Leatherface / Jawbox - Your Choice Live 023

Photo by P Squared

I wrote about the Your Choice Live series a little bit ago; now let's talk about the first one in the series I ever copped. I snagged this in 1996 primarily because it was a live Jawbox set. Never got to see them live, even though I probably had three years worth of opportunity to do so. Shoot: I got propositioned by an NBC page to attend an episode of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" in 2009 and turned it down, not knowing that Jawbox was reuniting on the show that night. Jawbox is definitely one of the only gaps in my live viewing, and crossing paths with the members over the past twenty years are some of the few times I've gotten starstruck.

Leatherface, on the other hand, was a band that, at the time, I was only somewhat acquainted with. I had glossed over Jack Rabid's rave reviews in The Big Takeover. But the one record that had been released here in the States, "Mush", got deleted about 3 days after it was released by an Atlantic Records vanity label. So it wasn't getting any reviews in MRR or No Answers, regardless of what an amazing record it was. Leatherface had been broken up for close to three years by the time I snagged this. Nobody I knew was talking about them.

So, yeah, this record was a revelation to me. One of my favorite things about punk is finding something for the first time, and sharing it with everyone you talk to about music. And to hear the power of THE classic Leatherface lineup of Stubbs/Hammond/Crighton/Laing when you don't know what to expect - FUCK, it gives me tingles thinking about it 24 years later. Then to roll right into Jawbox, at the height of THEIR power, playing songs from their self-titled record a year before they'd be released - YES YES YES! I revisit this rarely these days, but when I replayed it in anticipation of posting it, it brought back so many great memories, while still sounding vital and fresh.

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