Schwarzenbach's charismatic, frustrated, and personal lyrics helped establish him as a cult idol, even as he underwent surgery to remove painful, voice-threatening polyps from his throat.

They signed a $1 million contract with DGC Records and released 1995's Dear You, but its more polished production and smooth vocals caused significant backlash from the band's core audience.

Prior to forming Jawbreaker, Blake Schwarzenbach and Adam Pfahler were childhood friends in Santa Monica, California and classmates at Crossroads High School.

[11][12] The band played their first show March 16, 1989 at Club 88 in Los Angeles and recorded their debut album, Unfun, in two days in Venice in January 1990.

[14][17] As the band drove across the United States to fly from New York City to begin a European tour, he began to suffer serious vocal problems.

[14] Though the condition caused him great pain while singing, threatened his voice, and was potentially fatal should the polyp burst or lodge in his throat, the band decided to do the European tour anyway.

[14] They soon found new residences, with Schwarzenbach moving to nearby Oakland where he began writing lyrics for the band's third album, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy.

[14][19] "24 Hour Revenge Therapy is arguably Jawbreaker's best album," writes Greenwald, "but it is also far and away its most loved, the best example of Schwarzenbach's innate ability to marry the boozy, bluesy regretfulness of the Replacements with the loose, seat-of-the-pants attitude of Gilman Street punk.

[20] Nonetheless, the band signed to DGC in a one million-dollar deal, due in part to the relationship they had developed with A&R representative Mark Kates who they had met on the Nirvana tour.

[7] In an interview for Ben Weasel's Panic Button zine following the Nirvana tour, Schwarzenbach had stated flatly that Jawbreaker was not interested in signing to a major record label.

[7] Jawbreaker began recording their major-label debut, Dear You, in February 1995 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California with Rob Cavallo, who had produced Green Day's breakthrough album Dookie the previous year.

[7] After a week of recording drums and bass guitar, Bauermeister and Pfahler were largely absent from the rest of the sessions while Schwarzenbach continued to work on the album with Cavallo.

"[7] In the months leading up to the album's release, a number of music publications positioned Jawbreaker as the next stars of the Bay Area punk scene, sometimes referring to them as "the thinking man's Green Day".

[9][24] Fans and critics, however, still associated him primarily with Jawbreaker and did not warm to his new project: "Schwarzenbach was so adored for what he had done that few were willing to allow him to gracefully move on", writes Greenwald, "Jets to Brazil, though popular, has received unspeakably scathing reviews, boiling with the bitterness usually reserved for a cheating lover.

"[9] He eventually returned to music, joining the Chicago pop-punk band Horace Pinker from 1999 to 2001, performing on their 2000 EP Copper Regret before forming the short-lived Shorebirds and Mutoid Men with Mattie Jo Canino, formerly of Latterman.

[9][25][26] Pfahler remained in San Francisco's Mission District, where he opened the Lost Weekend Video store with Jawbreaker's tour manager Christy Colcord.

[27][28] In 2004 he licensed the publishing rights to Dear You—which had become an out-of-print collector's item, often selling for more than twice its retail price on online auction sites—from DGC's parent company Geffen Records, and re-released it to positive critical response.

[9] The performance was photographed, and an audio recording was made through the sound board, but the band chose not to film the session "out of both respect for the sanctity of the moment and fear that we'd suck.

"[9][31] In February 2011 Schieron and Irwin shot footage in Los Angeles, including interviews with Jon Liu and the band's former tour manager Anthony "Nino" Newman.

"[9] For his part, Schwarzenbach had expressed that he did not feel physically capable of singing the songs and doing them justice: "If I felt I was in a good enough place, I think we could have a really fun and successful tour.

[2][37][38] Although the Riot Fest appearance was initially announced as a one-off reunion show,[2] Jawbreaker performed together for the first time in 21 years at the Ivy Room in Albany on August 3, 2017, opening for Monsula; this was held as a private gig and mostly attended by friends of the band.

[40] On November 28, 2017, Jawbreaker performed their first post-Riot Fest show at the Olympia Film Society to benefit the Thurston County Food Bank.

He explained, "If we aren't burned alive in Chicago, we wanna do more, and not have to have people make it a destination and pay a ton of money to see us."

Schwarzenbach was the poet laureate of scruffy white male angst and, by couching his thoughts in his own inscrutable metaphors, he set a pattern for bands that would follow for the next decade.

[66] This focus on personal, immediate matters, coupled with descriptive imagery and word choices, attracted listeners to Schwarzenbach and made him a cult idol in rock and roll circles.

[65] "The attraction then was to the songwriter," writes Greenwald in Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, "it wasn't the song that the listeners related to, it was the singer.

[17] Greenwald cites the track as "one of [Jawbreaker's] seminal and best-loved songs", calling it "sludgy and churning, a working-class anthem with a steady, proletarian heart".

[69] With lyrics profiling a pair of drunks outside a Mission District liquor store, "'Kiss the Bottle,' more than any other song, captures the sensitive boy machismo that drew (and continues to draw) male listeners to the altar of Schwarzenbach.

"[17] The song has been cited as a favorite and influence of Jim Ward of At the Drive-In and Sparta, and by Ron Richards, editor of the successful zine Muddle.

[71][72][73][74] Numerous other bands and artists have cited Jawbreaker as an influence, including Rise Against,[75] Dashboard Confessional,[76] Title Fight,[77] Eve 6,[78][79] Drug Church,[80] and Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio.