X
Punk legends X got in the van to leave their home of Los Angeles for their first tour on December 9, 1980; they’d been a band for about three years at that point. One day earlier, John Lennon was murdered in New York. The day before that, Germs singer and the band’s close friend Darby Crash died of an intentional heroin overdose in L.A.
Fast forward to early summer 2024, when headlines ricocheted around the music press from Spin to NME and beyond about the end of X following the August release of what they’ve said will be their final LP Smoke & Fiction. X has long outlasted their Southern California punk peers, and one would understand if they were to call it a day. But on a phone call ahead of their stop at Brooklyn Bowl on Friday, frontman and founder John Doe protests the idea that his band has a foot in the grave.
“As you know, the news can be reductive,” says Doe, his tone making his eye roll audible. “We're just not going to tour 80 dates a year — which ends up being more like 110 days on the road. So we're just cutting back. And then they say, ‘Oh, it's the last tour ever!’ We're not gonna finish our career in Columbia, South Carolina! No offense, Columbia.”
In the beginning, it was Doe playing bass and singing, joined by Billy Zoom, who plays guitar like the bastard child of Johnny Thunders and Carl Perkins. A little later, poet Exene Cervenka added her supernatural howl to the mix; eventually drummer D.J. Bonebrake rounded out the lineup and X was officially a unit. They were part of the first wave of what would become one of the most important underground music communities in the U.S. They released their first single “Adult Books” on the Southern California indie Dangerhouse Records. Soon, they joined the Germs and Latino punx The Plugz as the third band on the Slash Records roster and released an album named for their hometown in 1980.
Produced by keyboardist Ray Manzarek from The Doors — whose “Soul Kitchen” X reinvented as a barn-burner for a new age, not unlike Devo did with the Stones’ “Satisfaction” — Los Angeles set X apart from their contemporaries with a sound haunted by the ghosts of the rock ’n’ roll rebels who came before. In spots, Zoom’s guitar recalls Chuck Berry, but faster and meaner. Among the elements of Bonebrake’s beats, you’ll hear surf, hard psych-rock and R&B. Doe and Cervenka make like junk shop poets when they get into call-and-response, and their harmony on songs like “The Unheard Music” is beautifully unsettling. Sure, X is a creature of Hollywood, but more like the Hollywood of Bela Lugosi and Ed Wood — a four-headed monster that came crawling from the La Brea Tar Pits.
“It was startling because the early scene in Hollywood — though it may have been a little cliquish — was very open minded,” Doe recalls. “And whatever kind of music you made, as long as it wasn't just jive and like anything you heard on the radio, you were welcomed.”
Eventually, punk became more codified and less a movement of lawless expressiveness. The Southern California hardcore explosion of the early ’80s gave birth to a kind of youth cult, with its own uniform of shaved heads and plaid flannels over sleeveless T-shirts. The music became repetitive. Punks began to mimic each other.
X at the Ryman, 9/30/2013
“It was reduced, because maybe those newer bands didn't have as much experience or influence,” says Doe. He notes a conversation he had with Henry Rollins while he was working on More Fun in the New World, one of two oral histories of L.A. punk Doe has co-authored. (Both share titles with X albums; the other is Under the Big Black Sun.) “[Rollins] had hundreds of records that he was influenced by. And maybe the next generation — they had a Black Flag and Bad Brains and an Alice Cooper record. … And if you look at someone like Joe Strummer, or the songwriting that Blondie did or even the Ramones, they drew from a lot of different sources.”
X’s footprint was much larger than the dingy rock clubs of the Sunset Strip in the early ’80s. “If you get an offer that makes you a little uncomfortable, if you get something that scares you,” Doe says, “it's an opportunity to move towards it and find out what it can teach you.”
The band was featured extensively in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. The charismatic nature of X’s sound, aesthetic and stage presence was a magnet for other offers to place their music in films, including Wim Wenders’ The State of Things in 1982; in 1983, their contemporary spin on Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Breathless” was in Jim McBride’s remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. In 1989, X’s cover of The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” — worked up, Doe notes, just for the fun of it at Cervenka’s suggestion — appeared in Major League as the theme song for Charlie Sheen’s hotshot young fastballer Rick Vaughn. With the rugged look of a Sam Peckinpah character, Doe found himself on the silver screen before long, appearing in Roadhouse, the aforementioned Jim McBride’s Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire, Wyatt Earp, Boogie Nights and many more.
“I think we appeal to people who are thoughtful, people who are not afraid of songs and sounds that are a little bit weird,” Doe says. “And we appeal to people that aren't afraid of some complicated lyrics that tell a story. So it's not just meatheads and it's not just people who go to art galleries or something.”
X at the Ryman, 9/30/2013
With a stable lineup for nearly their entire tenure, X was still a functioning band in the 1990s and beyond. But after 1993’s Hey Zeus!, there was no new studio full-length for almost 30 years.
“There were three or four things that kept us from recording after we had been touring quite a bit,” says Doe. “One was: We didn't have a record company. And why would we put all that time and effort into writing and learning and rehearsing new songs if we don't have a place to put them?”
However, as the 2010s waned, the group linked up with producer Rob Schnapf (whose work you’ve heard on several Elliott Smith records, among many others) and inked a deal with Fat Possum. This has yielded two LPs: 2020’s Alphabetland, with a cover by beloved Tennessee-born artist Wayne White, and the recent Smoke & Fiction.
“When those other things aligned,” Doe says, “we thought, ‘Well, we don't have any excuse now, so let's do it.’”
The resulting records are far more than simply something new to stock the merch table as an aging band hits the road again. They include some of the best songs of X’s career — new ones and one very old one, a rowdy R&B throwback called “Cyrano deBerger’s Back” Doe performed with ghoulish garage-punk outfit The Flesh Eaters — and playing that’s ferocious as ever. They’re a middle finger to anyone who mistook X as a thing of the past.
While X is not retiring completely, they are intentionally slowing down. So what does an artist do with the extra time?
“I'll probably write a memoir. I write poetry all the time, but I'm not really an expert.”
