John Doe – Border X-ing
The range was there in X if one paid close enough attention. At a show at Ontario Theater in Washington, D.C., in November 1983, they kicked off the show off with “We’re Having Much More Fun”, and they sounded as if they really were. Guitarist Billy Zoom played his choppy, twangy riffs that somehow combined Link Wray and Johnny Ramone, while Doe and Exene Cervenka sang-shouted simultaneously (apparently with the theory that one of them was likely to hit the right note at any given moment). They sang about the joys of Los Angeles at four in the morning, and they backed it up with cackling, delirious laughter.
“I always thought that the point of punk was coping with bullshit,” Doe told me at the time, “and humor is an important part of that. I always thought punk had a certain amount of John Waters in it — the insanity, the goofy clothes, the song titles like ‘Our Love Passed Out On The Couch’. That’s why I changed my name to John Doe — not to be a rock star or to be taken seriously, but because I thought it was funny, like I thought it was funny Declan McManus changed his name to Elvis Costello.
“Humor keeps rock ‘n’ roll from getting overbearing and morbid and completely sobering. Yeah, you have to write about the unhappy parts of your life, but you have to balance that out with fun. Unfortunately, after the hardcore bands took over punk, that humor got lost. And people who formed bands after that misunderstood what punk was about originally.”
The Ontario show’s highlight was “The New World”, a punk rewrite of Martha & the Vandellas’ “Dancing In The Street” and a vicious satire of the Reagan era. Doe and Cervenka wailed out the lyrics with such conviction that Zoom grabbed their energy and turned it into one of the great guitar solos of the era. And when Doe shouted, “Don’t forget the Motor City, Baltimore and D.C. now,” the local crowd responded with cheers.
Doe himself had lived in Baltimore from the ages of 9 to 22, although he then went by his birth name, John Duchac. With his junior-high best friend Jack Chipman, Duchac co-led a bar band — known variously as Stump, Sterling or King Dance — that mixed covers and originals in the style of Neil Young and The Band.
Doe disowns that music today, but when he and Chipman played a college gig and could bring out more of their originals, they were pretty impressive. When Doe began introducing country-rock elements into X, he wasn’t trying something new so much as he was returning to something he had done before.
Even more important for Duchac’s future career was his involvement in the Baltimore-Washington poetry scene. “I’m glad I had the chance to study poetry in school and to be part of a poetry scene before I became a full-time songwriter and musician,” Doe says today. “It’s a funny thing about studying the arts. Some people I know — Exene, Elliott Smith, Darby Crash — have no poetry background and yet they write like poets. And some people I know who went to the Berklee School of Music were destroyed by it, but others came out with tools that are invaluable. I think I came out of the poetry world with some useful tools and a sense of what’s possible.”
In the fall of 1976, Duchac and Chipman drove from Baltimore to Los Angeles. The intention was they’d become songwriters in the country-rock vein they’d been mining back in Maryland, and they did sell a few songs. But their luck dried up, and they got tired of rejection letters and knocking on doors. Chipman went back home, but Duchac stuck around.
“Los Angeles at that time was in a state of decay,” he recalls today. “Everything was falling down, and you felt as if you were in the heart of the beast. It reminded me a lot of Baltimore in that regard. In that kind of environment, you’re not worried about tradition or things lasting; you’re thinking about what’s happening now. That, combined with being in a new place surrounded by new people, gave me a chance to rewrite my identity.
“I was ready for that, because I was bored and tired of my own shit. I didn’t want to listen anymore to the Beatles, The Band or all the things that had influenced me up to that point. I totally rejected that and went to the other side. I found a basement below a porno theater that had bands playing this weird music. I thought, ‘So this is Hollywood. Cool.'”
And so John Duchac became John Doe. That same winter, he signed up for the Beyond Baroque Poetry Workshop, sponsored by a famous small press in Venice. Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski were alumni of the workshop, and Doe hoped it would give him entree to the same kind of poetry scene he had known in Baltimore.
“At the first session,” he remembers, “we were filling out cards and for our favorite poets I wrote down Charles Bukowski twice. This woman next to me said, ‘You wrote that guy down twice,’ and I said, ‘I must really like him.’ That same night, she read a poem about Lois Lane that was very short and very cool. In the middle of this bunch of people who looked like poets was this woman who was really exotic and about my age. I said to myself, ‘This is interesting. I wonder what she’s like to hang around with?'”