We Nibbled Our Butter Cookie Rings to the Knuckle: Cap’n Jazz’s Shmap’n Shmazz Turns 30
The short-lived high school garage band is one of the most quintessential American teenage tropes, but it takes true once-in-a-lifetime talent to produce one that becomes and remains as influential as the Kinsella brothers’ Buffalo Grove band.
My hometown is always on the precipice of completion, and the people there hold their cards quite close to their chest. I went home for the holidays this past winter, and as I passed by the remnants of the now defunct Sam Ash I grew up across the street from—the one that Mike Kinsella recalls to have purchased his first guitar at—I thought of how many remarkable things come from being surrounded by what feels inherently unremarkable. The town in question—Buffalo Grove, Illinois—is a part of a handful of Chicago suburbs lovingly referred to by their residents as “Action Heights,” thanks to how mundane and cookie cutter each town is, and “Heights” referring to the towns Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights. Cap’n Jazz’s Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped On, and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over, colloquially known as Shmap’n Shmazz, turns 30 this month. Because of its purely DIY distribution, there’s no known release date beyond June 1995, but in the time since, it’s become one of the most seminal emo albums of all time, oftentimes hailed as the origin of Midwest emo. The Kinsella brothers, who also grew up in Buffalo Grove, would go on to make even more greatly influential rock music in bands on their own: Tim in Joan of Arc, Mike in American Football.
Buffalo Grove is a town that spans between Cook and Lake counties in Northeast Illinois. Its inhabitants will say they’re “from Chicago” despite being 30 minutes from downtown. Many people refer to Cap’n Jazz as a Chicago band, but to label them as such is a categorical misrepresentation of who they are. The inscrutable minutiae of suburbia is a cornerstone both of the subject matter of Tim’s lyrics, and why they’re effective. The imagery of so many of their songs feel specific to a suburban upbringing: “I am drunk in the breeze in the park chasing kites and splashing puddles”; “We nibbled our butter cookie rings to the knuckle”; “I watch myself in the fishtank mirror in the corner, all the fish died for Friday’s fish fry.” The representation of these ultra-specific youthful experiences are what made people in the Buffalo Grove community flock to them. It spoke to the complex love/hate relationship teenagers have with their mundane hometowns. They’re disenchanted with the confines of their zip code, but can’t help but be fond of the most tender moments of their childhood.
Before they were called Cap’n Jazz, the group called themselves “Toe Jam.” The songs were about mundane inconveniences like homework, since not much else was on the barely pubescent minds of those recent Catholic K-8 grads. Toe Jam’s drummer Jeff was a neighbor of the Kinsella’s until he eventually became the star running back of their high school’s football team and had to quit the band. So, a then-13-year-old Mike Kinsella bought a drum kit, took his place, and Toe Jam became Cap’n Jazz. The kids went to Wheeling High School, whose football team I recall my cross-town high school always handpicking for homecoming games to secure an easy win.
Tim Kinsella’s oftentimes unintelligible lyrics have a “scream first, process second” charm to them—they’re just as evocative as they are vague. For having been as young as 15 when writing some of these songs, his quirky wordplay and rhyme schemes are impressively deft and dextrous (“We live in quick flips, slips, tips, and taps / To snap us outta these statue traps”; “Hammy fat fingers pinch clammy cold coins”). He was a bookworm as a kid and his kindergarten teacher went on the record saying that she thought he’d be president one day. Tim had no interest in becoming president, but he channeled his command of the English language into his music, penning four novels and later teaching college courses on creative writing.
While Tim’s lyricism stands strong on its own, it’s only strengthened by the youthful and gifted band that surrounds it. Opener and fan favorite track “Little League” singlehandedly exemplifies everything great about Cap’n Jazz: Tim comes in barrelling the opening “hey,” as the track’s simultaneously crunchy and bright guitars and Mike’s high-power drumming support the space surrounding him. “Hey coffee eyes / You got me coughing up my cookie heart / Making promises to myself / Promises like seeds of everything I could be,” he addresses his hickey-prone, Molly Ringwald-type lover. Girl craziness is a consistent throughline of Shmap’n Jazz, but Tim never takes it to a place where it feels like self-pitied cliché. While he may be breaking the status quo musically, his adherence to social norms is unwavering—oftentimes leaning into the now quintessential emo trope of being a goofy little guy. We would not have the pun-filled and referential song titles of Origami Angel and Marietta without “Little League”’s “kitty kitty cat” refrain, or when Tim decides to scream the first half of the alphabet from the corner of the room in the middle of “In the Clear.”
