When I was in high school, I got turned on to Jawbox. I had heard their first two albums, and pretended to like them because the older kids I knew, my friends' brothers, liked them. So yeah, sure, Jawbow, woo! And I still remember, in one day, at a Sam Goody in the Willow Grove mall, I bought Jawbox's Savory EP and the Afghan Whigs' Gentlemen. Possibly still the greatest music-buying day of my life. Anyway, the EP blew me away. Four songs, two covers, the single from the album; a rock solid base line like a jail's foundation, two guitars circling each other, lyrics that made no sense except at some dreamtime level, and these drums... goddamn those drums. I have friends that play drums that used to dissect Zach Boracas' swirling drum beats; they were like whirlwinds of leaves blowing up in an empty parking lot. They were Euclidean geometry, the only time it made sense to me in its theory of controlled chaos. But I'm getting to purple. Jawbox is still one of my all-time favorite bands. Hearing about one of the members is like watching some special on baseball when Hank Aaron or Mike Schmidt or Ted Williams shows up and you are overwhelmed by this memory of joy from the heydays. For Your Own Special Sweetheart is still my second favorite album by far (beind Automatic for the People - come on, you want to deny that album? Peter had an easier time denying Jesus).

The main man of Jawbox, J. Robbins, went on to Burning Airlines. That left me cold. I saw his new band, Channels, play their second show, at the Warehouse Theater. It was sloppy, J. kept looking down at his guitar while singing. There were high points, but not cathedral-ceiling high like Jawbox. And now there's an MP3 of one of their songs on the J. Robbin's website, Storytime (In the Streets of Spies) (it's the third song, for you guys too lazy to look). It's good, it's got all the markings of a J. Robbins songs, but he needs a second guitar. That's where the magic lies. Well, we probably won't have Jawbox again, but we have this. It's kind of like looking at photos from you past when you should be going out and making new memories, but I'll take what I can get.