45 Years With X

One of my all-time favorite bands is saying farewell with a new record, Smoke & Fiction, and a tour

The arrival of X's debut album, Los Angeles was, for me, the way many people describe hearing the Velvet Underground's debut album for the first time: unexpected, mesmerizing, and exactly what I had been hungering for. It's a debut record by a band that knows who they are, where they come from, and who are not interested in the least in fitting into a place in the rock firmament of their time, choosing instead to forge a unique identity from the art that they create. The number of bands that are able to manage this in any period of pop music history is small, and it was clear from the moment the needle dropped on Los Angeles that X was one of them.

The group speaks their own language, musically and lyrically. Musically, they are a hard-rocking trio rooted in the rock and R&B of the fifties and early sixties, part of the coterie of bands on the edges of the L.A. punk scene in the last third of the seventies that play a hybrid of rockabilly, early Elvis-inspired rock, country, and blues that ranges from the menacing low rider rumble of Los Lobos to the juke joint buzz of The Blasters. X takes those vibes and throws them into a blender with the buzz-saw guitar of hardcore punk and some mesmerizing shaman rock poetry.

Lyrically (and vocally), X is a poetry slam between singer/bassist John Doe and singer Exene Cervenka. I remember reading that John and Exene had been hanging out in the literary scene in Venice and were heavily influenced by the Beats (particularly Kerouac, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti) and Charles Bukowski. There's more than a little Hubert Selby, Jr in their twisted tales as well, like the disturbing serial rapist in 'Johnny Hit and Run Paulene'. Even that song title tells you that the writer is interested in words, in how they convey meaning.

Behind the drum kit sits DJ Bonebrake, seemingly a simple punk-influenced rock drummer, but listening to the group's work over the years reveals him to be the Charlie Watts of Hollywood punk. He also excels at playing malleted instruments such as the vibraphone and marimba. You can hear his marimba work on The Flesheaters' second album A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, or hear him play with The Bonebrake Syncopators (jazz standards played in a western swing style) or Orchestra Superstring (Afro-cuban and Latin jazz).

Guitarist Billy Zoom is the band's not-so-secret weapon. A veteran rocker who was forming and touring with bands from his fifteenth birthday, he had cut his teeth on rockabilly, learning the music from records until he could incorporate rockabilly riffs and runs into his chord comping and  lead work at the drop of a hat. Billy claims he got into rockabilly as the seventies dawned because he didn't look good in spandex. By 1975 he was touring with fifties legend Gene Vincent: "Gene was a great guy. The rest of the band sucked. The rest of the guys in the band were a bunch of hippies who thought - they weren't sure who Gene was, but they knew he'd been famous. But they were profoundly embarrassed; they said this on numerous occasions - that it was so embarrassing to play those stupid old songs in front of people. But they thought that maybe it would look good on their resume, you know?"

Zoom was looking for something else, something beyond rockabilly, when he saw The Ramones for the first time in late '76 or so. He immediately got what they were doing and he locked onto Johnny Ramone's guitar style immediately:

"And while I was watching them, I was thinking, "You know, Eddie Cochran and the Ramones put together - if I could do something like that.... I could put this rockabilly guitar stuff, you know, rock and roll guitar - if you could put that with what Johnny's doing with the bar chords, it would kick butt." And the next day I went out and bought their album. I saw 'em on Saturday, bought the album on Sunday, and on Monday I put an ad in the paper for a bass player and a drummer to form a punk band. I think it said something about "Eddie Cochran meets the Ramones" or something. And John Doe, this kid fresh out of college with a Baltimore accent - he was the second bass player I auditioned and he had really cool shoes. I think at that point I had assumed that I would be the main songwriter and lead singer because that's what I'd been doing, and then I listened to some of John's songs and he sang really well and had some really strange but interesting songs that were really unique in style."

Los Angeles opens with Zoom's spot on take on Johnny Ramone's punk guitar sound on "You're Phones Off the Hood, But You're Not." It sounds like it could have been an outtake from The Ramones' debut or Rocket to Russia. Like Johnny, Billy refuses to reduce punk guitar to buzz-saw strumming, which is what many lesser young guitarists did to approximate the style. And, or course, bar chords, which basically define the sound.

