Last week’s post reminded me of the opportunity afforded to me by this platform to pimp bands that my friends used to be in.
The Least Cheesy Picture From Their Myspace Page
Jet By Day was a band started by three guys I went to high school with. The band was originally called the Hosstages (which honestly I always thought was a better name) until the release of their first EP the summer after we graduated.
Autumn Means It’s All Downhill combines the whinging indie rock of Dinosaur Jr. with the off-kilter rhythmic sense of Thirty Ought Six and a dose of the Beat sensibility that was briefly in fashion with bands like Cap’n Jazz, Rainer Maria and the Get Up Kids before emo turned into a massive joke.
Actually I guess that was like five or six years, so it wasn’t really all that brief after all.
Anyway, this EP has some good ideas on it, and I think the songwriting is really quite good for a high school band, but the performances and recording quality, in particular guitarist David Matysiak’s vocals, aren’t quite up to the standards that the band set for themselves later on. This type of recording seems much more “high school” to me than the hi-fi stuff kids are putting out these days. Therefore, I’ve only included the song “Hawaii,” a punky number that the band kept playing for a couple of years. Check out the drum riffs on the chorus sections.
The band’s original bassist, Bo Wamsley, gradually lost interest after he started at Georgia Tech- the other two guys were at UGA in Athens- and sometime in 1999 he was replaced by Amy Burmeister. Her first recording with the band was a three-song self-titled EP.
Here, the band is moving toward a more progressive style of songwriting- long, through-composed songs, with some crunchy palm-muted guitars and big whompy drums with lots of fills, shot through with what is still a clear root in emo-indie rock. They were getting a lot of Get Up Kids comparisons at this point. The performances have tightened up considerably, although it’s still clear that this is a young band.
The first full-length Jet By Day record, The Feedback That Distracts Us, came out in 2002 on Moodswing Records out of Athens. They did a long tour to support the album, including a Houston date (with a band called, I think, the Letter E?), that ended, in a bad omen of things to come, just before the CDs arrived at the label, which, in turn, promptly went out of business.
“The Box That Held Our Bandaids”
All of the above were recorded by Bob Weston of Shellac. Compare the dry, forceful sound to the much wetter approach on the self-titled EP- the drums, especially sound very different.
While this album was being written and recorded, Jet By Day added a second guitar player, Mason Brown. This enabled the use of the guitar harmonies that were becoming popular at the time, with the nascent hipster movement becoming interested in Thin Lizzy for some reason, and pushed the band even more toward progressive rock. I remember being a little confused by this, and having this exchange with a friend:
Me: “Heard the new Jet By Day album.”
Devin: “So what did you think?”
Me: “I dunno. It’s awfully proggy. Sounds like. . . “
Devin: “Sounds like Yes, huh?”
Me: “Yeah, I guess so.”
Devin: “But Yes is awesome!”
Me: “. . .”
Anyway, I eventually came around to the more complex and challenging music on this album.
“Go To The Docks” is apparently about a neighborhood (that I’ve never been to) in the suburb of Atlanta in which we all grew up. The bridge of “My Accomplice” interpolates one of the band’s best early songs, “Take Me Away,” which I definitely would have posted if they had ever recorded it. “My Accomplice” also features some crucial drum shredding from my marching band buddy Tom Naumann, who has featured in my NAP posts a couple of times already. You can hear a rare vocal performance from bassist Amy Burmeister on “Ohio the Bruiser,” which is followed by one of the band’s very few acoustic tracks.
Along the same prog-oriented lines was this single, which came out on the split with The Blindfold Parade around the same time:
“The Day the Earth Stood Still”
How did Tom put it? “I thought it was about some kind of apocalyptic battle, but it turns out David wrote it about some girl.”
Around this time, Jet By Day began touring heavily, and their live performances were explosive and inspiring examples of muscular indie rock. They were working hard enough and playing well enough to land a spot on Kindercore records for their second full-length record, 2003′s Cascadia. . .
“Let You Down,” from last week’s post, is also on Cascadia.
. . . shortly before the label collapsed amid a confusing barrage of accusations between the founders and their partners, The Telegraph Company. At least Kindercore (which eventually revived but seems to be out of business again) managed to get the record out first- once again, after the lengthy tour the band booked to promote the record had drawn to a close.
Cascadia represented a creative 180 for Jet By Day, as they jettisoned the prog impulses in favor of glossy, heavy, tightly constructed guitar rock with lots of harmonies. “Bite the Bullet” and “Let You Down” are good examples. The best songs on this album, like the ones posted above, are positively crushing- take note of the scooped-out crunch of Brown’s Explorer on “Dying In the Spotlight.” Along these same lines, this single came out on a split with The Maginot Line (bad band names: not what they used to be) around the same time.
The bridge on this one really does it for me.
Despite the vagaries of label representation, Jet By Day soldiered on. Burmeister was replaced by Brett Griffin, another high school friend, and the band toured heavily through 2003 and 2004. They were dealt what could have been a crippling blow when their booking agent dropped off the face of the earth 10 days into a two-month jaunt in late 2004, leaving the band to hunt down some of their own tour dates on the internet; in one case, they showed up to a club in the Midwest just in time for a gig, only to learn that the booking agent had called a few hours earlier to cancel. Fortunately, the band was scooped up by Hey Mercedes for a number of dates, salvaging much of the tour.
Around this time, the band signed with startup Frisco label Future Farmer, which I’m flabbergasted to learn still exists, for a well-produced and commercial yet really pretty kickass hard rock record called The Vulture.
