Judging by the cover, Through Being Cool was a fitting title for Saves the Day’s sophomore album. The album art shows the five band members, most in their late teens, sitting uncomfortably on a couch; behind them, what appears to be a pretty decent party unfolds, but these guys are having no part of it. One bites his nails, another gazes off; they either don’t care, or they’re unaware---not unlike the genre that they so proudly embody.
Emo morphed out of punk sometime between the mid-’80s and early-’90s, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the subgenre broke into the mainstream with bands like Jimmy Eat World and Taking Back Sunday. Through Being Cool predates that tipping point; it doesn’t represent emo at its peak commercial powers, but it certainly precipitated it---due in large part to bands like Fall Out Boy who were influenced by the album.
Even at its peak, emo couldn’t completely avoid the mockery of its punk peers. That’s what wearing your heart on your sleeve gets you. But spurred by the popularity of bands like Saves the Day, emo became, for a few moments, music’s "it" genre: Saves the Day was playing Conan, touring with Weezer, and bagging heavy MTV2 rotation.
This week marked the 15th anniversary of the release of Through Being Cool, back when emo looked more Goodwill than Hot Topic. The album offers a snapshot of a band on the brink of success, a scene about to erupt, and the dividing lines within the punk community---music prejudices that the band spent years working to overcome. Those same guys who once sat alone at the party became its very life.
Saves the Day’s debut, Can’t Slow Down, is released in 1998---right around the time the band members are graduating from high school in central New Jersey.
Chris Conley (Saves the Day singer, songwriter): Bryan Newman and I went to NYU. This was the summer after we graduated high school. We’d just done our very first full U.S. tour with the hardcore band Bane.
Bryan Newman (former Saves the Day drummer): We were driving ourselves around the country in this van that Chris’s mom had bought. I can’t believe how young we were.
Pete Wentz (Fall Out Boy bassist): Emo had nothing to do with black hair. It was like fast hardcore, but more melodic.
Conley: We got heckled at every show. We were playing with hardcore bands---everybody else is screaming, and we sounded like these little kids trying to sing.
Newman: We were totally out of place.
Gabe Saporta (Midtown bassist, vocalist): They were this melodic band, dorky kids. Bryan was wearing this puffy Ralph Lauren polo jacket at a hardcore show.
Steve Evetts (Through Being Cool producer): The scene preaches being inclusionary, instead of exclusionary. The irony is that a lot of exclusion exists.
Conley: We were awkward teenagers. People would make fun of me for my acne.
Newman: People [weren’t] really that interested. Then we started college and wrote Through Being Cool.
Evetts: The band had basically completely turned itself over.
Conley: We had like three different lineups touring on Can’t Slow Down. Within no time, the only other original member left was drummer Bryan.
Conley: At the end of our very first full U.S. tour, our guitar player quit.
Saporta: I actually tried out for the band. They needed a guitar player; I was a bass player. I tried to play guitar because I loved the band so much, but I wasn’t good enough.
Newman: So [guitarist] Dave [Soloway] joined the band midway through that year.
Conley: David was an older kid in school with us in high school, who used to drive us to all our gigs, because he was the first one that got his license.
Newman: He was slowly quitting college and he basically lived in my NYU dorm with me.
Conley: David wasn’t a punk guitar player; he came from bluegrass and his family would sit around singing folk songs and stuff at home, playing piano and banjo.
Conley: We got Ted Alexander along the way.
Newman: He was our roadie and he kind of latched on. I think he was there so much that we just gave him a guitar.
Conley: We booked a tour on the East Coast during our winter break, and we started to see that places were somehow getting more psyched on the band. Now there were maybe three kids in Delaware standing together in the front row.
Newman: We kicked out Sean [McGrath], our first bass player. We really liked him but it wasn’t a good fit. Then we met Eben [D’Amico].
Conley: We had been playing all these cool gigs with all these cool bands. And one of the guys from one of the bands that we had been playing with was this sick bass player. I had his screen name and I wrote him from my dorm room: "hey Eben, do you want to come play bass for us?"
