Milwaukee musician Davey von Bohlen has led the kind of musical career that must leave other artists teeming with jealousy. Since the early ’90s, Davey has performed in a variety of bands: Ten Boy Summer, Cap’n Jazz, The Promise Ring, Vermont and Maritime. Nearly all of these acts – Cap’n Jazz and The Promise Ring in particular – have become touchstones and major influences for countless punk, emo and indie bands.

Though Davey is a Wisconsin native, he spent a good chunk of time performing shows in the not-to-distant city of Chicago. It didn’t hurt that the other four members of Cap’n Jazz all lived in the Chicago area. But, even after that band broke up, Davey has continued to play in Chicago.

With Saturday night’s Maritime set at Beat Kitchen adding to an impressive tally of local shows, Davey took some time to discuss some of the gigs he’s performed in Chicago in an email interview:

Chicago was the first place where any of my bands became accepted, or followed as a band people might actually like to hear and see. For many years, The Promise Ring felt that Chicago was also a homtown gig.

Chicago has played a strong role in Davey’s musical life during the past few decades. To read more of the interview and find out some interesting anecdotes about Davey’s career, check out the map at the top of this post to uncover some interesting history behind some of your favorite Chicago venues.

Davey von Bohlen

Straight from an anonymous but reliable source, The A.V. Club can confirm there will be more Cap’n Jazz shows this year. Additionally, Jade Tree Records is issuing deluxe LP and CD versions of the band’s material sometime in 2010.

Before I left the Empty Bottle Friday night, I ran into Mike Kinsella (of Owen, American Football, and Cap’n Jazz). I’d had a bit of an awkward conversation with Kinsella in December when I asked him about the Cap’n Jazz reunion rumors, and I wanted to apologize for bugging him last month. Kinsella was friendly and made mention of “doing more of these” in the future. I thought this was a dead-ringer for future Cap’n Jazz gigs: My friend who was with me when I chatted with Kinsella wasn’t so sure.

I guess I won that argument. But really, everyone wins.

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The group performed as part of the Joan of Arc Don’t Mind Control Variety Show, which boasted 15-minute sets by bands affiliated with the Tim Kinsella’s post-Cap’n Jazz musical project. Even without an appearance by those five musicians together onstage, the show offered a solidly entertaining and eclectic mix of music.

The A.V. Club happened upon the scoop Thursday night, that Cap’n Jazz would “reunite” at the show. Perhaps Tim Kinsella sensed reunion fever in the crowd, which bloomed into a sold-out capacity only a handful of hours before the show, and maybe that put something of a frown on his face. But, take it from this perspective: If a show you’d planned for months meant as something of a communal gathering for friends and fans was suddenly overshadowed by the mere memory of a former band a mere 24 hours before the event is set in motion, wouldn’t you be a little concerned?

But, as the Cap’n Jazz guys came together, they showed their set was anything but a “reunion” gig. They weren’t in it for the glory: They stuck to their 15-minute time, with Tim Kinsella carefully monitoring the time through the four song set.

The name Cap’n Jazz wasn’t even mentioned: They played under the title of “Local Cover Band.” And it turned out to be a title that summed up all the positive connotations one could associate with a cover band: A passion for the music, little cares for the glamour of “rock stardom” and a mind set straight for the Chicago community.

Most of all, this was no reunion set. “Reunions” are for groups that end. The banner “Cap’n Jazz” stopped flying in the ’90s, but the bond between bandmates has stuck together through the years. You could see it in the passionate, swelling performance and on the smile on every band members’ face (well, almost everyone’s); You could hear it in the perfectly performed songs in the tune of “Little League,” “Oh Messy Life,” “We Are Scientists” and “Que Suerte!”; And you could feel it in the pulsating catharsis that captured the band and crowd and rolled it into one big frenzy.

Reunion implies mapped out. It’s the antithesis of a cathartic release. And catharsis is what Cap’n Jazz did best, and catharsis is what Local Cover Band brought Friday night.

