What was it like seeing X in the late 70s on their home turf of Los Angeles? In a recent interview with respected indie zine Shredding Paper, Brendan Mullen, who ran LA's notorious Masque punk rock club back then and lists X among his favorite bands, described a typical nightly scene:
A hundred people ranging in age from mid-teens to late 20s getting completely blasted out of their minds with bands playing at 130 decibels, with terrible acoustics, and overflowing toilets, and everybody jumping up and down and bouncing off the walls.
And while Doe calls Mullen's recollection maybe a little romanticized, he's not about to deny the excitement of the times or the visceral power that his band channeled, nostalgia or no nostalgia. With Rhino's new editions of the first three X albums -- 1980's Los Angeles, 1981's Wild Gift and 1982's Under the Big Black Sun -- that power gets a righteous, overdue airing. Jointly produced for reissue by Doe and Rhino Senior VP of A&R Gary Stewart, the CDs benefit from all the usual Rhino hallmarks.
Explains Doe, Rhino offered us an opportunity to have our records in stores. They haven't been, which pissed me off. So we just jumped at it! You're gonna put out each individual CD? Excellent!' There had been that crappy two-for-one CD on Slash with the first two albums, so that alone is worth it. We're gonna be able to put in bonus tracks? Even better! And we're gonna be able to put in a 10-page booklet and Rhino has excellent distribution and is the king of the fucking hill where it comes to reissuing and compilations?' It was a natural.
Doe himself took charge of organizing the archival end of things, consulting old photos and gig flyers, Mrs. Doe, Sr.'s collection of clippings about her son's band, even bits of memorabilia sent in by X fans in response to ads that Rhino posted (an ardent collector from Detroit was rewarded for his efforts by having one of his live X tapes tapped for a bonus track).
I'm not that much of a control freak that I have to be in on everything, says Doe. But it's better to go to the source and be able to like what's going on as it's happening rather than be upset later. And this is sort of the last chance to get [the reissues] as good as they can be. I had to keep reminding myself as I was playing X's secretary and trying to remember which engineer did, for example, the Adult Books' [bonus track] demo, that this was a good thing. [emits mock groan] You wanted to do this, John!' But it was worth it, all the headaches, the pondering, who did what, how do we credit this, going over liner notes, looking at hundreds of photographs, seeing all your friends that are dead now.
By the time X -- vocalist/bassist Doe and singer Cervenka, drummer D.J. Bonebrake and guitarist Billy Zoom -- went into the studio in January 1980 with producer Ray Manzarek to record its debut, the band was at the top of LA's club heap, additionally having logged widespread kudos for its 1978 single Adult Books b/w We're Desperate.
X brought to the table an uncommon level of musicianship, songwriting that was steeped equally in Americana traditions and impressionistic-poetic firsthand narrative (one song, The Unheard Music, was even adapted from a T.S. Eliot poem) and charismatic group chemistry. In Kristine McKenna's liner notes the band is described as being like Botticelli's Venus on the half shell. . .fully formed and perfect. . .gorgeous and glamorous. . .on fire from the very start. Punk bands of that era tended to be sloppy, but X was tight, and you never worried that one of them might take a wrong turn and derail the show. X stood out in a crowd, even by Punk's sideways standards.
Doe: One thing that made writers want to write about us was that we had fairly intelligent lyrics. Writers like to write about that. If it wasn't for the press, X wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention that it did. And as far as what the band's strengths were, it was Exene's gift for crazy, or unique, harmony, the fact that there were two vocalists and not just one, and Billy Zoom bringing rock & roll guitar a la Chuck Berry into punk rock. The songs were good, too.
Los Angeles is a start-to-finish napalm-and-velvet explosion, from the opening wallop of Your Phone's Off The Hook, But You're Not and the desperado hard rock of Johny Hit And Run Paulene to the Stooges-like treatment of the Doors' Soul Kitchen and the anthemic chug of The World's A Mess (It's In My Kiss) (featuring heavy organ courtesy Mr. Manzarek). Throughout, an edgy, almost apocalyptic tone is pervasive, as befits many punk artifacts; the band's economy of motion, buzzsaw or otherwise, is equally well-suited to the times.
Present in Wild Gift is a more serene, self-confident side (by this stage, Cervenka and Doe had gotten married), as evidenced by the brilliant surf-pop number In This House That I Call Home and the sensual, sexual churn of Universal Corner. X wasn't so tidied-up and content as to eschew the good ol' ramalama however, as the jackhammer proto-thrash of We're Desperate and the hate-love-danger crunch of When Our Love Passed Out On The Couch both offer ample testimony. Present, too, is one of the great X anthems, White Girl, brutal in its temptation-noir lyrics, darkly unsettling in its minor chord sonics.
