Editor’s note: Welcome to the first in our series called Plumb Line by Alyx Zauderer. Alyx will be exploring Boston music of the past that might have been overlooked by those of us active in the scene these days. I hope you will enjoy it.
“Two of my favorite bands, Jejune and Rainer Maria, had women coleads,” Dashboard Confessional singer Chris Carrabba told the New York Times in an interview in February when speaking about women in second wave emo.
While “emo” has become a canonized genre over the years, in the 1990s, being labeled emo was unpleasant and carried derogatory connotations analogous to how the “shoegaze” label began. Regardless of whether the classification befits them, it’s worth revisiting the story of this indie rock band that began in Boston, moved to San Diego, and managed to become affiliated with the genre developing in the non-coastal states between. Chris Carrabba was right that Jejune rules.
Prior to the band cohering in a Berklee College of Music rehearsal space, Jejune bassist/singer Araby Harrison grew up in Hawaii where avenues to explore alternative rock were scarce. Simultaneously, her future Jejune bandmates, Chris Mendez-Vanacore and Joe Guevara, were cutting their teeth as high schoolers in the world of west coast hardcore. Chris’ San Jose/Bay Area hardcore band, Tearwater, would bring him into contact with many of the venues that Joe’s San Diego hardcore band, I Wish I, was playing (including Steve Aoki’s “The Pickle Patch”). Their parallel development in this scene perhaps put them on a trajectory to stick together and form a new band with the eventual fourth member of Jejune when Araby amicably parted ways in 2000. It was also what bonded them when they first crossed paths by chance.
“I was walking through the halls of Berklee heading to a music theory class at nine in the morning,” Chris recounts, “and I see this kid sitting on the ground waiting for a class next to mine and he’s wearing an Unbroken shirt… I was like ‘Unbroken, yes!’ And he looks up with this look of immediate wariness almost like, ‘Step off,’ and I said, ‘No-no-no, I love that band. Life. Love. Regret. was an amazing record. San Diego, right?’ And he was like, ‘No way, I’m from San Diego. I’m friends with these guys.’ And thus I met Joey [Guevara]. We immediately became best friends because I didn’t know anybody else who was from California at that point and also had the same musical inclinations.”
The abundance of practice spaces at Berklee made it easy for the two of them to write music together. Chris drummed, and Joe sang and played guitar—all they needed was a bassist. Chris reached out to Araby, whom he was friends with through class.
“I remember telling him, ‘well I sing but I don’t really play an instrument,’” Araby recalls (she was a voice major at the time). “He was like, ‘That’s ok,’ and I was like, ‘Dude I don’t even have an instrument,’ and he was like, ‘That’s ok too,’” she says with a laugh.
When Araby missed the first scheduled jam session, Chris made arrangements for his other friend Matt Wachter to take the role. In the interim between Wachter’s earliest availability, she was able to get a hold of a friend’s bass though and make it work. (Wachter ended up doing ok for himself despite the missed connection, becoming the longtime bassist for 30 Seconds to Mars, and afterwards, Angels & Airwaves).
“I think I borrowed somebody’s bass and looked down and was like well crap… I’d never played bass before, but guess it looks pretty close to guitar… I’ll just go for it,” bassist/vocalist Araby Harrison recalls of Jejune’s founding. “And that’s how our first rehearsal went… It wasn’t my bass and I didn’t have a strap… so I made a strap out of duct tape. That ended up being the strap that I used for our entire run as a band.”
Things clicked in that jam session when she and Joe sang together and their voices were perfectly complementary. By Winter, the three of them were renting a private practice space off campus.
“When we got serious about it, we got a room that was a little bit farther away in the northern part of Boston,” Joe says. “It was right next to a donut factory and it always smelled like donuts… we were there during the Blizzard of ‘96, so I remember a lot of times getting on the road and being like what the fuck are we doing… [but] we were really serious about it.”
Of commuting to the rehearsal space throughout that brutal winter, Chris retrospectively views it as a metaphor. “We would always go out there bundled up kind of weathering the storm, [which] we felt like we did as a band for a lot… and then… this wonderful warm smell of apple fritters, and we’d get in the room and just be excited to play music together.”
