Notes and photos from local teenage punk troupe Jawws' tour opening for The Offspring

The members of teenage Nashville hardcore quintet Jawws weren't even born in 1995, when Clinton-era punk superstars The Offspring released Smash, the bestselling independent album of all time. Twenty years, 11 million copies of Smash sold and six subsequent albums later, the now-veteran band hasn't forgotten its roots, explaining why (via a Facebook message) they tapped Jawws — an ensemble that operates without a manager, booking agent or even a full-length album — to open four shows at the end of April and beginning of this month.

It was Jawws' first proper tour, and what a way to start — playing 2,000-plus-capacity halls the likes of Nashville's War Memorial Auditorium and The Tabernacle in Atlanta. Joining the green punks for the trek were frontman Elijah Tidwell and drummer Hunter Tidwell's proud parents — singer Cortney Tidwell and recording engineer Todd Tidwell — on chaperone duty, and photographer Matt Masters. The crew piled into an SUV for what Todd Tidwell would later call "the best family vacation ever" and took some notes from the road for the Scene — a little homework assignment we gave 'em.

"This tour was just all-around insane and so fun," guitarist Conner Sullivan says. "I'm hoping that we gained some new fans."

"The crowds were huge," notes Elijah Tidwell. They were receptive as well. "We got hit on by a lot of older women at the merch table, which was a trip," he goes on. "Signing autographs was surreal so I decided to pen each one of mine with a half-assed smiley face and upside-down cross."

If the band had pre-show jitters, it wasn't apparent in the performances, which Masters describes as "raw and aggressive." Elijah, however, did have a moment of high anxiety during a Ferris wheel ride before the Atlanta gig. "I was so hyped up for the show I forgot how I hate heights," he recalls. "The damn thing took us what felt like 200 yards in the air and I was absolutely petrified." That's somewhat ironic given the fresh-faced frontman's acrobatic stage antics. "At the Virginia show I got ballsy and took a leap off this metal cage thingy at the front of the stage," he recalls, "and when I landed I lost my footing and slammed my head into the cage and crumpled to the floor. Luckily I didn't get knocked out and I managed to crawl around onstage and keep singing to kind of play it off."

Then there were those moments of great American weirdness between tour stops, like checking out a biker party at an Athens, Ga., Harley dealership or involuntarily eavesdropping on an arguing couple through the walls of a North Carolina hotel room in the middle of the night. As Tidwell recalls again, "I heard lots of banging and glass breaking, and over all the chaos a man could be heard screaming, 'GIVE ME THE FUCKING KEY! I WANT MY DAMN KEY! YOU CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME TOO!' "

Back at the venues, relations between Jawws and their multiplatinum tourmates were a little less dramatic. "All the dudes in The Offspring were super nice," Tidwell says. "Sweet guys. The crew had its cool guys and dickheads. They just said, 'Keep attacking it while we're young, keep getting your legs up.' "

"I got to see [The Offspring] play songs that I used to listen to every day in middle school," says Sullivan, "so [the tour] was almost like a childhood dream that got fulfilled."