Under The Big Black Sun, incredibly, tops both its predecessors on all fronts: rock variety and velocity, lyric depth, increased production values (as with the other two albums, it was produced by Manzarek), and a hard-to-pin-down sense of tapping into the zeitgeist. By 82, Punk was all but dead, along with a number of the band's closest associates who had literally died; if X had once written a song called We're Desperate, its third album at times personified the term.
A feral, dissonant The Hungry Wolf opens, followed a few songs later by the ominous, paranoia-inducing Riding With Mary and, still later, the creepy, almost David Lynchian Blue Spark. Elsewhere, the decidedly non-punk Dancing With Tears In My Eyes -- an old Tin Pan Alley tune chosen by Exene to be sung for her sister who had just died -- is given a Hawaiian guitar lilt that decisively contrasts with How I (Learned My Lesson), a tight-as-polyvinyl slice of surf-garage punk. Closing things out is The Have Nots, an unusually poppy, melodic tribute to blue collardom that closes with the wry vocal tag line, It don't come soon enough for the working class.
Bonus track-wise, all three albums are given appropriate, if not exactly liberal, treatment. Los Angeles features five additional cuts including 77 rehearsal material, plus a rough mix demo of Adult Books. Wild Gift adds seven tracks highlighted by a live Beyond And Back (originally on the soundtrack album The Decline. . .Of Western Civilization), the original 77 demo for Blue Spark, and a live Back 2 The Base. Under The Big Black Sun's five extras include a couple of concert recordings from 82 -- How I (Learned My Lesson) came from the Detroit X fan noted above -- and an oddly segued pairing of Marty Robbins' El Paso with the band's own Because I Do. Roughly half the bonus material here saw previous issue on the 97 anthology Beyond And Back. Still, from a performance and period standpoint, each album is complemented nicely. And the reason there's not more is simple: X didn't have the money at the time to record more.
Recalls Doe, Whatever got recorded got put on the record. We had 2 1/2 -3 weeks and $10,000 to do Los Angeles, and we picked nine songs and said, That's all we have time for.' We weren't making any money, Ray wasn't making any money, we just put it into the studio time. We didn't have to demo anything -- it was for Slash Records, for crying out loud! We didn't have to prove that we had a hit! Hit, schmit. Wasn't going to happen anyway! So for bonus tracks I just picked what I could find that seemed worth it. And to try to balance the fast with the slow, and what seemed interesting.
Mainly, though, I'm a firm believer in the definition of a record -- it's a record' of what it was, when it was. Those albums, primarily the first two, we were doing what we sounded like live, and adding a few little extras, and making sure the vocals were in tune and had meaning. To Ray's credit, he didn't mess with it. He didn't try to fix it when it wasn't broken. Just turned it on and let it rip.
Doe adds that when the next trio of X reissues comes out -- tentatively slated for April or May 2002 are 1983's More Fun in the New World, 1985's Ain't Love Grand and 1987's See How We Are -- there will probably be more in the way of bonus tracks, and quite likely some remixing for Ain't Love Grand, which he now describes as too slick sounding, too much like a metal album. At the time we were frustrated and scratching our heads and wondering why we couldn't have a hit record -- it was because we were a punk rock band, and all the bands from that time that survived and did have hit records had moved on into a softer, disco sound which wasn't punk rock.
Punk rock. Back to the nostalgia issue for a moment. Billy Zoom left the band after Ain't Love Grand; X soldiered on with different guitarists, going into hibernation at various stages while members pursued outside projects (most notably the country-acoustic combo The Knitters). But lately the original lineup has been spotted playing a series of reunion gigs in California to celebrate the reissues. Coincidentally, earlier this year Spin magazine and VH1 mounted a joint 25th Anniversary of Punk special that included flattering commentary on X. And as we read above, P.J. Harvey recently gave her own enthusiastic endorsement, too. What's Doe's take on all this?
I don't know if you'd call it nostalgia, Doe muses. I think I just call it fun and having a good time. At any rate, what we originally did was we paid attention to bringing rock & roll back to rock & roll, which is a three-minute song with not a bunch of extended guitar leads -- what punk rock was about -- and we tried to give our side of that and make our contribution. Now, the upside of X playing is we have a great time, the music doesn't sound dated -- I mean, not dated like, um, Haircut 100! [laughs] And the audience is there, crazy dying to see it, and we make some money. We get together periodically anyway; we're not gonna be writing any more X songs and there's not going to be a new X record. But it's fun. It's all good -- no downside to it.