Cap’n Jazz/Local Cover Band – “Oh Messy Life” [via Jessica Hopper]:

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UPDATE: Samuel Cotterall posted a bootleg of last night’s Cap’n Jazz set. Four great songs in 13 minutes and 25 seconds, straight to your computer.

This week, the reunion picture got a little clearer. Jessica Hopper dropped a hint in the Chicago Reader that the rumors may come to fruition at the Joan of Arc Don’t Mind Control Variety Show at the Empty Bottle tonight. Last night, The A.V. Club‘s Kyle Ryan officially announced the reunion performance:

The A.V. Club has learned that seminal emo outfit Cap’n Jazz is playing a mini reunion set Friday night at the Empty Bottle as part of the Joan Of Arc Don’t Mind Control Variety Show.

Though Ryan doesn’t include any quotes from former Cap’n Jazz members, The A.V. Club is a fairly reliable source.

Not enough evidence? Since the announcement, Twitter has experienced quite a bit of Cap’n Jazz buzz, with many Cap’n Jazz buddies confirming that the band will be performing.

Former Braid/Hey Mercedes frontman Bob Nanna, who is buddies with the Cap’n Jazz guys, wrote this a mere four hours ago:

Whirlwind Nashville trip almost over. Then ians pizza, @Threadless bingo, and oh yeah, cap’n jazz.

Dan Didier, drummer for Maritime (and formerly of The Promise Ring), was asked about bandmate/Cap’n Jazz alum Davey von Bohlen’s potential role in the gig. His reply:

@mmmCOOKIESmmm Yup.

So, in celebration of all the recent Cap’n Jazz hubbub, here’s a little video that shows just what made this band so special and a touchtone of post-mid-90s emo:

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Tickets to tonight’s show appear to still be available, so snatch them up while you can. At $10 a pop, you’d be crazy not to pass this up, with or without Cap’n Jazz. It’s a night of performances by 14 bands, including A Tundra, Tim Kinsella, Owen, Disappears and many more acts associated with Joan of Arc. You really can’t go wrong at the price of less than $1 a band.

The A.V. Club has learned that seminal emo outfit Cap’n Jazz is playing a mini reunion set Friday night at the Empty Bottle as part of the Joan Of Arc Don’t Mind Control Variety Show.

So the question that started my awkward conversation with Mike Kinsella has been answered!

Mike Kinsella and his friend (who I unfortunately did not get the name of) sitting at the southern end of the bar. I pop up before I leave the show…

Me: Hey, it was really nice meeting you.

Mike Kinsella: Yeah man, you too. [shakes hand]

Me: Hey, I know this is a little odd, but I have to ask. I heard rumors Cap’n Jazz are getting back together… Is that true?

MK: I don’t know, are they getting back together?

MK’s friend: Well, what do you think? Do you think Cap’n Jazz should get back together, or should they leave it behind, keep it in the ground? What do you want Cap’n Jazz to do?

Me: [clearly flustered] I… umm… I think they should do whatever makes them happy.

MK: So, what makes me happy?

Me: Umm….

MK: You wrote the paper, so what makes me happy?

Me: I… um…

MK: So what was your conclusion?

Me: Well, I said the conclusion was… unknown.

And so it went… The rest was a bit of a jumble, and that beginning of me embarrassing myself in front of Kinsella and his friend isn’t word-for-word because its been a few hours and I clearly could have forgotten a word/sentence.

But, Kinsella’s a good sport for even dealing with my “hey, I’m some random fan, answer my every question!” trope I busted out. Kinsella and his friend were certainly very nice to me, and I wish I could have stayed and chatted longer.

But, whatever happens with the reunion rumors, I just hope the Cap’n Jazz guys actually make whatever decisions because they want to. But, considering the amassed discography that makes up the Cap’n Jazz family tree, it’s clear they’ve all been doing things the way they want to for some time. And that’s what makes them all continue to create strong, vital music today, with or without a Cap’n Jazz reunion.

With Pavement’s reunion plans all but finalized, it was only a matter of time before other defunct acts added their name to the list. The latest: Chicago’s Cap’n Jazz.