The first voice we hear is a wailing,keening cry that belongs to Exene Cervenka--'Someone clean to chew on/a wife no one likes/I called and they said all of New York is a tow away zone'. Then, on the next line-'we paid sixty dollars on 12th street today' John enters, singing a harmonic line that is open as the big sky country. John and Exene singing their weird harmonies that approximate country and folk--but not quite--is one of the band's most defining sounds, the secret sauce no other group had.

Listen to the chorus of "Motel Room In My Bed" from their third LP, Under the Big Black Sun. "I go to bed/soggy and forgetful/hopefully not waking up so fitfully"--I defy you to hear anything other than country in John and Exene's harmonies. The way they sing together, the way their voices work, it's brilliant. Yet I'm reminded of how writers would wax poetic over The Band's complex harmonies involving three or more voices and of Robbie Robertson's assessment in the Classic Album DVD on The Band: 'it's not clever--it's just pretty much everybody doing what they can do.' If the singers are right, if the voices are right together, nothing else matters.

On Los Angeles X began an association with Ray Manzarek, the keyboard player with The Doors.  He served as producer, and he also contributed some organ work to several songs, giving them a strongly mesmerizing, ritualistic sound. "The Unheard Music" and "Nausea" are still great songs without Manzarek's swirling organ, but he punctuates them with an urgency that goes beyond the usual hardcore punk grind. He also plays on the rave-ups "Sex and Dying in High Society" and "The World's a Mess, It's In My Kiss," and it's fair to say that while Manzarek does little to draw attention to himself, the organ is a welcome textural addition to the group's expert mix of punk, rockabilly madness and what Billy Zoom likes to call jazz chords.

The stories that John and Exene tell through their lyrics are varied, but they revolve around things they've seen and places they've been. "Back to the Base," from the second album, Wild Gift, is the story of a guy Doe saw on the bus in L.A., a soldier ranting about Elvis Presley. The lyrics cut out the fat, making writers like Hemingway and Bukowski seem positively flowery by comparison:

Man on the bus/screaming about Presley

Man on the bus/screaming about Presley

All tied up, got a knot in his hands, says

'Presley sucks on doggy dicks'

I'm the king of rock and roll, if you don't like it you can lump it

Gotta get me back to the base

Gotta get me back to the base

But a lot of the songs on Wild Gift are about living in an alternative society, which was the L.A. punk society that grew up between 1977-’80. The early Los Angeles punk scene was made up of a merry band of misfits, drag queens, and general counterculture outsiders who coalesced around a group of bands and clubs. John and Exene lived in a house on Genesee Street--reportedly they wrote their names in the concrete sidewalk out front. It's the house where the band is interviewed in a segment from Penelope Spheris' documentary The Decline of Western Civilization which sought to capture the L.A. punk scene. Many of the bands on the scene declined to be interviewed for the film, though they allowed filming of live performances. Though there are brief cuts of comments by Alice Bag, Kickboy Face (Claude Bessy), and members of Circle Jerks, the only other band to be interviewed at length is Black Flag. The story goes that John Doe gave Spheris permission to film the band at their house after a show, much to the others' chagrin. By then X had released Wild Gift and they had locked in with rock critics and a lot of punk rock fans outside of L.A., making them easily the best known of the Hollywood bands. Their appearance in The Decline of Western Civilization helped spread their name across the country as much as anything else.

In the interview segment, John Doe is giving Top Jimmy (Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs) a tattoo. Billy sits on his own--he doesn't want a tattoo. Exene spends a bunch of time in front of the camera, entertaining Spheris with her funky collections of stuff, including religious tracts like those produced by Tony Alamo's Christian Foundation, which was founded in Hollywood in 1969. She reads from one of them that 'public education creates leaches' and looks incredulous. "Who could say something like that?" It's a weird shadow moment of the 2000s, when Exene will become enmeshed in right wing conspiracy theories. It's easy for fascination to spill over into belief. Cervenka hasn't had much to say about her political beliefs for awhile. She offered an apology online for some of the things she said; in the intervening years she has either changed her mind or decided to remain quiet.

