#103: The Audit with J. Robbins

Talking Jawbox, Burning Airlines, Office of Future Plans, and many more.

Photo by Shane Gardner

To skim a list of J. Robbins’ various projects over the past four decades is to open up numerous thematic cans of worms. Jawbox. Burning Airlines. Channels. Office of Future Plans. Report Suspicious Activity. Government Issue. Rollkicker Laydown. None segues into the other thematically, and the names don’t imply much sonically. (The exceptions on both counts being Government Issue and Report Suspicious Activity.)

That makes J. a perfect subject for the Audit, wherein Band Name Bureau talks to an artist about the project names in their discography. And it was the perfect time to chat because of his upcoming live dates, which kick off this week in Chicago opening for Bob Mould.¹

To continue the “Kyle Ryan in the ’90s” theme established by the Ean Sicko Audit: I first interviewed J. in 1994 for my friend’s video zine. He politely, if grudgingly,² indulged us after a Jawbox show, which you can see here—sans interview, because I would cringe myself to death otherwise. I have since spoken to J. many times over the years, and it’s always a great chat.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length, blah blah blah.

Jawbox, 1989-1997, 2019-2025

Band Name Bureau: You did a great interview last year with Norman Brannon for Anti-Matter. At one point, you mentioned how Jawbox lyrics are word salad, something you and I have talked about too. You elaborated with Norm, saying you consciously avoided revealing anything too personal out of “a fear of being too easily understood.” I feel like some of your band names have flowed from that same instinct.

J. Robbins: Really? [Laughs.]

BNB: Yeah, Burning Airlines. Office of Future Plans. I could be reading too much into them, but I'm curious about your process.

JR: I don't know if I have a process, really. Jawbox, we just got that name by flipping through Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which is a dictionary of sort of weird colloquialisms from around the world, I guess. We were just opening it to a random page and putting a finger down and seeing what came up. I just liked the word. I thought, “Oh, it's got some cool letters in it.” Like a nice, angular X. [Laughs.]

It means a number of different things. Sometimes it means an open sewer, sometimes it means loose talk around the kitchen sink when you're doing the washing up. I used the word to mean television in one song.

The main thing about coming up with a name, honestly I think, is getting over the hump. It's getting it out of the way, because the magic of it is that sooner or later, you just get used to using it. At one time, Butthole Surfers was a rough go! [Laughs.] Then sooner or later, it just is the name of the band, and you’re like, “Okay.” [Laughs.]

Burning Airlines, 1997-2001

JR: I actually have to credit [bassist] Bill Barbot with pitching that one to me. It just comes from our mutual love of Brian Eno, because it's from his song “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” which is just a weird fantasy about traveling. It's like traveling first class in a crashing jet, as if the crashing is a feature, not a flaw. I was so relieved, because Bill literally showed up at my door and goes, “How about Burning Airlines?” I was sold. I didn't have to think about it.

But then it was interesting later, because I know that name is from Brian Eno. Brian Eno's music means a lot to me personally—those first four or five Eno solo records are very important in my musical education, my musical makeup. But I don't think anyone necessarily hears it in songs that I've written. The sound of the band has very little to do with Brian Eno in any way that anyone can hear. And then of course, it got us in trouble after 9/11. Couldn't have a band at that point.

BNB: I remember hearing you had to cover up the name on your gear cases. But you're doing a Burning Airlines set at Best Friends Forever fest in October. It's still a ways out, so I don't know how much prep work you've done. Do you play any of those songs in solo sets?

JR: Some of them. I mean, when I started doing solo acoustic shows, I played a lot more of them, but as I've written new songs, they sort of fell by the wayside. They don't really translate that well. Some of them do okay, some of them don't. In the J. Robbins Band setting, when Pete [Moffett] is playing drums, we kind of feel like Burning Airlines songs are fair game, really.³

There's a few that I wouldn't touch. There's some, like "Meccano," the one that Bill sang. Obviously we're not going to do that, and there are some where [bassist Mike] Harbin contributed... I mean, I feel like the songs with Harbin we wrote collaboratively, but there are tunes where I wouldn't feel comfortable playing them. But for the most part, the Burning Airlines stuff, I feel like it's me and Pete, if we like the song, we should play it. But I think there's only been three or four that we've put into the set from time to time.

