Los Angeles was so foundational to punk-rock pioneers X they named their 1980 debut album after it. For Brooklyn-raised bassist/singer John Doe, the city held all the promise of a new frontier. “I’d seen Talking Heads at CBGBs, the Heartbreakers at Max’s Kansas City,” he says. “I wanted to be in a band, and I packed up my shit and moved to LA because I loved movies and literature, and because there was no punk scene there, yet.” For singer Exene Cervenka, it offered salvation from a deadening existence in St Petersburg, Florida. Restless, an inveterate hitchhiker, she was “always searching, my antennae open, just looking to see what was out there in the world”.
At 20, Cervenka followed those antennae to Hollywood, where she met Doe and Illinois-born guitarist Billy Zoom, and they formed one of the first – and certainly the most enduring – of LA’s punk-rock groups, in 1977. Documenting a nihilistic LA, and soon namechecked in Bret Easton Ellis’s similarly minded Less Than Zero, they became local, then national punk heroes before losing their way amid friction, divorce and major label misdirection.
Now though, the group are releasing a new album Smoke & Fiction. Billed as their last, it is remarkable: a dialogue with their past that never descends to mere nostalgia, a record that somehow sounds as lean and poetic and fiery as their debut. “It’s made by the same people,” deadpans Cervenka, by way of explanation. “None of us died, so we got lucky on that end.”
Luck was a regular player in the X story. Having succumbed to LA’s siren call, Cervenka found work at venerated Venice Beach arts space Beyond Baroque where, at a poetry workshop, she sat beside fellow new arrival Doe, who’d decided this was where to find “kindred spirits”. Asked by the workshop-leader to name 10 poets they loved, Doe caught Cervenka cribbing from his list. “John had studied poetry,” she says. “I wasn’t educated. I wasn’t literate. I’d dropped out of school at 16. But in Florida, to entertain ourselves, my sister and I would buy old ledger books at the thrift-store and fill them with words and drawings. I loved to write.”
Cervenka and Doe quickly became friends, and then lovers. Doe asked Cervenka if he could use one of her poems as lyrics for a song with Zoom. “That’s when I realised I had something that might be worth something in this world, and I better not just give it away,” Cervenka says. “So John said, ‘OK, will you sing it?’ And then I was terrified, because I’d never sung in my life.” But, Doe explained, punk “was all about free expression and having fun. I knew Exene was a great writer. She was fearless. She’d already lived a life. I could tell she had the presence to be a lead singer.”
Welcoming aboard “Buddha-like” drummer DJ Bonebrake, X played parties and friends’ basements, where – alongside contemporaries the Screamers, Black Randy and the Metrosquad, the Weirdos and Germs – they inaugurated LA’s punk-rock scene. Documented by film-maker Penelope Spheeris in The Decline of Western Civilisation, these groups lived fast, and some – notably Darby Crash, Germs’s auto-destructive frontman – died young. But while songs such as The World’s a Mess: It’s In My Kiss chronicled this milieu (“We were like: everything’s going too fast, it’s going to implode,” remembers Doe), X were on a different path. An influx of suburban skinheads in the early 1980s evolved Hollywood punk into hardcore and, Doe says, the group realised “our beautiful little bubble was no longer. There was a lot of testosterone, and overt violence, and some homophobia and racism, and that’s not what punk was ever supposed to be.”
“None of that bothered me as much as the spitting,” adds Cervenka. “I just wanted smart people at our shows.”
But luck had delivered the group an unlikely champion. They’d added a punked-up cover of the Doors’ Soul Kitchen into their set, catching the ear of that group’s former keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. By now, X had evolved into a remarkable proposition, Cervenka’s anguished howl complementing Doe’s slow-burning burr, Zoom grounding their attack in rock’n’roll’s fundaments. “We loved Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran,” Doe says, “the imagery, the economy of the storytelling, the truthfulness.” Manzarek recognised within these new wave Los Angelenos a similar poetic menace to his own group, and produced their 28-minute debut album. “Those tracks all possessed a similar darkness, which had drawn Ray to us,” says Doe. “Los Angeles can be a dark place, underneath the sunshine.”
Across three further albums with Manzarek, their songwriting matured, fielding works of complexity and nuance like I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, their “sarcastic state of the world address, taking in wars and colonialism”, says Doe. But while X were showered with critical acclaim, and became a key influence on the punks that followed, commercial success proved elusive. Frustrated by their middling sales, they swapped Manzarek for Michael Wagener, producer of Christian metallers Stryper, for 1985’s Ain’t Love Grand!. It was their biggest-seller but, Doe says, its polished college-rock “didn’t sound like us”. Zoom exited soon afterwards, while Doe and Cervenka, who’d married in 1980, divorced in 1986 (“I didn’t understand a lot of things about myself,” Doe offers. “I didn’t understand ego”). The break-up didn’t signal the end of X, but their returns diminished steeply. Their albums grew uninspired, and by the 1990s, as Nirvana finally took punk-rock mainstream, X were playing bars. “It was depressing,” says Doe.
Zoom returned to the ranks for a 1998 farewell tour, after which Doe pursued a solo career and an acting side-hustle, and Cervenka focused on poetry and mixed-media art. Reunion tours followed a decade later, but they wouldn’t record a new album until 2020’s stinging Alphabetland, their first in 27 years, which was far better than it had any right to be. Smoke & Fiction, meanwhile, is a revelation. The cornerstone track, Big Black X, revisits wild hijinks in late 70s Hollywood, all acid and angel dust and drunken expeditions in search of Errol Flynn’s abandoned mansion.
“Rumours circulated, like, ‘There’s this awesome place with a swimming pool where we can skate and drink beer, and nobody knows it’s there’,” remembers Cervenka. “I don’t think it really was Flynn’s mansion,” adds Doe, “but we all snuck into the Hollywood Hills. The shit hit the fan pretty quickly: cop cars showed up, and Exene and I slid down the hill and got separated.” Doe drifts into reminiscent reverie, then smiles. “It was all just youthful mayhem.”
The album has been trailed as their farewell, along with the tour that promotes it. “It was taxing,” Doe says, of making Smoke & Fiction. “I’m not sure we have the will or energy to do another. As for touring, I never want us to be a shadow of what we were, I want us to go out on top.”
But if X are on borrowed time, the friendship between Doe and Cervenka has only deepened. “After the divorce, there was friction,” Doe admits. “But I made my amends. It was tough, to split up and still be in a band, but we thought it was worth it. We’re probably better friends now than when we were married.”
“There are no road maps,” adds Cervenka, of the unpredictable path of their life together. “We can’t know the future, we can only make the best choices we can. But life is long, life is hard, and life is rewarding.” She pauses for a moment, perhaps remembering again that night in the Hollywood hills, searching for Errol Flynn’s mansion, fleeing the cops, all that chaos and unlikely magic. “It’s amazing the way things twist and turn.”
• Smoke & Fiction is released 2 August on Fat Possum Records
