do an okay superman seat grab, knack knacks and stuff, but the backflip was coming out. It was one of those things, you know, I didn’t have it.”

Whether he had it as a factory rider or not, he had it as an artist and he was becoming a builder. The story of his creativity starts early in his life and runs concurrent. Allison started taking things apart and putting them back together reimagined as long as he can remember.

“Since I’ve been a little boy I’ve always been a custom dude. When I had my bicycles the first thing we would do is tear them down, strip them down. Number plates, the coolest pads you could get. All of that,” he says. “I remember my mom being pissed because I would blow my bike apart and rattle can it.”

Mechanics and art have always been tools in his mind from those early days. If you look around his shop, you know it takes great knowledge to operate at his level and create custom motorcycles from raw alloy and a Panhead. If you look around his dining room, it’s obvious seeing his grandfather’s paintings, he was born to create in some way. Family being such an important factor of his life — he also credits his grandfather,

“I grew up in an art studio because he was a professor at the University of Wyoming. I grew up drawing motorcycles, cars, bikes and stuff like that. I just thought I was going to be an artist and that’s what I wanted.”

It turned out art school and graphic design were not the perfect fit for Allison, he left school. Although, he continued to learn, he continued to fix up and make motorcycles cooler. He was incorporating both mechanical skill and an eye for design into metal. Building a Honda CB750, he got it running, painted it, but he was topping out his abilities.

“The bike ran really good once I got the carbs figured out, so I painted it [and] lowered the suspension. I did what I could do at the time on it. Nothing too fancy, it was something at that point when I didn’t have a whole lot of ability. It was a cafe, but it wasn’t the coolest cafe.”

After a rough go with a friend teaching him the MIG welder, he decided to go back to school. Instead of art school, he found his time at WyoTech inspiring. He was about to combine art and engineering, school was racing fuel in his veins. He says he was ready to go,

“When I got into street rod, I was already out of street rod. They showed me ‘oh my gosh this is what you can do! Let me graduate’, I was already thinking what can I do. I got hired before I graduated at Tin Element. [I] started working there, that’s what mainstreamed me into the whole culture and the scene. I was doing cars, mainly, there, but in the background I was doing these cafes and bobbers.”

After school, Allison had a strong ten year career building for the best. WyoTech taught him this most important lessons, he says,

“I give a lot of credit to those guys where I’m at now because they opened me up to — Hey man if you have a trade and you learn to get good at this. — We can show what this is like at a very basic level, the sky is the limit.”

Tin Element, Pinkee’s Rod Shop and The Forge, Allison built cars with these greats. All along, he built motorcycles too, becoming the best at what he’s most passionate about — motorcycling.

“If I build organically and just go with that flow,

lot of times mistakes are just some

of the coolest things that I’ve done.”

He recently won Denver’s Choppers Custom Class for his Panhead build and his passion and hard work is paying off. He says,

“The Panhead — took over a year, probably a thousand hours in that build, very intensive, to this day the most intensive metal shaping, most organic bike, some of the things on that bike were not planned, they just fell into place.”

What’s his favorite build?

“Definitely the Panhead,” the answer is simple.

“If I build organically and just go with that flow, a lot of times mistakes are just some of the coolest things that I’ve done.”

He doesn’t sketch, he creates. In the case of the Panhead, he changed the handlebars many times before they felt correct.

“I think that’s part of building, you talk to any builder and there’s a pile of scrap in some corner. Whether they show that pile to you or not.”

His philosophy on building is simple,

“Being a bike builder, you’re not just building a part of, you’re building a bike. It’s gotta be able to kick and it’s gotta be able to go. If they don’t run or they don’t ride — there’s zero point in doing this. I love show bikes and bikes that look badass, but it’s even funner when you can ride ‘em.”

Another magnificent build is the “The Black Gypsy.” He’s quick to explain and rattle off some of the specifics,

“1972 Cone Shovel, 1956 straight leg Panhead frame, the rear drum is a 1951 Panhead, the transmission is a 1974 four speed racket top, the headlight is a 1920’s Orlow headlight — Super rare. […] That bike is special to me because I was able to find some really super rare vintage parts. Most of my bikes, I just want to make everything. That bike has a perfect balance of hand built stuff, which makes it one of the cooler bikes to me — because of the blend of handmade plus vintage stuff on it.”

He says the idea of The Black Gypsy came in Austin Texas and was inspired by the architecture of the city. Allison explains, Batman, Gotham City,

“Those type of old dirty, worn out buildings — Gothic look.” He incorporated a Buick emblem too. “Cars influence me, but that building struck me with that beaded line and that patina look. — Kind of spooky like the life of a gypsy.” In all he says it was about eight months. All nighters and lunch breaks right up until leaving for Sturgis. He says he set goals, “I want to do Mondo’s chopper show, it helps me focus and it helps me push.”

He’s definitely focused and pushing. You can follow along with everything he does here, Cry Baby Cycles Instagram. His ideas are realized from childhood inspiration. He paid attention to what his father taught him, he was inspired by his grandfather and the art studio at the University of Wyoming. It’s all come together in motorcycles that are aesthetically visually beautiful and tell a story through concepts like The Black Gypsy.

“There was a lot of design to it. The beads flow everywhere. Not just making cool parts that go together, actually having like a whole flow to the bike. The Panhead taught me that. I wanted brass, but not just a brass part, let’s pull brass through everything. Let’s make a bike have a whole flow.”

Flow it does. The Black Gypsy from the Orlow headlight, many vintage parts, custom gas tank, custom oil tank, through the custom seat to the taillight. It’s the creation of a master builder, a sharp thinker.

He began riding a bicycle at the age of four or five, BMX was the start of a two wheel break it down build it life. Bicycles became motocross, motocross was an outlet for creativity, his creativity was going in many directions and that artistic nature transitioned to building custom cars and motorcycles.

What’s next now that Cry Baby is off and running?

“My dream is to build a knucklehead, the most iconic Harley motor ever.” Allison is someone whose dreams are built into reality one bolt at a time. He’s inspired. He sets goals. He’s backed by family who support his creativity and let’s hope he gets his hands on a Knucklehead motor soon because the world needs a Cry Baby Knucklehead build.

  Editors Note: The title of this piece and other elements have been updated for clarity