Wild Gift is unabashedly a punk record, though the band continues to play with retro styles ("Adult Books"). Many, if not most of the songs, were already part of the band’s repertoire when they recorded Los Angeles. Manzarek is again credited as producer, but he doesn't play at all on this record, or any others for that matter. Many of the songs are about love, marriage, being faithful, and the guilt that arises from cheating: "Obedient host/and visiting wife/come out of the bedroom/straightening their clothes/In this house that I call home."

In thirteen songs and just under forty minutes, X covers so much ground in such short lyrical bursts, accompanied by music that is both muscular and imaginative and which somehow fits the record's themes perfectly. The penultimate track, "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch," for example, conveys the anxiety of one partner when the other passes out during foreplay--where does that person go? Is it, as the narrator imagines, into fantasies of 'kissing every little child that comes along'? "I need to know what you do' demands Exene, 'when our love passed out on the couch.'

You can hear Exene's many bracelets clacking together on some of the songs on Wild Gift, one example being the punk rock anthem that closes the record, "Year 1". Essentially a recitiation of all the things that punks will be living without ('no desperate living class/no Roman Catholic Mass') it closes out X's sophomore effort, and with it their relationship with Slash Records. X becomes the first L.A. punk band to sign with a major label: Electra Records, The Doors' old label.

The band had already outgrown the Hollywood punk scene, and new influences asserted themselves on the third album, Under the Big Black Sun. Exene commented on the one dimensional idea of the scene presented by Decline and a raft of magazine articles: "It wasn’t painted as an intelligent artistic scene, it was more a violent, silly, crazy, wanton, hedonistic scene, which it certainly had elements of. But it was a really big, all-encompassing artistic situation we were all in. Maybe you can’t show that in an hour and a half."

With its noir cover art by Alfred Harris, and dour title, Under the Big Black Sun expanded X's subject matter to include the big stuff: life, death, and why we are here. There were still songs about love and lust and guilt, but they were filled with new urgency. It wasn't an album that was likely to connect with a bunch of teenage punks, and musically it moved beyond the basic punk buzz and rockabilly acrobatics of the first two albums. Billy Zoom helps the band create their own sound here, influenced by folk, R&B, and country.

Thematically, the first side of the record is influenced by the death of Exene's sister, Mirielle Cervenka, in a car accident. The opener, "The Hungry Wolf" finds Zoom and J.D. Bonebrake tearing into a modified Bo Diddley beat. Billy plays a proto metal riff and offers some feedback as well. "I am the hungry wolf" sings John before Exene joins in, "and run endlessly with my mate/I see the gutter feed on the foolish, outrun and kill the strong."

I saw X around this time at Mississipi Nights, a small, dark club on the outskirts of St. Louis. The Replacements were their opening band, and during their set I remember that BIlly Zoom came out into the club and played pinball. No shit. I also remember that Exene took the audience to task for talking, drinking, milling about and generally not paying attention during The Replacements' set. "This is one of the best bands in America right now, and you can't be bothered to listen to them." It was really about giving a new band a chance to play in front of audiences where they might learn to make an impression.

They played, as they did at so many shows, "Come Back to Me," a set of lyrics that Exene wrote after her sister's death, then put away. John convinced her that they would make a great song, but in an interview later she said that at the time they recorded the song it was not cathartic for her. It sounds as though she didn't want to relive that time in a song, yet it has turned out to be one of the band's best loved songs. "I like that song because of what it means to other people, not because of what it means to me. Because I know that that song means a lot."  (https://willharris.substack.com/p/interview-exene-cervenka)

That tells you all that you need to know about X, the band, and the bond that they have developed over the years with the old punks the alt-rockers, and the lone wolves who make up their ragtag group of fans and followers. They still draw listeners because they are authentic and because, when they get it together and step on that stage as the band they have always been, they can still deliver the goods.

