Cap'n Jazz

“We’re growing in different directions. That happens around this age for boys.” So says Davey von Bohlen in a bit of stage banter forever immortalized at the end of a live track on Analphabetapolothology, Cap’n Jazz’s only record. But the word “growing” is misleading: it implies a slow, gradual bloom into a maturity that the band never really had. Cap’n Jazz weren’t so much a band as they were the site of a traffic accident in which throat-splitting yells, naive melodies, long-winded wordplay, and five mid-western youngsters who would go on to play in a lot of other bands all collided, like the syllables in their album title, in a brief flurry of sneaker-squeaks and adrenal confusion. Though they figured prominently (alongside bands like Braid, Gauge, and later Rainer Maria) on a local, cresting wave of early-to-mid-90s emo, Cap’n Jazz also personified a sentiment that cannot be entirely explained by macrocosmic chronology. It seems less important to tell you that they played together between 1989 and 1995 than to say that Mike, the youngest of the band’s two Kinsellas, was 12 when they started and 18 when they broke up.

Cap’n Jazz played a brand of emo that moved between cacophonous loudness and surprising bursts of hush. Perhaps the most quintessential moment in their catalogue comes in the song “Little League,” particularly in the breath poised between the song’s famously sing-songy bridge (“Kitty cat / Kitty kitty cat”) and frontman Tim Kinsella’s sudden, gravely wail of what always sounded to me like “Michelle,” but the word comes out with such amorphous fury that any hearer could easily botch it up to fit his or her own personal meaning. While Tim and his brother Mike later went on to play in bands like American Football, Owen, and Joan of Arc, and guitarist Davey formed the Promise Ring, the short-lived Cap’n Jazz always retained a peculiar sanctity for emo kids past and present. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they didn’t live long enough to make any short-armed swipes towards a grave, boring maturity just beyond their reach; a lot of emo bands did this when their members got older, and it rarely was anything but disastrous. Cap’n Jazz’s entire catalogue (with a few, mostly negligible exceptions) is captured on Analphabetapolothology, which Polyvinyl released in 1998. Its all-inclusive, gawky immortality stands as an exception to the most widely recognized of emo maxims: I believe it was Ponyboy who once said, “Nothing gold can stay.” And emo kids put a lot of stock in that commandment. I personally know at least one who has it tattooed, somewhat woefully, across his torso.

On the heels of Analphabetapolothology’s recent reissue and on the first night of the hottest weekend of the year—all during which we silently, incessantly cursed our forefathers for having built their nation’s capitol on top of a swamp—Cap’n Jazz cruised into town to play their first show there in 16 years. And I do mean “cruised.” As Davey breathlessly recounted between songs, he arrived at the Black Cat in the grandest DC style imaginable: making up for time lost on a delayed flight by riding to the club on the back of Dismemberment Plan bassist Eric Axelson’s motorcycle, and arriving just ten minutes before the rest of the band took the stage. From a frenetic, crowd-pleasing rendition of “Puddle Splashers” onward, the band sounded, to everyone’s delight, just as tight as they did on their record all those years ago. The only thing worth calling them out on is that Tim had to read off a lyrics sheet during the verses of their cover of “Take On Me.” I think I speak for most people in the English-speaking world who don’t even play in a band who frequently covered that song live and put a version of it on a record when I say, “Come on now.”

Their stage banter, of course, riffed on the very notion of the reunion show. Tim lifted his button-down shirt to expose a modest gut with the same air of self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement that he exudes in almost everything he does; Davey told a charming story about coaching tee-ball. And the sold-out crowd was peppered with plenty of fresh, sweaty faces who looked awfully close to regulation tee-ball age. In fact, when Tim asked the audience who had seen the band last time they played DC in 1994, the only guy who cheered, apparently, lived in the house where that show took place. But none of this is to suggest that the crowd was anything less than exuberant the entire time. There was a charm to not having been there in ’94; young or old, almost all of us in the room were linked in the experience of seeing Cap’n Jazz live that night for the first time.

After sloping down from an inspired sing-along at the end of closer “Que Suerte!,” the general consensus among the varied crowd was, as the one dude standing around me who’d actually professed to having seen the band live before put it, “That was one of the best reunion shows I’ve ever seen.” And, even days after the post-show hyperbole has faded, I’m still compelled to find a little bit of truth in that. If a good reunion show finds a band playing all their best songs note-for-note and a crowd dutifully singing along, a great reunion show happens when you can feel the presence of a long-dead idea come alive again in the room and then retreat in a hasty gust through the back door as soon as the house lights come up. Cap’n Jazz played a show that—especially in the moments when the crowd lurched toward the stage, arms outstretched like one profusely sweaty being—approached that definition of greatness in brief gasps, as emphatically, pubescently, and fleetingly as the band once did themselves.