The girl-craziness continues on tracks like “Puddle Splashers” and “Qué Suerté!” “We’re busy touching ‘till we’re dizzy stupid,” Tim repeats during the ⅞-metered intro of the former. Fluidity of tempo and meter is used throughout the record, which exemplifies both how creative and talented they all were as musicians from such a young age. “Flashpoint: Catheter” is in 5/4, “Yes, I Am Talking To You” is constantly throwing in random bars of two and three, and the drumming on “Precious” doesn’t sound too dissimilar to a lot of the wave of technically challenging post punk that’s come out of the UK in recent years.
For my money, “Messy Life” is Cap’n Jazz’s best song, even if just for its bulletproof hook. Tim muses on the people he encounters that are stubborn and find themselves too attached to routine. He talks about boys who smell like salami and how his cousin Bucky never takes his hat off, even when he goes swimming. “Yeah, I know there’s a lesson in there somewhere,” Tim quips, the monotony and unchanging environment of a town like Buffalo Grove aiding in fostering equally unchanging habits and routine. My mother, who’s lived in the town for nearly a quarter-century, was forced to start frequenting a new nail salon—it’s the most jarring thing that’s happened to her lately, but she’s pleased with the variety of the new salon’s offerings. As much as routine fosters comfort, it incites angst: “And you are colder than oldness could ever ever be / And you are bolder than buzzing bugs,” Tim wails during the song’s euphoric hook.
Though what can be culled from the archives of Cap’n Jazz’s early performances is sparse, Tim’s stage presence was infectious—dancing and screaming among his peers donning beanies and bowl cuts. Playing in driveways, random banquet halls, and backyards, the punk scene of the Chicago suburbs was very insular—they didn’t really have much choice otherwise. Chicago’s infrastructure isn’t as conducive to house shows as a city like Philadelphia, so the few DIY bands that were active had to get creative with venues while still underage. Gauge and Braid came up alongside Cap’n Jazz (they even played a triple reunion show together at Bottom Lounge in 2010), and they all drew inspiration from each other, but Mike Kinsella cited Cap’n Jazz to have “…that sort of Dischord [Records], Fugazi influence,” in contrast to his later work in American Football. Tim co-signed that, admitting to having skipped his last week of high school to follow Fugazi on tour, exemplifying his unshakeable passion for not only the music of DIY bands, but the community they fostered. Cap’n Jazz’s true-to-form DIY ethos, and a stark appreciation for those that came before them, is what fostered an acceptance from these adjacent scenes, even to the genre’s harshest traditionalists.
If anything, Midwest emo—as it’s defined by TikTok—is what happens when you pulverize and bastardize the aspects of Cap’n Jazz’s music that made them so influential. The more unfortunate byproduct of that misinterpretation is how easily it gets into the hands of record labels trying to make a quick buck off of a trend. What constitutes “Midwest emo” is a ceaseless debate (one that allows bands like the Front Bottoms to be categorized as such, despite being from New Jersey), but the reliance on vague aesthetics and tongue-in-cheek lyrics have begun to eclipse the ethos that once made the genre a vehicle of catharsis. A handful of later emo revival and current fifth wave bands have earned criticism for reliance on internet references and sophomoric lyrical themes, and I find it hard to argue against those criticisms. Mom Jeans, a band from California, is the first act that much of the general public associates with Midwest Emo. Teenagers on TikTok will flip through a rack of funky patterned sweaters at Goodwill and ask, “Who’s Midwest emo boyfriend died?” The plot has been lost on the musically subversive and community-driven spirit that was built by Cap’n Jazz and their contemporaries. Many new bands, particularly those in the DIY scenes of individual cities, continue to carry on these ideals, but what is ultimately pushed to the general public is in diametric opposition.
What makes Cap’n Jazz so influential are their boundary pushing eccentricities. A band like Mom Jeans is inherently and instantly accessible, appealing directly to the stereotypical Carhartt beanie-wearing, amateur skateboarder white boy—as frontman Eric Butler waxes about failed relationships that definitely had more nuance than he lets on. The goofiness of “Little League”’s “kitty kitty cat” refrain is not comparable to the poorly-aged, chronically online indulgence of naming a song “Vape Nation.” What makes Cap’n Jazz distinctively Midwest emo is how they internalized their specific surroundings in a way that was maturely profound for a 16 year old to convey. They weren’t blaming a person for their woes, but rather the culture (or, really, lack thereof) that surrounded them.
