ADAM PFAHLER: We were together for so long by the time we signed that we thought, [in regards to] any troubles we were having within the band, “Well, we’ve been doing it this way for so long, let’s try it another way, maybe it’ll afford us a little bit more space.”

ANTHONY NEWMAN: People just totally identify with things Blake was expressing through his lyrics. I just remember being like, “God, if these guys sign to a major label why would people care so much? Why would a fan of Jawbreaker be so opposed to that?”

MARK KATES: I think that kids in the Bay Area for whom that scene was really important were already a little bit disillusioned by what had happened to Green Day, and I think Jawbreaker signing to Geffen was far more culturally traumatic than we ever could have imagined. I’m not saying that that necessarily makes sense, but it was very real.

DAN SINKER: I think by the fact that [24 Hour Revenge Therapy] was so good, that made the expectations that were a result of what was happening externally that much higher. But there were any number of big bands at that moment that it suddenly was like, “You are our hope,” for lack of a better term. God, what a fucking awful thing to put on a band.

Part Thirteen: The Geffen Experience

ADAM PFAHLER: I remember me and Blake were at 20th and Valencia, in front of La Randia on the corner. We just kinda stopped and stood there for a second and I go, “What do you think? Do you wanna sign?” We were like,“Yeah, we’ll go to Geffen.” And then we just continued walking.

ADAM PFAHLER: Then it was just done. Then all there was to do was call somebody up and tell them to send the paperwork. I remember the biggest pain in the ass about the whole thing was driving down to Menlo Park to sign the thing with our lawyer. I remember falling asleep in some of those meetings, bored to tears.

DAN SINKER: I remember a Ben Weasel column saying he would eat his hat if Jawbreaker ever signed to a major label. And then of course they did, and there’s a Maximum RockNRoll column with him sitting at a table with a hat and a knife and fork.

JASON WHITE: To some people they were turning into something they didn’t want—they wanted them to stay the same forever, or what they thought was forever.

KEVIN MCCRACKEN [Siren guitarist, DIY booker]: I know for myself it was a little bit of a bummer when ticket prices went up and they signed to Geffen. There was a lot of people that were like, “They deserve it, they worked hard.” And then there were people that were more like,“This is inexcusable.”

JEFF SPIEGEL: In terms of signing to DGC, anybody who took offense at that or felt slighted or thought that that was negative, I don’t think they really understood the band. Because of a need to categorize things and because of the demographic they came out of and the people that were their peers, they got lumped in with being a punk-rock band. I think it’s more accurate to say they were a band, they were a great one. So the shame isn’t that they signed with a major label, but the shame is that millions and millions of people didn’t get exposed to them when they signed to that major label.

ADAM PFAHLER: It wasn’t like we were careerists. We knew that the reason why they were coming after us so aggressively is ’cause they wanted another Green Day, and we knew we weren’t gonna be another Green Day. It takes a Jawbreaker song a minute to get to the chorus. Blake has been quoted as saying that it was almost like a whimsical decision to sign to a major and I’m not sure that he’s that far off. It was just sort of like, “Ah, what the fuck, this could be interesting, we’ve never done this before. Maybe it’ll be fun, maybe it’ll be glamorous.” We knew we were gonna get a new practice space out of it, we knew we were gonna get a new van out of it, we knew that we were gonna be able to live for at least for a year on whatever advance they gave us, and we knew that we could afford to spend a little bit more time in the studio, which we had never done. So it was just sort of like, “Let’s do something different, let’s see where it takes us.”

CALI DEWITT: They signed, and I was excited to be there [at Geffen] when the record [Dear You] came out. It was when I really felt the truth that I had already been told about that world—like the whole company was so excited about that record, everyone was talking about it. But because it wasn’t an explosive success, it took like less than a week until everyone in the company never uttered their name again.

ADAM PFAHLER: We knew what we were getting into. We knew it could be disastrous. But by the time we did it we were ready to do it just to do it because it was there, just to see what it was like.

CHRIS BAUERMEISTER: In hindsight I’m not sure it was necessarily the best move, but that’s 20/20 hindsight. Nothing came of it, so of course it wasn’t the best move. We lost a lot of our existing fanbase and didn’t really gain a new one. Eventually that’s what killed it for me.

DAN SINKER: Had that Green Day money not shown up, had Jawbreaker not signed, had none of that happened, would they still be around churning out records? Would the punk scene still exist the way it was then?

This story originally appeared in our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. Buy back issues of the magazine here.