Over the summer Jawbreaker staged a reunion at Chicago's Riot Fest. The set from the West Coast punk icons was one of the most anticipated shows of 2017 and came nearly three decades after the band released its debut album, Unfun, in 1989 (Jawbreaker's breakthrough, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, would arrive four years later).
That reunion set was preceded by a decade-in-making documentary directed by Tim Irwin and Keith Schieron (the dudes behind Minutemen doc We Jam Econo). While the film premiered at San Francisco's Alamo Drafthouse in August, cities like Tampa were deprived of screenings for Don’t Break Down: A Film About Jawbreaker.
Not anymore.
Eric Turner — drummer for Tampa pop-punk band Awkward Age and co-founder of History Bike Tampa — is staging two December screenings at Seminole Heights record shop Microgroove, and interested parties may want to act fast on tickets since tickets for a December 9 showing are already sold out.
UPDATE: Planet Retro Records will hold the only Pinellas Country screening of the film on December 16. More info and tickets to that screening — which will feature 30 spaces for reserved seating and standing room area — are available via local.cltampa.com.
Turner, 36, says he fell in love with the band is high school after hearing Revenge Therapy, which he listened to nonstop after a friend passed him a copy.
"This was before the time of file sharing and digital downloads so I remember how hard it was for us to find a copy of Dear You," Turner told CL.
"We had bad copies of bad copies of tapes passed around [by] our friends until one day in the middle of nowhere Georgia (probably a FYE or something) I found a used CD copy. It was like finding a long lost treasure. The band has influenced me for years."
Turner says he wanted to do the screenings at Microgroove because shop owner Keith Ulrey actually sold Turner an original press copy of Unfin years ago. Ulrey, the 46-year-old co-founder of Tampa's New Granada Records and drummer for bands like Rec Center and Pohgoh, puts it even simpler.
"It just makes since to show the Jawbreaker doc in a DIY/indie record store. Plain and simple," Ulrey told CL. "It keeps with the band's original aesthetic and hardcore fanbase."
Watch a trailer for the film below, and get more information on the screenings via local.cltampa.com. Keep an eye out for a forthcoming Awkward Age EP by following the band on Bandcamp.
This article appears in Nov 2-9, 2017.