While their first songs were coming together, Araby was interning for Blue Jay Studios, where prominent artists such as Aerosmith and Billy Joel had recorded at various points. She was able to get Jejune access to it overnight, and their first recordings were made and mixed there (with much of the production done by Araby herself).
“Those recordings became Junk,” Araby says of how Jejune’s first album came together. “And I hate them now… We thought we knew what we were doing in the studio and we totally had no idea…. It’s definitely rough around the edges but I guess it’s a little endearing that way.” (Rama Mayo, who ran the label Big Wheel Recreation, recalls that he had to talk them into even releasing it).
The musical influences it interrogates range from the pop side of punk expressed on Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, to the more morose soundscapes of bands like Christie Front Drive. Especially after the release of their second album, Jejune would become popularly identified with the latter sound, later termed “emo” (much to their chagrin). A series of coincidences earned these recordings a distributor.
“[Chris] was a very talkative, friendly, outgoing voice for the band,” Araby recalls. “He was the one who was always meeting new people and like, ‘Hey I met this guy from this band and we should play shows with them… Hey I met this guy here.’”
Through his job at Newbury Comics, Chris connected with Dave Karen, who introduced him to the person who would put out all three of Jejune’s albums—Rama Mayo.
“So I meet this guy Rama Mayo who happens to have just started a label called Big Wheel Recreation. And we’re all hanging out and [Dave Karen says], ‘Oh Chris is in a band,’ and Rama says, ‘I have a label.’ And I just happen to have a tape of Jejune demo stuff because Araby luckily worked at a studio at the time.”
Mayo immediately wanted to put out Jejune’s first official release, and got them their first show on a bill at The Middle East with The Promise Ring and Garden Variety. Their first set was impressive enough to turn into their first tour.
“[Kerry McDonald] from Christie Front Drive was with them on tour just hanging out doing tour stuff,” Chris recalls. “He came up with a couple of guys and was like, ‘Hey, you guys were awesome. Do you guys want to do four more shows with us and just jump on this tour tonight?” Along with an upcoming bill at New York’s Mercury Lounge that Garden Variety’s manager invited them to join, Jejune accepted. The following day they drove out to the Midwest with a rented trailer hitched to Araby’s Ford Bronco II. Not long after this mid 1996 tour, Kerry McDonald would introduce Jimmy Eat World to Jejune’s early recordings.
In 1997, following his time at Berklee, Joe was living back at his parents’ place in San Diego when he met Jim Adkins (Jimmy Eat World) at a Jimmy Eat World show at Che Café. As Adkins wrote in the liner notes for a compilation Big Wheel Recreation put out in 2000 called “Singles”:
“During a stay in Denver, Kerry Mcdonald showed us a band called Jejune. He had seen them while he was a roadie for the Promise Ring. He had a tape of demos which were later released as “Junk” on Big Wheel Recreation. Kerry told us they lived in Boston. We were touring constantly but still not playing for many people. At our first show playing the Che Café in San Diego I saw a guy with a Jejune shirt on. It wasn’t hard to pick him out because there were perhaps eight people there. I told him, “Hey, that band rules!” He said, “Aw, dude, I’m in that band!” That’s how we met Joe. We kept touring and met Araby, Chris and their friend Rama Mayo who was starting a record label.”1
As Guevara recalled to me, “When I was living in Boston going to Berklee and Jejune had been going for a while, me and this kid Burt just like screened up some stuff in his apartment one day, just like quick little designs we made and… I think we only made like five shirts or something but one of the ones I was wearing was just the one I’d made… Jim came up, said ‘what’s up’ because he had heard us through the dude from Christie Front Drive… Kerry [McDonald] apparently played our music for them… Somehow they [Christie Front Drive] got a hold of our first EP and were playing it for them… or at least Kerry was.”
After the show, Jimmy Eat World ended up crashing at Joe’s parents’ place. “They came and slept on the floor of my room and then the next day we went diving off the Sunset Cliffs and just kinda hit it off,” Joe recalls.
Chris recalls of that night, “[Joe] calls me while I’m in Boston and he’s like, ‘Hey, guess who’s here hanging out with me.’ And he hands the phone to someone who’s like, ‘Hey, this is Zach from Jimmy Eat World.’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa, no way!’ Totally starstruck from this silly little phone conversation, but I was that huge a fan at the time and music was that exciting.”
