The story of ‘Borders and Boundaries’ is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a part of music history. Twenty five years after Less Than Jake wrote their cult-classic fourth album, it still shines as a record of a time and place in the band’s lives and a tribute to who they were at the turn of the twenty-first century.

“It’s a time capsule. It’s a snapshot of where we were at that time in our lives. We were beginning to change into adults,” explains guitarist and vocalist Chris DeMakes. “You know, a couple of guys had gotten married. We weren’t living together anymore. That was a huge thing. Because me, Vinnie [Fiorello] and Roger [Lima] lived together up until that point until Roger went and bought a house. He was the first one to defect. He built a control room down there in his basement. So we had a studio and we did all of our demos there on this new digital recorder that Roger had bought called an ADAT. It was digital tape. It was before Pro Tools and all those things now. And none of this is bad, what I’m saying. This is just part of… we’re not living in this bubble together anymore. So I remember that influenced the songs. We were able to be a little bit more introspective, certainly on the lyrics.”

“‘Borders and Boundaries’; what that title reflects, and in a lot of the subject matter… we were spending years of our lives away from any semblance of reality. We were crossing Borders, we were crossing Boundaries. “Get out your passport. Hey, wake up. Hey, we got another flight. Here we go. Hey, get in the coach. Hey, get in the taxi. Hey, go here. We got an interview. There’s a hotel.” And it was all happening just at a crazy, frantic pace. It was at breakneck speed. We were going to different places, hence the title of the album. We were traveling to countries that I had only read about and dreamed about going to. I read the books on Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and The Who and The Stones and just to be able to travel and to get to hear the different accents of people and how they talked and the slang and just immersed in it, to be in London and go to the rock shops. And just… it was mind blowing.”

“I had Mark [Hoppus] from Blink 182 on my podcast some years ago and we did touring with those guys. He said something, and I can’t remember exactly how we got the subject, but he’s like, ‘yeah, if I could just go back to when ‘What’s My Age Again’ was hitting and some of those songs for that band… if I could go back and just slow down’. I was just, ‘probably if you were to go back, you wouldn’t be able to do anything different. It was a frantic pace’. That’s what it felt like for a while for us.”

“But with that said, we were young and there was a lot of this was very new still. Yeah, we had been on the road, but we were still going to new places and we were still seeing our hard work paying off; going to play a huge festival in Germany and then coming to the club show the next time and having it be sold out because we did that festival and things like that.”

Their hometown of Gainesville, Florida looms large in their writing at this point, emblazoned on the cover of ‘Borders and Boundaries’ but also giving rise to their fan-favourite single. “‘When I started going ‘Gainesville Rock City’,” DeMake shouts the chorus, “that was just like a joke in the studio that, like, made the record, you know? It was a play on where Kiss had this song called ‘Detroit Rock City’. Gainesville is considered a city, but I think our tallest building’s six stories tall. I think the football stadium is taller than the buildings downtown. It’s known as a university town, and there’s not much more there, okay? “

“In fact, we do these shows called ‘Wake and Bake’, which we’re gonna have in Gainesville on March 13th and 14th this year. It’s kind of like our hometown shows. When we first started doing their shows, I remember punters from the UK coming over, and they were just amazed. They were like, ‘Gainesville’s so small!’ They were gonna turn up to this metropolitan area that was just New York City, you know; ‘Gainesville Rock City’! They were just amazed that this was just another North Florida cow town, if it wasn’t for the university, and some punk rockers.”

“Our primary lyricist [on ‘Borders and Boundaries’] was Vinnie, our drummer. [‘Suburban Myth’]’s about where we’re from. That song’s really about Gainesville. It talks about 13th Street. It talks about Park 16th on the right. Park 16th is where Vinnie, Roger and I lived. It was a crappy apartment in the southeast or southwest part of Gainesville. We were referencing those places. The UK fans really zoned in on that. They were very interested in it, and they drive by Park 16. They’d be on 13th Street. They’d be looking for the liquor store, which was in one of our early songs. So, yeah, that, all those references in ‘Suburban Myth’ were all Gainesville.” 