The final track on Black Sun is "The Have Nots," a country rock song the likes of which hadn't been heard since The Rolling Stones' early seventies days. There's no punk or rockabilly in Billy Zoom's guitar, just rhythm guitar and bluesy country licks. John and Exene do their best Old Opry harmonies, which sound all the more assured in the wake of voice lessons for Exene. The song, with its refrain 'dawn comes soon enough for the working class' ends with a list of lounge names from the group's extensive time on the road: Detroit's Main Vein, Dexter's New Approach, Rest in Pieces. It's a reflection of the life of a working rock band on the road and a look at life across America. The song fades on the chorus, but if you listen closely you can hear the song come to its conclusion with Zoom's final chords.

I used to love to put "The Have Nots" next to the first track on X's fourth album More Fun in the New World, titled "The New World." It's introduced with a single snare drum crack before Zoom, Bonebrake, and Doe kick in with a loping shuffle before Zoom  unleashes a soaring guitar line. It dovetails exactly with "The Have Nots" as the speaker is a panhandler complaining about the bar being used as a polling place: "Honest to goodness/the bars weren't open this morning/they must have been voting for a new president or something/Do you have a quarter?--I said 'Yes' because I did/Honest to goodness the tears have been falling all over this country's face." The song's chorus is the rallying cry of discontent behind nearly every election and one of punk's great protest lines: "It was better before, before they voted for what's-his-name/This was supposed to be the New World."

The rest of the record is a solid rave-up, but it's different than before. The Americana/folk influences that were hinted at on Big Black Sun sprang to the forefront on More Fun in the New World. Not that the record was wanting for punk raves: they prowl through two trashy songs on the vagaries of the music business ("Make the Music Go Bang") and being a small band on the road ("We're Having Much More Fun"). There was the Bo Diddley beat with super melodic chorus ("Poor Girl"), trashy punk girl rock ("Devil Doll"), a nod to Otis Redding ("Hot House"), and a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Breathless."

The two tracks that really define More Fun in the New World as the big X statement are those that end each side. The first side concludes with the initially mellow (musically) "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" where John goes on a little stream of consciousness rant over some of Billy's jazz chords before settling into the thrum thrum of the repeated chorus. Initially the lyrics are inspired by the civil war in El Salvador, making it probably X's most overtly political song. As the song gathers momentum, Exene rails about the lack of diverse music heard on U.S. radio:

The facts we hate

You'll never hear us

"I hear the radio is finally gonna play new music!

You know, the British invasion"

But what about the Minutemen

Flesh Eaters, D.O.A

Big Boys and the Black Flag?

Will the last American band to get played on the radio

Please bring the flag?

Please bring the flag! 

Some whippersnapper of a writer referred to X as 'The Last American Band' in an article, and it started to gain traction. I had the phrase painted on the back of a ripped up Boy Scout shirt I'd bought at a resale shop. It turned out that the band didn't like the phrase applied to them. They were not calling themselves 'the last American band,' which is pretty clear from the fact that they listed five other American bands there. It was just a nifty nomenclature for the fact that New Wave and punk that was popular on the radio was primarily performed by British groups. When I wore the shirt to see them I got some flack from one or two fans, but nothing to write home about.

The thing is, America was once again turning away from the music that was born on its soil, melded from diverse cultures and influences in favor of confectionery pop. X had created four nearly perfect albums in the same number of years, and that is something that only a small group of bands can say. It was clear by then that if the public hadn't made X a household name at this point, then it was not going to happen.

The final track on More Fun in the New World, "True Love, Pt. 2" (part one was a completely different song on side one) had a funky, R&B-oriented rhythm guitar part and DJ Bonebrake backs it up with a solid beat. Other descriptions of this sound have included 'dance-oriented' or even 'disco,' which is goofy considering this was 1983. John and Exene sing about true love listing its attributes: it is the devil's crow bar, suitcase, zip gun, car crash. Finally this melds into a series of musical quotations from a long list of American folk songs, nursery rhymes, blues roots, and more: "I've Been Working on the Railroad," "Black Betty," "Old MacDonald." It marked the way that X, like many of the hippies before them, had turned toward traditional American music to express their experiences and views of modern life.

It was two years before the band released their fifth album, Ain't Love Grand! Despite a number of strong songs, the desire of Electra and of Billy for the group to have a hit and to actually make some money led to a record that didn't really sound like X, despite Billy's assertion that "It's the best-sounding record we've made. It's the first one I'm really happy with." Michael Wagener, who worked primarily with metal bands such as Stryper, was brought in to produce. He gave them a more radio-friendly crunchy rock sound, but why anyone would want to hear that song on an X record is anybody's guess.