Newman: That ended up being the lineup for that album.
Conley: We continued at NYU, playing shows in the spring semester, going to class, writing papers. I’d been a kid in high school about ten seconds before, suddenly I’m living in New York, going to college, hanging out on the front steps of somebody’s brownstone.
Writing lyrics during college lectures and playing music in any willing parents’ basement, Through Being Cool quickly comes to fruition---while the band’s members are still in their teens.
Conley: I had written all the songs while at NYU, writing lyrics during Psychology 101 and writing the guitar parts over at Bryan’s apartment on 7th street and 2nd avenue.
Dan Sandshaw (head of Equal Vision Records): They were still wide-eyed and excited about all the stuff they had going on.
Newman: We’d come back to New Jersey and practice in the basement of his mom’s house.
Conley: We would all sleep over, working all weekend long on playing these songs I was writing, and tracking demos together to see what it would sound like as a band playing these songs.
Evetts: I produced the first record. [Chris] came to me because he was very much enamored with Lifetime, one of the hardcore bands that influenced him. He was like, "let’s record with the guy who did the Lifetime record."
Newman: He would keep us in line. Definitely the guru of the whole thing.
Conley: We went into the studio for what was going to be nine days of work.
Evetts: Trax East in South River, New Jersey.
Conley: We hit the studio and the songs instantly came to life.
Evetts: I took advantage of the honeymoon phase of the band. We were just cracking jokes and laughing the whole time.
Newman: Steve was this metal guy who somehow got connected with some punk bands. He was from this era of hair metal.
Evetts: I was involved before that in the pop metal scene. The goal of that scene was we gotta make it: Rock stardom, fame, chicks. The hardcore scene, what I loved so much, it’s down to the purity of doing the music.
Newman: He had this wall of albums that he had produced for these obscure Central New Jersey hair metal bands. One of the albums was called Guitars, Stars, and Candy Bars. I remember getting a lot of mileage out of that.
Conley: I blew out my voice tracking vocals so we had to book two extra half-days. We wound up doing Through Being Cool in eleven days.
Evetts: There wasn't a lot of downtime, aside from occasional excursions to Olive Garden.
Newman: I was very nervous in the studio in those early days. It was intense. It took a while for me to get used to.
Evetts: Bryan came close to having a breakdown a few times.
Conley: Eben would give Bryan a look of death if Bryan had a hard time playing a fill in the studio.
Evetts: Eben was at first a little reserved. I remember encouraging him to do more. I love the busier bass players, and he had an R&B influence.
Conley: As we were laying down the guitars and bass and vocals, you couldn’t deny how good this record was. It didn’t become overly uncomfortable [with] Eben and Bryan, because we were all psyched on this record.
Sandshaw: We couldn't stop listening to it when they turned it in. We had to get them the exposure they deserved.
The band’s memorable---if controversial at the time---album cover is an indictment of how image-conscious the scene really is.
Sandshaw: There was a lot of debate over that album cover.
Conley: Bryan and David went to school for photography. I went along with whatever with the artwork, because have no idea what to do about art.
Newman: I had some idea of doing this concept thing.
Conley: It was this glossy image of the band, and we ironically tell some story in the layout.
Newman: We wanted to do something a little kitschy, but we probably weren’t clever enough to really pull that off. It didn't quite have the ironic quality that I think we intended.
Saporta: They had a whole bunch of friends come to shoot a house party.
Wentz: One of my best friends, Gabe Saporta, is on the cover.
Saporta: On the CD is a photo of me kissing my girlfriend from college. One of the other kids on that [cover] is an actor now, James Ransone [Ed.---Ziggy from The Wire!]. He’s the guy on the couch, passed out.
Sandshaw: We felt like it wasn’t the right impression for them.
Newman: As soon as it came out, I was like, ‘fuck, I wish we hadn’t done that.’
Conley: At the time, the hardcore world was so anti-rock star. People said, "look at the album cover; you guys are selling out," because it was this glossy image and we have our faces on there.
Wentz: I was like, "ah, that’s really weird." I hadn’t seen packaging like that before.