It might sound too good to be true, but according to a close source, the band — Tim Kinsella, Mike Kinsella, Sam Zurick, Victor Villarreal and Davey von Bohlen — has been rehearsing old material in hopes of putting together a 10-date tour for summer 2010. While nothing is confirmed, the source says the five performers were asked to learn their individual parts for five songs.

Sure, IRR won’t be spilling the beans on their source, so who knows the veracity of that statement. However, it’s not like a reunion would be impossible: The Kinsella brothers are quite close, and Sam and Victor have been in so many Kinsella-related projects it’s hard to keep count. And as for Davey, he’s still a close friend of the band, having recently opened for Mike Kinsella’s full-band Owen gig in Chicago back in September. So who am I to say what may happen?

I’ll try and dig up some information myself. In the meantime, stay tuned for what could be an interesting couple of reunions.

As a majority of my America Is Just A Word interviewees happen to be musicians, it’s great having Darren on board to give some perspective of the other goings on that helped transform emo through the decades. (Of course, an exception to all this is Ian MacKaye, who’s role as a musician and Dischord Records co-founder gives him a completely different perspective than most folks involved in the book.) When it comes to emo in the 90s, Jade Tree was one of the few places where things were really popping. The record label quickly rose to fame with The Promise Ring and continued to soldier on from there, releasing music from numerous indie emo “big names” (whatever that oxymoronic phrase means) such as Hot Water Music, Texas Is The Reason (a split with TPR), Lifetime, Jets To Brazil, Joan of Arc, Pedro The Lion, Cap’n Jazz (the label introduced many people to the band with their double-disc discography) and many a popular non-emo act such as Fucked Up and My Morning Jacket.

But, I’ll let Darren explain it all himself. Enjoy:

How’d you get into music and, more specifically, punk music?

Darren Walters: “A few things happened around the same time that finally got my fully into punk once and for all.
I had been into new wave, alternative and the like and eventually met a few people who were also into the same type of music, including punk.  In and around the same time, my best friend ended up being sent to military school where he became immersed in punk.  His friends at military school helped him stock up on great records which he brought home during his breaks and left with me.  Him and I quickly became 100% into punk rock in about 1985 or so and began going to shows and seeking out as much info as we could on punk rock and watching movies like Suburbia and Decline of the Western Civilization over and over again.

What was it like growing up in Wilmington?

DW: “Wilmington is at the northern tip of Delaware and the biggest city in the state.  Essentially, it is a suburb of Philadelphia as it is only about 25 minutes outside of the city.

It was-and is, for the most part, devoid of any culture during my childhood and continues to be so to this day.  It’s basically your typical American suburb and it’s the place that I still call home and have form most of my life.

Having spent most of my life here I’ve come to like it, which is interesting considering I spent those formative punk years trying to think of a way to get out.  Growing older and being able to leave, I got used to the idea of being in Delaware.  It also became advantageous for Jade Tree to remain in Delaware as it was inexpensive compared to cities like NY or SF where Tim and I had often discussed moving the label to (in fact, Tim lived in NYC for many years).”

On the Jade Tree site, it says that you and Tim were pretty involved in the DC punk community. Considering Delaware isn’t exactly a walk away from DC, how did you balance a life at home with going to shows and building on a community in DC?

DW: “I was involved in the DC scene in the sense that I was going to shows an awful lot in the MD/DC/VA area and Jade Tree worked with plenty of bands from there over the years.  DC was one of our support systems and one of our scenes and we of course looked up to many of the people involved in it both past and present.

It was easy enough to go back and forth from DE to DC.  Tim had grown up in DC and still had family there, I had a girlfriend there at one time, Jade Tree had bands there, tons of friends and so on.  It was just something that we did without thinking.  And it’s less than 2 hours away.  I used to be able to get to the Damnation house in an hour and 10 minutes on a good day. Granted, I was doing 90+ mph, but the point is that this was a drive that Tim and I made almost weekly, or at least monthly, for years.”

How did you and Tim meet?

DW: “My best friend growing up attended college in MD and met Tim at a show in DC.  They started a label called Axtion Packed together and that’s how I met Tim, through him.