In the 30 years since Shmap’n Shmazz, Cap’n Jazz have been cited as an influence to bands that have become seminal in their own right. Algernon Cadwallader’s Some Kind of Cadwallader feels like a spiritual successor to the work of the Kinsellas. Frontman Peter Helmis’ half-melodic-half-screaming vocals, the equally bright and crunchy guitars, and their freaky sensibilities all evoke the lightning-in-a-bottle emo music that the brothers pioneered. The “bop-shoo-bops” on “Motivational Song” and the “Oh man, it’s taking me over” hook on “Some Kind of Cadwallader” harken back to the infectious nature of songs like “Messy Life” and “Little League.” These kinds of moments capture just how much the band are students of Cap’n Jazz and the like. Cadwallader’s 13-minute, mostly instrumental closer “In Response to Irresponsibility,” however, is the signpost of the needle moving forward. Sprawling, expressive guitar riffs dance around the track’s first three minutes, ushering in a brief, quirky, toy box percussion break of charmingly panned tambourine, shaker, triangle, güiro, and woodblock. It begins to accompany the song’s only lyrics: “When trees with more leaves never teach the younger trees / We all learn the same thing / How quickly we rot back into the earth and start over.” Algernon Cadwallader’s Philly scenemates Glocca Mora, Marietta, and Snowing would soon follow that same path.
Marietta, who have three increasingly large, sold-out reunion shows scheduled around Philadelphia this October, kept the sound of Cap’n Jazz alive in the city after Algernon Cadwallader’s first disbandment in 2012. They ruled the Philly scene in the mid-2010s alongside Modern Baseball, whose lyrics were (in contrast to Marietta) more enunciated and straightforward in their confessionalism. “Pony Up!!,” the opener of Marietta’s second and final album As It Were, is succinct in conveying disillusionment, pulling from the same jagged abstractionism of Cap’n Jazz and Algernon Cadwallder. In the first iteration of the song’s infectious hook, frontman Evan Lescallette sings, “Begone from me an everlasting sigh went skyward / Marching on and on and on,” with each instance of “on” being delivered increasingly impassioned. Lescallette’s lyrics may not be as wordplay-heavy as Kinsella, but the focus on being emotionally evocative is what has allowed Marietta fans to remain passionate enough to sell out their reunion shows in minutes.
Kinsella-isms continue to define DIY emo to this day, even just in the nooks and crannies of the underground. Philadelphia’s armbite, Haunt Dog, and Precious Little Life all cite Cap’n Jazz as a considerable influence. These bands all exhibit some combination of experimentation with meter, abstracted, evocative lyricism, and a tasteful amount of goofiness, but with each of them adding their own personal flair. Armbite will sometimes lean into the hardcore and math-y stylings of bands like the Callous Daoboys, and Precious Little Life often incorporate synths and electronic elements à la glass beach and Crying. Armbite frontman Harrison Lennertz says of his affinity for the band, “When I think of Cap’n Jazz I’m really thinking about the energy that they exhibit—Tim’s screaming, the guitar work, the overall builds of the songs. Especially in ‘Little League,’ everything kind of works together in such a chaotic yet well woven manner and it’s something that I always would like to emulate in my own writing.” Bands that are active and notable in just their local markets is where Cap’n Jazz’s influence should be reaching. They may just be playing bars and basement shows, but these bands devote their spare time to making music because they simply just can’t live without it. These bands are not meant to be lucrative, but rather to foster community first and foremost. That’s the Cap’n Jazz way.
Cap’n Jazz called it quits in the middle of a nationwide tour in 1995. They were fresh out of high school and riding on the overwhelmingly positive reception of the record in Midwest DIY markets, having sold over 3,000 physical copies of Shmap’n Shmazz at local shows. On a drive to Little Rock to get a guitar amp fixed, guitarist Victor Villareal suffered a non-lethal drug overdose. Afterwards, the band followed its instincts and drove 17 hours back home to Illinois. Though the overdose was a traumatic experience for the band, their ambitions remained intact—nearly all of Cap’n Jazz’s members, including Villareal, continue to play in different bands to this day. “That was the harshest part of the couple of years post-Nirvana, that all the jocks and the pea-brains were suddenly wearing the codes of rebellion that my friends and I really depended on to recognize each other up until that point,” Tim said in an interview with Tone Glow last year.
The short-lived high school garage band is one of the most quintessential American teenage tropes, but it takes true once-in-a-lifetime talent to produce one that becomes and remains as influential as Tim Kinsella’s crew. Their hearts were clearly in it, and those around them could feel it in spades. They’re all in their forties and fifties now, most of them fathers and divorced. 30 years ago, all the freaks who were just a 45-minute drive from Chicago found solace in these lanky white boys’ familiar disillusions. For however long they could play in those banquet halls before noise ordinances set in, the world belonged to them. Whether some posers find their way to these shows is outside their control, but if they’re there, they better be fucking moshing.