Max Bemis (Say Anything vocalist): I remember looking at the artwork, seeing that these dudes were super young, clean-cut looking. I didn’t know what to expect.
Conley: It did create a splash. People would say, "I was flipping through records and I just saw this cover and I decided to get it." And then: "you guys look like a bunch of pretty boys. What’s the deal with that? Look at your haircuts."
Sandshaw: They knew that they were opening themselves up to take a beating,
Wentz: I listened to a lot of hardcore bands at the time, and it just didn’t look like any of that. The way it read to me was an invitation to this party. An invitation into this world.
Sandshaw: But that’s a record cover that turned into a really iconic thing.
Andy Hull (Manchester Orchestra guitarist, vocalist): All I remember thinking was, ‘god, they look so young, they look my age.’
Sandshaw: They definitely gained more out of it than any heckling or anything they took off the other side.
Newman: A big thing that really ruined what might vaguely be considered punk at this point is narcissism and self-absorption, which we kinda fueled by making the cover about us in such a direct way.
Hull: I always thought that the artwork for the record tied in to the music video.
Sandshaw: Between touring and everything else that the band had done, we felt doing a video would be the next step.
Conley: So we make a video for "Shoulder to the Wheel." All of our friends come over, and we just made a day of it.
Newman: That was at Dave’s parents house.
Sandshaw: It’s campy. It’s a good time capsule.
Conley: We played songs to create a mood, and then we would turn on the loudspeakers and turn on "Shoulder to the Wheel," and everyone would mime and sing along and go nuts.
Newman: It was fun making it.
Conley: It was a real party.
Conley: I remember [the director] going, "here, sit in the front seat of this old Volkswagen. We’re just kind of going to have you lean your head against the window and look sad." And I’m like, "this is really uncomfortable."
Newman: We all hated it as soon as we saw it.
Through Being Cool is an instant hit, in the larger punk community if not the mainstream. Fifteen years later, it’s regarded as a hidden classic---the album that spawned all the albums you’ve heard.
Sandshaw: My initial thought was that it was a complete game-changer.
Conley: We finished the record, we hit the road and sure enough, people are eating it up.
Saporta: Fuck, yeah! We listened to that record all the time when we were on tour.
Conley: Through Being Cool really took off quickly. We got a call the very first day the album came out from Vagrant Records, which would soon be our label, just saying, "we’re so excited about this album, how many units it’s shipped."
Saporta: We did play the record release show. There was a time when these shows would happen, crazy shows now---Get Up Kids, At the Drive In, Saves the Day, Midtown.
Newman: Shortly thereafter we signed to Vagrant, and then onward and upward.
Conley: It was almost overnight. Sales doubled on Can’t Slow Down, [which] sold maybe---at the time of the release of Through Being Cool---8,000 copies. We were psyched, people coming to the shows were psyched, and then there were hardcore fans, who were not psyched.
Sandshaw: Can’t Slow Down was a lot more directly related to that hardcore world. Through Being Cool was a step outside of it.
Newman: The reception was big, but it alienated a lot of the older fans.
Conley: And we had all the major labels coming, going ‘you’re going to be the next blink-182’ and blah, blah, blah. We’re like, ‘this is not our thing. We just want to play shows.’ [But] that’s the album that started it all for us.
Sandshaw: It completely paved the way for a million bands that came after them.
Wentz: It was a giant leap of discovery.
Conley: The whole world was waiting right around the corner.
Saporta: Saves the Day just cracked it open for kids all across the country.
Hull: That was the record, ninth and tenth grade, sit in your room, play Tony Hawk.
Wentz: I definitely think that without that record we would not take the steps that we have or became the band that we did. I’m forever indebted to it.
Newman: I honestly don't know how I feel about the legacy. If I’m really honest, it’s mixed. [But] Saves the Day has meant a lot to a lot of different people and I feel honored to be a part of that on any level.
Evetts: To sit here 15 years later, being interviewed to talk about the legacy of that record is pretty incredible. Working with bands now, they list that record as their influence.
Conley: Through Being Cool is the place where it all kicked off.
