B-Side Guys

Jefferson Pitcher was sixteen when he saw Jawbreaker play 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, sometime in the late ’80s. Blake Schwarzenbach pulled him onstage to sing “With or Without You.” He bought the first 7″ that night, drove all over the Bay Area in a ’66 Volvo to catch every show he could, and watched the local scene turn on the band when they signed to Geffen. Pitcher didn’t turn. He thought Dear You was a masterpiece, and he still does.

That backstory isn’t incidental to this cover. It’s the whole reason it exists.

“Jet Black” is slacker rock rendered with the patience of someone who’s been carrying a song for thirty years, which changes what the darkness in it means. Pitcher’s version doesn’t try to recapture the urgency of the original so much as hold it at a slight remove, the way memory works on the things that mattered most when you were young. The production is moody and unhurried, giving the song room to breathe in a way a teenage Pitcher probably couldn’t have appreciated at Gilman Street, pressed against the stage.

Pitcher describes the cover as an attempt at honoring and reclaiming something from his teenage years, and the word “reclaiming” is the interesting one. You reclaim something when it’s been taken, and Pitcher is pretty clear about what he thinks has been lost: the consumption of music, as he puts it, has gone off the rails. Pulling out old xeroxed 7″ sleeves and cutting this track is a small, deliberate act against that drift.