John Doe – Border X-ing
It was Exene Cervenka, who had made a cross-country trek of her own six months earlier, from Florida. The two L.A. newcomers eventually became writing buddies, then friends, then lovers, then spouses, then ex-spouses and good friends once again. That same winter, Doe placed a musician-seeks-band ad in a handout newspaper, the Recycler. In the same paper was a similar ad from Billy Zoom, a local guitarist who had played with Gene Vincent and had led his own rockabilly band.
“He didn’t want to do the Billy Zoom Band anymore,” Doe explains, “because that was a dead end. Rockabilly was still too close to where it had started for it to go anywhere. There was a rockabilly scene in L.A., but there wasn’t enough of a different spin on it.
“Unlike most rockabilly guitarists, who emphasize Eddie Cochran, Scotty Moore and the country side of early rock ‘n’ roll, Billy had a blacker feel; he used a lot of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. That’s a better hybrid, to my taste. And unlike a lot of punk guitarists, he didn’t just play noise; he had a lot more range than that. Billy was unusual for that scene. He’s unusual for any scene.”
In early 1978, original drummer Mick Basher was replaced by DJ Bonebrake, a Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa fan who, says Doe, “approached the drums as an instrument and not just as drums.” Then one day Doe brought his pal Cervenka to band rehearsal so she could sing “I’m Coming Over”, a song they had been co-writing. Before there was much time to think about it, she was in the band.
“Exene was included because she wrote things that were obviously songs that I would put music to,” Doe says. “We came up with that twin-vocal thing, because I didn’t want her to feel left out. She didn’t play an instrument, so she had to be singing most of the time. Her lack of musical education proved to be a good thing, because instead of singing what should be sung, she just sang what she heard or what fit.”
Unlike many punk musicians, who were still learning their instruments in those days, Doe, Zoom and Bonebrake had been playing for years and could realize bigger ideas more readily. And the wild card of Cervenka kept them from falling into stale old habits. Meanwhile, Doe and Cervenka were both serious poets, so the songwriting tended to be more genuinely experimental and ambitious than almost anything else in the punk world. Thus X proved the counterintuitive notion that experience can actually help one become a radical innovator.
X were stars in L.A. before they ever released an album. Lines wrapped around the block for their shows at the Whisky A Go-Go in 1979, but none of the major labels got it. One person who did, though, was Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist.
“He saw us at the Whisky,” Doe recalls, “and he said, ‘Wow, they’re connecting with the audience the way the Doors did. I can feel this.’ He came backstage and said he’d like to work with us. Exene and I considered him a true rock icon, and to have someone you respect believing in you meant so much. It gave us a lot of confidence when we needed it most.”
X finally signed with a then-small West Coast label, Slash Records, and in 1980 released Los Angeles, featuring Manzarek as producer and keyboardist. It eventually sold 80,000 copies, and the 1981 follow-up, Wild Gift, sold 50,000. These were unheard-of numbers for a punk indie label, and when the albums showed up on many critics’ year-end 10-best lists, X came to personify the West Coast punk movement.
But by Wild Gift, X sounded like no one else in a movement they supposedly represented. Already, hints of Zoom’s rockabilly roots and Doe’s folk-rock past were seeping into the music. “Beyond & Back” sounded like Johnny Cash’s “Get Rhythm” on hallucinogens laced with amphetamines; “White Girl” sounded like a demo for Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde. “Back 2 The Base” name-checked Elvis Presley and Little Stevie Wonder. When X signed with Elektra and released Under The Big Black Sun in 1982 and More Fun In The New World in 1983, the roots influence only got stronger.
“By the time we made Wild Gift,” Doe notes, “Jeffrey Lee Pierce [of the Gun Club], Exene and I had a strong friendship and were starting to get into older music. Traditional music with all that death and hard times was very attractive, because pop music didn’t do that.
“We did catch some flak for incorporating these other elements from folks who said, ‘Oh, that X band is from Venice where all the hippies live.’ But we didn’t catch as much flak as you might think, because the scene was more open; there was still a great diversity in punk rock at that time. You had bands like X, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, the Gun Club, Los Lobos and the Blasters all playing shows together.
“That diversity went away because the audience became more factionalized and said, ‘I like this and I don’t really want to listen to that, so I want to just go to this kind of show.’ That’s natural, I guess, but the first incarnation was better because there were no rules. The whole idea was, ‘Do what you want to do; just make sure it’s intense.'”