BNB: Which ones?

JR: "Wheaton Calling," "Pacific 231," "The Escape Engine." I guess that's it. Then I've done a pretty different arrangement of "Outside the Aviary" in my acoustic sets.

I'm actually in the middle of baking the tapes from the Burning Airlines records so that I can transfer them to digital so that we have access to the original tracks, because Brooks [Harlan, bassist] wants to make sure that he is 100 percent accurate in what he's going to play. I need to refresh on that because a lot of the guitar writing is pretty nuts. It's pretty different than a lot of what I would be inclined to do now.

BNB: I was curious what you've noticed going back to that stuff. It sounds like you've noticed nutty guitar parts.

JR: But I always knew that it was a thing that I was trying to break away from. I wrote some overly intellectual guitar parts. Sometimes the song ended up… not being an afterthought, but I'd kind of write myself into a corner and write beyond my ability to play. Then I’d have to work up to being able to execute what I wrote and being able to sing something on top of it. All of that was really, really cool. But then periodically I'd go, "Isn't there supposed to be a song here?" [Laughs.]

When I started doing the solo records, I put my guitar into an open tuning that I thought sounded cool. I started writing way, way simpler. Just trying to get the guitar out of the way of the song, figure out what the song is trying to do, and then go back and retroactively flesh out parts that have a little more depth to them. That's just much more fun. It's just bashing away on something, really, that is physically simple to do, but sounds rich enough that it excites my ears, but it's physically not crazy. Physically, it's much easier to get to.

So it is wild to go back to Burning Airlines stuff and be like, “Oh my God, I never stop here.” It's like everything all at once, all the time.

BNB: In the years I've been talking to you, you've always been on this mission to simplify. I think it came up when I spoke to you around Identikit⁴ in 2001.

JR: Yeah, a lot of times in band world, you show up with a part—some kind of cool-sounding guitar part or a cool-sounding bass riff or whatever—and you go, “I wrote a song. Here's my song. Hey, we're playing my song!” But of course the song—in a band like Jawbox or certainly a lot of Burning Airlines stuff, to some extent—the song is the sum total of what the individuals are putting together. It's an ensemble creation, and everybody's part is the identity of the song, which is all really cool. It's great. But I also like song songs. I just really wanted to write from the perspective that the song comes first, and if you wrote a really good song, you could play it a lot of different ways and it would still retain its identity, its fundamental character.

Channels, 2003-2006

JR: I wanted it to be Channel, because I liked the idea of a verb to channel something. That's what I really was wanting. But then I found out that there was a Richmond band called Channel, and that really bummed me out. I was like, “Okay, fine, Channels.” It's a present-tense verb. But it's also supposed to flip back and forth between that—the present-tense verb of channeling something—then also meaning a noun. Like the channels of information, the channels on a tv, that kind of thing.

But really, it's another case of a fairly instantaneous call because part of the magic of that band was, it's the most intuitive band I had ever done up to that point. A lot of stuff just came out of the three of us. We were psyched about it and went, “Where did that come from? Fucking awesome!” I think we all were riding a wave of enthusiasm about our collaboration, and that was really nice. So it wasn't a name with a whole lot of thought behind it. It was just like, “What are we going to call this thing? Channels? Sounds good. Okay.”

BNB: I remember when I spoke to y'all for Punk Planet, the cover accidentally referred to you as “The Channels.” I remember you were like, “Oh, yeah, Janet [Morgan, bassist] had suggested the Channels.”

JR: I think I remember going back and forth about whether there should be a “the,” but I like it without a “the,” because then it gets to be verb.

Government Issue, 1985-1988

BNB: This was an ongoing concern when you joined, but I always thought that Government Issue was a perfect '80s hardcore name.