Through his job at Newbury Comics, Chris had previously gotten a promotional copy of Jimmy Eat World’s first CD, Static Prevails (1996), and been playing it for his Jejune bandmates. By the time he was put on the phone with Zach, he and Araby had already been won to moving to San Diego after they finished up school—but the phone call catalyzed those plans for him.
“As the day got closer for [Jimmy Eat World’s Boston tour stop], I started hatching this plan in my head—because this was before cell phones or anything, it wasn’t like I was able to reach out and talk to them—like you know what, I’m gonna get all my ducks in a row and my shit together and mail everything that I need back to California, and hitch a ride with these guys. So I went to their show and brought a suitcase just in case, and was like, ‘Hey dudes, I’m the guy you spoke to on the phone. I’m in that band Jejune.’” They welcomed him and he helped out as a roadie for the rest of the tour as they made their way to the west coast. Unfortunately, Jejune’s adjustment to San Diego went less smooth than Chris’s transportation plan.
“The truth is San Diego was not a very welcoming place for us,” Araby says. “A lot of that is probably because the type of music that we played at that time wasn’t really big out here.
“There were the bands that kind of sounded like post hardcore. And then there were the bands that were older San Diego musicians like Rocket From the Crypt and Drive Like Jehu… We were a little bit of a sore thumb and that made it a little more difficult for us to feel like we fit in.”
Though Araby’s quick to qualify that they did make very close musician friends in San Diego, Jejune “didn’t cultivate the same touring companions and show bill sharers [as in Boston]. We didn’t share a lot of bills at shows out here.”
The situation was made messier by an interview Chris gave to the zine Punk Planet for their September 1997 issue in which he had harsh words for the San Diego music scene—and name-dropped specific artists.
“I was friends with the interviewer,” he recalls, “so I was getting just a little too fun with the interview and made some remarks about the San Diego scene that when I was saying them I thought were funny but when you look at them in print they just look mean. And so I kind of had to come into the San Diego music scene hat in hand and eat a bunch of crow and make apology phone calls… It wasn’t the greatest first foot through the doorway in San Diego because my foot was planted firmly in my mouth.”
This alienation from San Diego’s music scene pushed them to spend much of their time as a band on the road touring, and to return to Boston to record their subsequent two albums. “I feel like there was nourishment in Boston that couldn’t be found here,” Chris says. “There was something there that pushed the three of us together in a way that I don’t think could have happened anywhere else.”
The studio in Boston where they recorded their album This Afternoon’s Malady around late 1997 or early 1998 was unfinished in its construction—much like the songwriting that was only partially done before they flew in from San Diego. “It was, again, like a rush job,” Joe recalls of the recording sessions. In contrast to today where artists can for example have production software on their laptop, “At that time, ’97 or ’98 or whatever, it was still like you’ve got a couple hours here to try to pull this off and if you’re not super happy with the way it turns out, well that’s just the way it is.”
The pressures of limited studio time and an unfinished writing process exacerbated some of the tensions that had been brewing in the band as far as the musical directions the members wanted to explore. “There was a little more tension in the band because we were starting to realize writing that record that we were on paths that were starting to diverge a little bit,” Chris says. “But in a way that also added to some really cool moments because we ended up leaving each other alone for some of the recording process. Araby and I split and left Joey there to do guitar parts one night and he came up with some stuff on his own that probably never would’ve happened if we had been there pushing and prodding. And vice versa–you know, we left Araby alone to do some vocal stuff.”
This Afternoon’s Malady saw Joe and Araby reaching operatic heights with soaring vocal melodies over Joe’s fuzzy, dominant guitar track layers. Joe and Chris in particular had been listening to a lot of Catherine Wheel and Radiohead at the time, and the influences of such bands with arena-sized sounds shone in their songwriting.
But in between the “epic” songwriting (a word Araby and Chris both used to describe one of This Afternoon’s Malady’s dominant sounds), is a breezy respite in the form of Araby’s track “38 Calumet.” With the wall of guitar noise turned down, Araby takes the existential despair down a notch with a light pop jam. It’s a sanctuary from the intensity of the rest of the album that mirrors the function of the house she wrote it about. Located in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, 38 Calumet was where Rama Mayo, head of their label Big Wheel Recreation, lived and at one point hosted Jejune.