The lengthy album-release tour in spring 2005, for which, once again, the band had no copies of the record they were ostensibly promoting, was poorly attended to the point of complete failure. What I believe was the last show, and probably one of the last shows the band ever played, was the only gig that I ever booked at Mary Jane’s, with the Jonx and Satin Hooks. This was undoubtedly the worst-attended show that either Houston band ever played, and if you’ve seen the Jonx you know that is really saying something. A couple of interesting side notes: this pathetic “show” was the first time the Jonx played “Scent of Earth,” one of the few Jonx songs anyone will admit to liking; the night before, Satin Hooks had played at No Tsu Oh with Jet By Day’s about-to-be-huge friends the Black Lips.
Shortly after this disastrous tour, Jet By Day basically gave up and stopped playing. I’m not sure they even played a farewell show. Actually I’m pretty sure they didn’t, since their Myspace page contains, along with an OK song I’ve never heard before, a blog post from 2006 that announces, in a sure sign of defeat, “WE ARE NOT BREAKING UP!!”
Brown and Matysiak are now playing in Coyote Bones and backing up my brother in Hollow Stars, along with Devin (the Yes fan above). Naumann is working on a home-recording project with Wamsley. Griffin, as far as I know, doesn’t play anymore. And of course they have lives outside of music.
Jet By Day was a big influence on me because they were the first band that I knew personally to make music that I really liked. They were the third band (after R.E.M. and They Might Be Giants) that I was ever a “fan” of, and it’s from that that I learned how rewarding it is to be a fan of a band that you know, that’s a part of your world instead of the world of mass-market entertainment.
And it’s partly because of the experience that Jet By Day had that I’m so skeptical of people that think they know how bands ought to be run, that they ought to tour a certain amount, they ought to market themselves a certain way, that they need to approach their music a certain way, that they need to care about success. These guys worked their asses off, they toured as much as they could, they were constantly pushing themselves creatively, and they had very high standards for themselves. It didn’t matter; they never sold many records, and their career never went anywhere. Griffin once told me that he thought they had been in it “for the wrong reasons” toward the end, but it seems to me that their attitude was totally consistent with the advice of everyone who’s ever given advice to an indie rock band. I guess you could argue that their timing or their style or their songs just weren’t right, but as far as I can tell, the important difference between them and the successful bands I’ve known is that the successful bands are lucky enough to, at some point, play in front of someone who can really help them. In all the time they were together, Jet By Day never were.
The great thing about indie rock is, I can enjoy their records all the same.
i loved autumn means it’s all downhill. i remember when you said you wanted to show me something and i sat on the foot of your bed in your freshman year dorm room (which you awkwardly shared with dan dehanas) and you played the record. you said it was emo, and not the lame dashboard confessional stuff that mtv would later try to package as emo. i bought a copy from you for $5. “april” is still one of my favorite songs, and i’m so glad we got to cover it for the band to see.
Hey Annie! We’ve missed you here.
Glad someone else I know will admit to liking this band.
FWIW, I didn’t even know who Dashboard Confessional was at the time. I only knew the good stuff, which made me very confused when emo-bashing came into fashion. Then I saw the Get Up Kids open for Weezer and suddenly understood.
> I learned how rewarding it is to be a fan of a band that you know, that’s a part
> of your world instead of the world of mass-market entertainment.
There’s definitely a lot to be said for this. It makes you realize that everybody has the potential to make something great. It’s like the DIY punks and the populist folk documentarians had a baby and gave it a guitar. For me, those bands were Lozenge and then later San Agustin.
Even if you don’t personally know them, but you know they’re just like you because you see them around and know their friends, etc. When I lived in Baton Rouge I had little idea that there was any such thing as good local bands. We had a few local bands, but they were incredibly inept and amateurish. Not that this is a problem generally; I think I just didn’t like the music. But when I got here and discovered the Mike Gunn and Linus, I felt that connection you’re talking about, that realization that anyone can do this if they want to and put some effort into it, and that’s a life-changing realization, sans hyperbole.
Charlie, it goes without saying that anyone could be like the Mike Gunn.
Danny, I never got the connection between early proto-emo bands like Sunny Day, or Embrace, or Rites of Spring, or Drive Like Jehu, and the later crap from all the nightmare bands called emo since. Those first bands were all good if you ask me, and the later stuff blows. There’s little in between. Except maybe Jimmy Eat World. I remember my friend Rob in Blueprint always talking about them (they recorded a split e.p, together), and then I remember their going massive with that one track, and then they just went bye-bye.
By the way, I enjoyed a bunch of the stuff you posted from JBD. The guitar work is nicely done.
Actually there is a good bit of stuff in between, in particular Braid, the Get Up Kids and the Promise Ring. The latter really are the keystone: Davey Von Bohlen started out in Cap’n Jazz, who are just about the furthest thing possible from today’s emo, but the year I graduated high school, the Promise Ring appeared in Teen People.
Personally, I was always into the artier stuff- Rainer Maria, Christie Front Drive, Boilermaker, stuff like that. I still don’t think I’ve ever even heard the Promise Ring.
by the way, i really like that you tweet links to articles and posts that you write. while i don’t always have the time/bandwidth to follow publications, i do follow the twitter pretty religiously and i always read the links you post. hoorah!
Im so happy for finding this page
Found this band on the net sbout 10 years ago, and they are still on my playlist.
I have most of the songs on this page already, but the version of “Hawaii” that I had was in realplayer format. its such a great tune!
Is there a way for me to get hold on the first 2 ep`s ? Been searhing the net, but no luck.
-Ronny.