Borders and Boundaries

I've written about 2000 before, in a two-part story about the time I had to move from San Francisco to my grandmother's house in Oakland and continued commuting to SFSU six days a week.

I spent a lot of time after classes on those six days just bumming around, sort of buying time before returning to Oakland via the Muni and BART (and occasionally driving my 1986 Nissan Pulsar over the bridge). I didn't have a job, and most of the friends I had in the city didn't really have time to hang out until the evening. And anyway, I was pretty busy being pretty depressed most of the time.

A lot of that time spent bumming around was at the Stonestown Galleria, the mall that sat right up against the San Francisco State campus. More specifically, I haunted the Tower Records that sat in the same parking lot, looking through the videos and magazines and comics, checking out the new releases every Tuesday and giving endless discs a spin on those little listening station endcaps. (This is the first time I ever heard Alkaline Trio, when From Here To Infirmary came out and was given a spot in the listening station disc-changer, although I didn't like it much on first listen and didn't realize they'd later become one of my all-time favorite bands.)

There are a ton of really vital records for my life that came out that summer and fall, and most of them I already had tabs on thanks to websites and Alternative Press magazine. (Not to mention that I got sent some random albums to review for my unpaid side job writing for the San Francisco Herald, run by my ex-housemate.)

I was reminded recently that last week marked the 25th anniversary of the release of Less Than Jake's fourth album, Borders & Boundaries, which I knew was coming out and picked up at the Stonestown Tower on release day. Fat Wreck Chords had released mp3s of two of the tracks ahead of the album's release, and I must have listened to "Look What Happened" a hundred times before I had to move out of my San Francisco apartment.

Less Than Jake had recorded the entire album while they were still on Capitol Records, but after a changeover in executives at the label, they were offered the opportunity to buy themselves out of their contract and take the album with them. They only wanted to put it out on Fat Wreck, and so that's what they ultimately did. Despite how much I loved "Look What Happened," I never expected that Borders & Boundaries would end up being the perfect album for my life at that time. It fit my mood and my situation so perfectly that I still can't fully explain how important it was to me. I listened to it on most trips back and forth across the Bay on BART for the remainder of that year, and got the opportunity to interview Less Than Jake when they played at Slim's that fall.

Borders & Boundaries is still my favorite Less Than Jake album, which is no small compliment since I consider at least four of their albums to be indispensable. I will spin this forever, and it has aged as well as any 25-year-old album ever has.

Thanks for always being there, Borders & Boundaries.