JR: Oh, it's such a good name. It's such a great name and great logo. That logo, the stencil with this sort of off-kilter stencil lettering. It couldn't be better. It's iconic.

BNB: It's such of a time and place—I mean that in a complimentary way. When you look at that, especially the logo, you know exactly what it is. Although, as you mentioned in that Norm interview, you guys got more adventurous in the later releases, like with the electric sitar. I love those albums all the same.

JR: I don't want anyone to think I'm shitting on GIs, because I am super proud of those. Both the GIs records that I played on were recorded in one weekend and mixed in the next weekend. So considering that, they sound fucking awesome, but every now and then, there are things that make me chuckle. The sitar makes me chuckle. The beginning of the song "Man in a Trap," there is this kind "grrssh" sound that's supposed to evoke a jail door slamming or something like that. It's a washing machine lid. And when you hear it, it pretty much can't be anything but a washing machine lid. [Laughs.]

Rollkicker Laydown, 1992

JR: The story of that record is that when GI broke up, we had two new songs, and I thought they were really cool. If we hadn't have broken up, maybe we were going to enter a new phase of musical growth that would've been really cool. But instead, I think the wind was already going out of the sails for Tom [Lyle, guitarist] and John [Stabb, vocalist] at that point.

So the band broke up, but I was just haunted by those two songs. One of them, the one with the kind of "Tomorrow Never Knows" beat, that one was pretty much done musically. The other one I remember thinking, the song isn't quite gelling yet, but man, when it does, it's going to be really cool. So I was sort of haunted by those tunes.

Then a couple of years into Jawbox, I was living in the WGNS house, which WGNS was a recording studio in DC. It was Geoff Turner's recording studio. It was in a kind of cramped basement in Arlington, and it was a basement of a group house. I was living in the attic.

I'm still obsessed with these songs. I'm in touch with Tom, Pete's in California, but I know that he's coming back. John had a new band. I was just like, these songs never quite got together, but I love them so much. If we could record these songs… It's not going to be a new band, because Pete's in California, and Tom doesn't want to do a band, and I have Jawbox, but let's capture this. This is the best shit we ever did together. And I want to sing it. John had written vocals for those songs when GI played them, but I just felt like I had a mission.

Geoff Turner recorded them in the basement of the GNS house. What was cool is we got Iain Burgess to mix the tunes when he was working with Jawbox on our second record. That was just super cool. Iain was a fan of GI's. He was a fan of Tom's guitar sound, of course, and of Pete's drumming. He was super fun to work with. Those songs turned out really great for being recorded in a basement with the drums in the corner in front of a fucking sink. [Laughs.]

The name was… Tom was working at the Washington Post at that point, and I guess the rollerkicker laydown is a part of the printing press. It either pushes out the new role of newsprint or pushes out the old one when it's reached the end.

Report Suspicious Activity, 2005-2017

JR: That started as a Vic Bondi solo record that he contacted me about producing. The way that he reached out, it was unclear. I thought that he had a rhythm section and he just wanted me to record. I wrote back to him for clarification, and I said, “Do you have a rhythm section?” He said no, and I said, "You have one now!" At which point he was like, “Oh great. Well, then this will be a band.” But the first record is all Vic's songs.

The subsequent records with Erik Denno getting into the mix, there's always one or two songs that I wrote, and the rest of them would be Vic's songs. But sometimes we'd take them apart and reconfigure them in pretty different ways. It was cool. Once Erik was involved, Vic would have a song and then he'd be like, "I don't know. I think I can hear Erik singing this. I'd rather hear Erik sing this than me."

So it was a super, super fun project. Initially, the first idea of the project was it's a Vic Bondi solo record called Report Suspicious Activity. But then when we decided that it would be a band, we just took that as the band name.

BNB: That name captures the time well: post-9/11, the Iraq War happening, the awfulness of the Bush administration.

JR: God, what's really fucked up is we had T-shirts that say, "Why not invade Canada?" on the back.

BNB: Oh no! [Laughs.]