Once my label, Hi-Impact, was beginning to fall apart, coincidentally so was AP, so Tim and I decided that perhaps it would be best if we combined forces to work on new label.”

What was it like being in high school and then college, trying to balance the life of a student and the work needed to run a label (be it Hi-Impact or Jade Tree) and a band as well?

DW: “It was crazy of course!  At times it would be fairly simple because there wouldn’t be much to do in the very beginning.  However, when there would be a new release in production or a record would need to be mailed out to radio or to all of the awaiting orders, it would take hours, if not days, to do so.  That could be intense.  Especially because for the first few Jade Tree releases, many of the records were put together by hand.  You can imagine how long it takes to hand assemble 4000+ 7″s & CDS for instance.  We would enlist every one we knew to come on over and enjoy free pizza, get the latest release and help us out.  It was a community thing and it helped Jade Tree get off its feet tremendously.”

Snowing EP Vinyl cover

I stumbled upon these guys from an article on punknews.org, and I’m glad I did. Snowing is a quartet out of Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, and they seem deeply into the Pennsylvania emo thing. Which, these days seems to be a resurgence of the kind of cataclysmic catharsis that Cap’n Jazz and early Promise Ring. It’s been swirling through the sounds of fellow PAers Algernon Cadwallader and the pre-Snowing band Street Smart Cyclist. It’s pretty immediate and just as forward thinking as anything else coming out these days.

You can grab their EP, Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit, for free on If You Make It. Below is the song “Sam Rudich,” the EP opener, and, by from what I’ve deduced from the band’s Facebook page, the name of a friend of the band members. Take a listen.

Snowing – “Sam Rudich”:

[audio http://leorgalil.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/01-sam-rudich.mp3]

Honestly, I don’t often think about the state of ‘emo’. The punk scene we came out of and the punk scene now are completely different. It’s like glam rock now. We played the Bamboozle fests this year and we felt really out of place. I could name maybe three bands we played with. It was just a sea of neon shirts to us. If this is the world we helped create, then I apologise.

Valid points, sure enough. Surely, I tend to appreciate it when bands generally refuse to bash groups that they’ve influenced, instead taking the high road and not delving into that subject simply to not unnecessarily stir any bad blood. What’s funny about all this is that Suptic really is speaking the truth about not keeping up with the state of emo. After all, what he’s describing sounds like scrunk, a sound that’s definitely indebted to and a part of the geneology of emo, but a creation that exists unto itself.

How do I know it’s scrunk Suptic is referring to? Well, the neon shirts are a dead give away. But so is the part of his following answer:

We at least can play our instruments.

Same ole’, same ole’. But, to each his own. I never particularly liked much of the Get Up Kids stuff to begin with… I can understand the role they had in both accelerating emo’s ascent to the top of the charts and providing support for the Vagrant business model, but most of their tunes I just can’t dig. But, as Suptic reveals in the interview, they certainly do fit into the 2nd wave emo lineage:

Fugazi is the reason I am in a band today. When I was 14 I heard Fugazi and started a band the next day. We grew up on indie rock. Superchunk, Rocket from the Crypt, Sunny Day Real Estate, Cap’n Jazz. That’s the kind of stuff we were listening to when we started.

Sounds familiar. And though Superchunk and Rocket aren’t emo bands, Superchunk is noted to have a pretty solid influence on 90s indie music, including emo (The Promise Ring anyone? That’s all Pitchfork could do when talking about TPR was to compare the two), and Rocket are a Drive Like Jehu offshoot of post-hardcore. Basically your out-of-the-ordinary ordinary roundup of influences for a second wave emo act.

This whole thing could potentially snowball into the Tim Kinsella vs Max Bemis free-for-all, though Tim had a more malicious rant against the emo acts he inspired, and Max had just as much venom when tossing insults right back. Good for Suptic for generally foregoing all the drama of attacking every band in Alternative Press and generally letting them be, even if he can’t give them credit for their music. Oh well.

The Get Up Kids – “Action & Action” (video):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFTh_Lr522k]

VS

The Bamboozle fare… BrokeNCYDE – “40 oz” (video):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoLUc6cqAOU]