Less Than Jake were also in a transition in their management and label, which adds to the sense of movement they captured on ‘Borders and Boundaries’. “I’ll always say what really saved this record was the fact that Capitol dropped us and that Fat Wreck Chords picked it up. Because as soon as they stamped the Fat Wreck logo on the back, the record became legitimate in the eyes of the European and the UK community as well as the US and everywhere else in the world. Even though we had made our most commercial record up to that point with ‘Borders and Boundaries’, it was way more clean. There was some songs on there I’d consider – I hate using this word, but –  a song that could go to radio. You know, that type of thing.”

“So the guy that had signed us at Capitol, Craig Aronson, had left, and so did Gary Gersh. Gary was the president who had signed Nirvana to Geffen, okay? That was pretty much kind of his claim to fame. We were assigned a new A&R guy. He had been Megadeth’s tour manager, or manager or something for years. He was a nice enough guy, but like, it was just weird. I remember he came down, it was just kind of business-like. I remember feeling he was kind of stiff, but looking back, it wasn’t really his fault. He came in and here’s a bunch of punks sitting around, like, ‘hey, we got this record’. He’s like, first day on the job. But it wasn’t long after that, that we got notification that we were getting dropped. We had even said to management that we want to get out of this deal. We know this record’s not going to get pushed. And they dropped us. That would be catastrophic to a lot of bands at that point. There were certainly bands that just would have imploded. We lost our deal, it’s over. But we had been a band for ten years at that point almost. We built up this really, really good fan base. Our fans didn’t care. In fact, when it went to Fat, it was the best thing that could have happened.”

Musically, ‘Borders and Boundaries’ marks a turning point too.  Critics at the time noticed it was a lot less ska and a lot more punk than they expected. DeMakes agrees, upon reflection. “Probably. Yeah, a lot less ska but I think there were horns on most of the songs on the record barring like two songs, so we were still fully utilising our horn section on stuff. It wasn’t a conscious decision that we were writing songs that didn’t have ska. It was just more of, at that point, we had made two records that were just ska, or three records actually, but ‘Hello Rockview’ started to go in the direction of ‘Borders’. You could see that the evolution of the growth, but ‘Pezcore’ and ‘Losing Streak’ were very much kind of the same record in terms of Ska Punk. I think it was just us branching out as a band a little bit more.”

“Back in the day we tried to balance it or be like, ‘there’s some mid-tempo, not too much mid-tempo stuff,  so we need a faster song’. We would think in terms of that. A lot of that really was not so much even balancing out the record as much as we knew we were gonna play these songs live. So we wanted like, we need some more upbeat stuff, or we need some more ska stuff to throw in the set. “

“I’m impressed with how well [‘Borders and Boundaries’] has held up. We recorded that record with a guy named Steve Kravac, and Steve had done some mixes right when we got done with the record. And we, weren’t happy with all of them. We had asked Bill… that was the first time we ever worked with Bill from Blasting Room. We asked Bill Stevenson to mix it. Him and Steph the guitar player from Descendants, they mixed the album. Our horn section, they were taking lessons from this well-renowned horn player. I think if they had to drive to a college at a university and they would go sit with him for like an hour a week, an hour or two, and they would learn. Their chops were just really up, the horn sounded good. Rog and I were singing really well at this point. It holds up. I’m proud of it. There’s other records at our catalogue that I don’t feel that way about. So I’m proud for that reason.”

Now, to mark the twenty-fifty anniversary of ‘Borders and Boundaries’, Less Than Jake are celebrating with a re-release, and the frontman is overjoyed. “I’m excited tohave these songs rediscovered by people. We were gonna put the record out whether we had extra stuff to put on or not. We released it a couple of times for anniversaries over the years, the ten year anniversary, and now we’re at 25. The fans are gonna want a reissue. So will a lot of the vinyl collectors as we do different variants. Okay, we’re gonna do it! We dug up some stuff. I found some old demos and things Roger did. Roger took some stuff and edited it and put it together. Yeah, I’m excited about it.”

It’s the combination of insight into the world that Less Than Jake lived in a quarter century ago, and the fact that the fifteen songs on the original release are still an addictive listen, that makes the reissue of ‘Borders and Boundaries’ an essential re-discovery.

KATE ALLVEY

The 25th anniversary re-release of ‘Borders and Boundaries’ is out now.