“That house in itself was a hub back in those days,” Chris recalls. “I think everybody from the hardcore scene in Boston kind of made their way through that house at one point or another… they all kind of lived and hung around the same house.”
Though Jejune wasn’t part of the hardcore scene, they happened to be one of the few non-hardcore bands that ended up on Rama’s label. According to Joe, they stayed there for about two weeks when they flew into Boston to record This Afternoon’s Malady. With a sincere wistfulness, Araby sings on the track, “We’ll miss you so and / We don’t want to go yet / Why can’t we be home at 38 Calumet?” The song concludes with the lines, “Before I go just one last thing / I just want all of you to know / We’ll be back in early Spring / Unless this van decides to blow.”
In fact, their previous van had decided to blow in the middle of Utah perhaps a few months prior on their first tour as a San Diego band. Their insurance company connected them to a father/son run auto shop that towed their van and hosted them on their spooky compound for two days while Jejune figured out whether or not to repair or abandon it.
“Luckily, Rick from Jimmy Eat World decided that he just wanted to go on a road trip,” Chris recalls, “and got in their tour van, drove out and got us, loaded up all our gear and drove us back to San Diego where we rented a minivan… and went back out on the tour. That was a really frightening experience for a little while.”
After This Afternoon’s Malady was released in June of 1998, Jejune was met with a mixed reception from their fanbase. In general, they’d had an overwhelmingly positive relationship with their fans, but the immediate aftermath of the album’s release saw some harsh knee jerk reactions. This was the period when the label “emo” was being thrown around indie rock circles with a negative connotation.
“There were certainly detractors for This Afternoon’s Malady,” Chris recalls. “I remember talking to a guy who had set up a show in Allentown just after it came out. We went and he was like, ‘You know, I gotta tell you, I put This Afternoon’s Malady in with a big grin on my face and almost immediately took it out and threw it across the room.’…But he was relaying this story only so that he could say, ‘But the more I listened to it, the more it made sense to me and I understand what you were doing, and I love it now.”
Araby reflects, “I think we were lucky our audience was evolving as we were… as we continued to evolve musically their tastes continued to evolve. We were lucky that they were going with us through that evolution. There were definitely others who we would hear, ‘Oh I wish you guys would play more stuff like Junk.’ But that actually got a little more drastic later on once like R.I.P… which was some of the final recordings and song ideas that the guys had.”
In 1999, as the band was (unbeknownst to them) nearing its end, Mark Murino joined as a second guitarist. “He was a really great guy so first of all he was a joy to be on tour with,” Araby recalls. “I liked it also because it really gave us a bigger sound that was a little more realistic in terms of how we tried to record.” On the previous record, Guevara often recorded more than one guitar track for songs, leaving a void at their live shows. “I think for us we all felt it was more fun to have another person along fill out those gaps and make everything sound more full.”
Jejune by this point was selling out shows at such venues as the 800 capacity Glass House in Pomona, but its members’ musical interests were drifting from the project. The musical divergence that initially found expression on the diverse This Afternoon’s Malady led Jejune to amicably part ways in 2000.
Araby reflects: “One of the last little tours we did was up the west coast and I think we played with At the Drive In in San Francisco, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh these guys, that kind of music sounds really fun, I want to do that.’ It was the first time I noticed there was music that was starting to become more prevalent that was a lot different from what we were doing and I was excited to try something new. Not necessarily exactly like At the Drive In but just that there were new paths to discover and adventure into.”
A compilation of their last recordings cheekily titled R.I.P was posthumously released by Big Wheel Recreation on September 5th, 2000. An emotional, brief history of Jejune written by Rama Mayo (Big Wheel Recreation) spans several pages of the insert: “It is about this time that everyone starts seeing the graceful and beautiful Jejune that I have been ranting and raving about for the last month or so,” Mayo writes of their first show. Maybe it’s time again for people to discover the kickass band Mayo raved about 20 years ago.
- Cited in “Post: A Look at the Influence of Post-Hardcore 1987-2007” by Eric Grubbs