JR: I found one recently in the basement. I found a little stash of these shirts, and I was like, “Oh my God. These haven't aged well.” [Laughs.]

Office of Future Plans, 2009-2016

JR: I read an interview with Armando Iannucci in which he referenced Dick Cheney's office where he drew up the schemes for the invasion of Iraq and everything else. It was purposely given an incredibly boring, innocuously bureaucratic name that if you saw this name, you'd fall asleep just thinking about it. No one would ever ask what happens in the, I think it was called the Future Planning Commission. It's so vague and bureaucratic-sounding that you just forget it before you've even said it. That was part of an effort to obfuscate what it was really about, which was… evil, right? [Laughs.] I think in In the Loop, I can't remember what they called it in the movie.

BNB: The Office of Special Plans is what the Cheney one was actually called.

JR: Right, okay. So Cheney's thing was Office of Special Plans, and then the thing in the movie, I think, was the Future Planning Commission.

I'm not especially a devotee of metal, although some of my absolute favorite bands are metal bands—I really love Gojira. I love them. But I'm not a metal guy per se. One thing I've always loved in the metal world is these super-antisocial band names, like Disemboweler or whatever. A name that's just dripping with evil and violent intent. So Office of Future Plans was a twisted version, was a J. version, of the most metal band name you could have. Because it's this innocuous, bureaucratic name that is designed to obfuscate your evil intentions. That was my theory behind that name.

Then also sometimes I would think about it, and I'd be like, yeah, this is also a nod to the fact that you have a lot of dreams and ideas about what you might do, but then you've got to go and execute them. You've got to actually make it happen. And making it happen is the harder part.

Every band is an Office of Future Plans when it starts. [Laughs.] You're just like, “What are we going to do? Where are we going to go?” Maybe you make it happen, and maybe you don't.

BNB: The Office of Future Plans page on the Dischord site says the band was “hoodwinked” into existence because the Bomb asked you to open for them in Baltimore.

JR: Yeah, it sort of happened backwards.

When our son Callum was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, one of the things that happened for me was I was like, “How can I presume to carry on putting my energy into music?” This is a wake-up call. I have to grow up and put aside this selfish shit and just concentrate on what is really important, which is figuring out how to take care of this child and be a good father.

It probably wasn't more than six months, but there's this period of time where there wasn't brain space or time or anything to be thinking about music. That was an incredibly complicated time in my life. But I eventually figured out how to start making time to just play guitar for half an hour late at night when everybody's gone to bed. Then songs started coming out. I would do little Pro Tools demos and stuff, and just figuring out a way to make time to create again.

Suddenly I was like, “Holy shit, I'm a whole person again.” Now I recognize that this is an essential thing for me to do in some form. This isn't going to be anything but me making demos of these songs. Then once I started, I was like, “Gosh, I love these songs. What am I going to do with them?” At that time, I was like, “Well, I'm never going to make a solo record. That's ridiculous.” [Laughs.] I was just really uncomfortable with the idea.

But I thought, I have this recording studio. I have these talented friends. I ended up starting to record the songs with Darren [Zentek, drummer] and Brooks and Gordon [Withers, cellist]. It sort of felt like a band, but I didn't really know where it was supposed to be going. I was just like, we'll record these songs and flesh them out. It felt really great. It had a band kind of social glue that was really working. Then the Bomb was coming through town, and they were like, “Do you want to play?” I was like, “Oh, okay. We're a band.”

J. Robbins, 2014-

BNB: You and Norm talked a lot about vulnerability in that interview. So I'm curious: Do you feel more vulnerable putting music out under your own name?

JR: Yeah, but I think that's good. That's what I want. I'm quite proud of what we did in Jawbox, but the creative mechanics of that band and my proclivities… For example, it's like pulling teeth for me to write lyrics. It's very, very hard. It's a struggle. I end up thinking like, okay, it's a necessary struggle, but it's not something that flows with ease. But in the end, I'm like, it's good for me. When I arrive somewhere that I'm happy with, I'm like, okay, that was a trip that was worth taking.