I dutifully bought and really tried to like Ain't Love Grand!. The single, "Burning House of Love" was a good song, one that might have come from one of their last two records, only it had a video and was being played on MTV. I liked some of the details, like Billy's acoustic guitar overdub on the lead in to the chorus, but I knew that the burning heart of X was gone. "Love Shack" was pretty good, as were "Watch the Sun Go Down" and the Dave Alvin/John Doe song "Little Honey." My favorite song was the lead off to Side Two, "What's Wrong With Me" (Answer? "NONE OF YOUR GODDAMN BUSINESS").

Zoom left the band anyway, before their next album, See How We Are, which was decidedly better than the previous one. Dave Alvin stepped in on guitar for most of the record, with some appearances by Tony Gilkyson, who took over for Zoom live. See How We Are seemed like a hopeful step for X, heading in a new, Billy Zoom-less direction. Gilkyson, who also played with Lone Justice, was a solid choice for the guitar seat. He lacked Zoom's Link Wray on speed bravado, but he more than made up for that with tasteful backing.

Still, I knew it was probably near the end of the band's time. John and Exene's marriage was on the rocks, and though X has always been a group of committed professionals who can play together regardless of what else is going on, the dissolution of the group's songwriting leaders' relationship took most of the wind that was left out of their sails.

Though they had never been able to push through into mainstream success, their work over the years had garnered them a certain amount of momentum that propelled them through the eighties based on the documentary X: The Unheard Music, a live album recorded at the Whiskey A Go-Go and an acoustic live album. I skipped 1993's album Hey, Zeus because I couldn't bear the prospect of a sub-standard X album when the first four slabs of vinyl were still regular fixtures on my turntable.

The group sailed smoothly into legacy act territory, with Billy Zoom rejoining in 1998 for tours and live performances. In 2005 they recorded X--Live in Los Angeles in part as a commemoration of the debut album's 25th anniversary. Seeing the group live at this time was more than an exercise in nostalgia, though it was also that for listeners who, like me, were there from the beginning. Is it really nostalgia to watch a band continue to play the songs they played forty years ago with the same level of commitment?

All of that changed with the surprise release of the album Alphabetland in 2020. Recorded in 2019 and 2020, it was the first album of new material, recorded by the original band members in 35 years, but it comes across as maybe the record that should have followed More Fun in the New World. Much of the record hearkens back to the group's punk halcyon days, with the cover art by Wayne White echoing Wild Gift, and Alphabetland was a gift, a validation of L.A. punk at a time when the scene was receiving significant reappraisal, and a validation of a career that combined the steadiness of The Ramones with a restless nature and the sense of street poetry and history of the LA scene that is their hallmark.

At the time of the album's release I wrote "Like The Doors, X has never shown much interest in changing their sound or adding gimmicky studio shine to their records. Clocking in at just over twenty-seven minutes, Alphabetland shows that the chemistry that made X one of America's greatest rock bands is still there, undiminished by time."

That might have been the end, with the group out for one final tour, but COVID had brought record production to a screeching halt, and Alphabetland was released six months early, without fanfare, in the midst of a lock down. With the band unable to tour for the rest of that year, it didn't seem like the right time to call it quits. And so the group reconvened for Smoke and Fiction, and now are on the road, in the midst of their farewell tour, titled The End is Near. The tour will take them into 2025, and the new album, Smoke & Fiction, is just as surprising and successful as Alphabetland. I love the assessment of the album that Fred Pessaro wrote for Qobuz: "This is a band on a roll, producing some of their most memorable songs in decades in a style that they own, not a band struggling for relevance in the twilight of their career."

Maybe one reason that X has proven to have staying power well beyond nearly every other Hollywood punk band of their era is that their music, though punk in aesthetic, isn't rooted in the merely rebellious. Their songs aren't about hateful parents or drinking beer or getting in fights or any of the other drivel that the media passed off as West coast punk back in the day.

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