Despite the fact that rock & roll isn’t far itself from retirement age, growing old gracefully in it is still a tall order. Second acts are still sneered at on principle alone, and for every Tom Waits or Patty Smith there’s a Mick Jagger and Madonna still sexin’ it up way past their sexin’ it up prime. In the punk world, second acts can be even harder to reconcile. There’s a certain amount of hat-eating involved for artists and bands whose raison d’etre was, to a great degree, slamming the old farts for still hanging around. But some artists seem impervious to time, their second careers smooth extensions of the first. Count John Doe among them.
X was going to be impossible to follow no matter what, but Doe slid effortlessly into a solo career beginning in 1988 while the band was on hiatus. His solo records, including his fifth and latest, Forever Hasn’t Happened Yet, haven’t reaped the critical acclaim of X’s material, but they all share a simple elegance and at least a couple of superior tracks per disc that can stand with his previous work in X or that band’s country side project, The Knitters.
One sure sign that an artist has remained vital is when subsequent generations clamor to appear on their records. On his previous disc, 2002’s Dim Stars, Bright Sky, Doe enlisted the assistance of Aimee Mann, Jakob Dylan, Juliana Hatfield and the Old 97s’ Rhett Miller. On Forever, Grant Lee Phillips, Neko Case and Kristin Hersh drop by Doe’s cozy studio to add their vocal talents, helping make the record one of his best solo efforts
Of the new record, which has a blues and country feel throughout, Doe told the web-zine Citizine, “I’m trying to get back to something a little simpler but I didn’t want to make a punk record,” he said. “(The Blues is) an art form that I’ve always been a fan of, as long as it doesn’t get really long. I hate that stuff. If a blues song is over three and a half minutes, it’s not a blues song.”
But the basic components are familiar.
“This is not punk rock, but it uses all the same ingredients: sex, drugs, death, loss, longing and alienation,” Doe says on the Yep Roc website.
Ergo, even though Forever is a relatively stripped down affair, its relationship to punk is best viewed aesthetically, not sonically.
“On solo projects I have a lot more variety,” Doe told Rhino.com on the eve of the reissue of X’s first three ground-breaking records. “Loud and soft, using tape loops and drum beats. You have to stay current. It’s not like you hear something and appropriate it. You hear a bunch of things, and they work their way into whatever you make. I think that with X and those first three records, we were trying to do things differently within a certain style. Everybody at that point was rebelling — against softness, against the chord structures that had come before. There was a lot more dissonance and aggression, because that was a part of society. Everyone was socially alienated, so they brought that into the music. At the same time it was returning to a more purist view of what rock’n’roll should be. There were no seven-minute jams. Just verse, chorus — three and a half minutes at the most, and then go on to the next thing.”
As usual with Doe’s material, the subject matter revolves around the fickle human heart and all its complexities. Unlike previous records, though, the gestation period for this one took longer than usual.
“I don’t write albums, they just collect themselves. This last one has been about two and a half years in the making because of the process by which it was done,” Doe recently told UnPop.com “And writing songs usually comes out of confusion, unhappiness, and a desire to make things less chaotic…And to better understand.”
And that sounds suspiciously like the kind of wisdom that comes only with age.
John Doe (backed by the Nick Luca trio) play the Visulite Friday; Jake Brennan & the Confidence Men open; doors are at 9pm and tickets are $12 in advance and $14 at the door.
This article appears in Mar 23-29, 2005.