[In Jawbox,] some of those songs I wrote, but most of it was the four of us putting pieces together and negotiating our way into making something that adds up to a song. Maybe I would be the traffic cop of the arrangement in the end, because I would be singing. But the reality is I'd always have melodies before I had words. The words were getting written at the last minute, and the words are collaborative.

I know when I don't really know what I'm trying to say. It's almost like the meaning, the thing I'm trying to express, is sort of hidden from me. Maybe somebody else got the last word about the arrangement, and I feel like it could have been stronger if it was a different way.

[With the J. Robbins Band], I'm comfortable with the idea that anyone might hear my songs and think they're not very good. If you don't like it, then it's not for you. That's okay. But it's really important to me to know that I did the best that I could do, and that whatever is in front of you, I took it as far as I could take it.

So in that sense, it's like, okay, it's a J. Robbins record. I just am really grateful that I have a forum in which to do it, and that anyone has an inclination to check it out.

The choice of calling it J. Robbins is somewhat of a pragmatic choice, because I love band names. I love the creation of this entity that's like a… What's the word? Egregore.

BNB: I don't know that one.

JR: It's a cool word. It's like a witchy kind of word. I'm going to look it up just to make sure I'm using it right. Egregore: “In Western Esotericism, a non-physical entity or thought form that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a group, influencing their beliefs and behaviors.”

So I'm not using the word exactly right. But yeah, “believed to be formed by the shared beliefs and emotions, worship and intentions of a group of people.” So like punk rock, there we go. [Laughs.] Or also, unfortunately, MAGA. It's a thing that doesn't have a physical existence, but it has real-world impact.

Anyway, I love the idea that a band is this new entity that is created from the inspirations of the individuals who are involved, but it's not any one person. It's the synthesis. I love that you give it a name and then it goes on and has kind of autonomy almost.

But then there's just the practical reality of it, getting older, and people peel away and they don't have the same priorities. You have arguments about what kind of music you're trying to make, and you have misunderstandings or people not being on the same page, and things you want to do and not everybody can do it. I do think it's very hard for me to imagine being in a band with a capital B. This is something I've said a lot before.

The band has an existence and you change a member, and suddenly it is a different chemistry. Maybe it's the same band. Maybe it's not. I mean, in some fundamental way, it's not, and I would just always feel bad about it.

But I'm at an age and at a stage where I want to do whatever. If opportunities arise, and I can afford to do them, I want to do them, and I want to feel okay about it if I'm collaborating with people. Of course, I'm not going to play with someone who's not my friend. I'm not going to play with somebody who I don't care about.

For example, last February, when Basilisk came out, Brooks could not come on the tour. So Matt Dowling played bass on that tour, and it was fine. I mean, I greatly prefer to play with Brooks because the J. Robbins Band is a band, and Brooks is a member of the band. But there's an understanding that it's fluid if it has to be. If it's the choice between doing something that I think is worthwhile, and maybe not everybody can do it, I can still find a way to do it, and I don't feel like I'm stabbing anybody in the back. [Laughs.]

“I love band names. I love the creation of this entity… I love that you give it a name and then it goes on and has kind of autonomy.”

BNB: To wrap up, I’ll ask the question I ask everybody: Do you think it's better to have a bad name that sticks out or an innocuous one that fades into the background?

JR: I mean, a bad name is rough. Like we were saying at the beginning, a name just becomes a word. Whatever the name is, it's a word you end up using. The band is going to really stand or fall on the quality of what it does. A great band can make a not-good name into cool name by being a great band. So that's where I fall on that question. [Laughs.]

1. Bob Mould & J. Robbins: The only way this could be more my thing is if Jawbreaker were involved. It’s like a Venn diagram of my favorite music that’s three concentric circles.

2. Which was 100% warranted. He had literally just played a show when two teenage jackasses accosted him, “CaN wE iNtErViEw YoU?!

3. Moffett played drums in Burning Airlines, as well as the last incarnation of Government Issue with J.

4. FUN FACT: Identikit was in the running to be the band’s name, but they ended up using it for their second album.