By Molly McGrath and Duane Davis
X, the LA-based 80s punk band, released their debut “Los Angeles” in 1980 and have been consistently cool ever since. X is also one of the many musical phantoms living in the Wax Trax walls. Some of the staff remember their 1982 visit to the store, our second generation owner remembers them as his first concert at the Rainbow Music Hall in 1985, and the younger staff, who grew up worshiping punk bands from before their time, yearningly listen to the stories. Whenever a customer purchases the Boogie Nights soundtrack, they unknowingly enter a conversation about John Doe’s small cameo. When someone buys Los Angeles, they might hear about John Doe’s 90s-era solo in-store show. Colleagues with a half-century age difference gab about this band like it’s the glue holding them together. Below are two reviews of X shows, just over forty years apart.
X at the Mercury Cafe, 1982 [Duane Davis]
“To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black.” – T. Adorno, Aesthetics
“The world’s a mess; it’s in my kiss.” – X, “Los Angeles”
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X have always been LA’s counter-memory: bleak, brittle, bitter. Knowing more than they should and always saying less than they knew.
You could see it in Billy Zoom’s fixed, rictus smile and hear it in his drill-bit guitar work; in D.J. Bonebrake’s impenetrable stone wall drumming, and John Doe’s frictionless bass runs.
But most of all, you could hear it in Doe and Exene’s unnervingly inflectionless voices, bordering at times on tuneless, an allergy to sentiment, an autoimmune reaction to the risks of feeling anything at all in a city with too much light, a city where everyone always sees through everyone and everything.
The band came together in Los Angeles in 1977 with John Doe, vocals/bass, and Billy Zoom, guitar. Exene Cervenka was Doe’s girlfriend at the time, and she wrote poetry that Doe thought would make good songs. So she was in the band, lyricist and singer. D.J. Bonebrake, occasional drummer with the Germs, was the last to come on board.
Dangerhouse, an LA punk label, put out the band’s first record, a 7” single: “Adult Books”/”We’re Desperate” in 1978. It took awhile but they got their first full length album out, now on Slash Records, in April 1980, titled, simply, “Los Angeles.” The songs on the album were a revelation: hard, breathless, cruel. Billy Zoom’s guitar drove the band with a rockabilly attack that has all the country fried cornpone boiled out of it: lean, mean, relentless, unstoppable.
They were on their way. And one of the places they were on their way to was Denver:
42 years ago, in August 7, 1982, X played their first Denver shows at the Mercury Cafe (when it was on 13th & Pearl around the corner from Wax Trax). On a Saturday, they first played an all-ages kiddie show at 2:00pm with no booze (ticket price: a sweet $5 bill!), followed by a show for booze-hounds at 9:30pm (ticket price: $5; and, yeah, here in Cowtown, USA, we rock it late into the night!)
And then on the next day, Sunday, they had another show in the evening at 9:00pm (a little earlier than Saturday night, I mean, Monday morning it’s back to working for the man). But Sunday afternoon was open for the band, so all of them marched over to Wax Trax (a block away in those days) for a meet & greet. They signed anything shoved in front of them and pressed flesh with fans.
So there they are, lined up behind our counter, with Exene and John Doe bookending the line up, D.J. Bonebrake and Billy Zoom in the middle. I’m behind the counter too, watching it all and I notice something interesting: John Doe and Exene (entangled not just in the band but romantically as well) are leaning back from the counter occasionally and exchanging barbed-wire words. All was not smooth in the world of punk rock love!
On stage at the Mercury though, the band was a machine. They had just released their third album (their first on a major label, Elektra) “Under The Big Black Sun”, a month before. They tore through songs like “The Terminator” punching through walls. John Doe and Billy Zoom looked like juvenile delinquents just paroled on work release from a 50s beatnik movie. Exene, dressed like a thrift store existentialist, leaned into the mic and turned the dance floor into a DMZ.
It was hot, sweaty, and dense. A big black sun rose up like a second night hidden behind the one we had walked out of and into the Mercury a few minutes before. Sure, the world’s in a mess. We were there for the kiss!
X live at Tumbleroot (Santa Fe, NM 7/27/23) [Molly McGrath]
When you’re raised in the church of rock n’ roll as I was (both of my parents are music journalists) X is one of those bands that you can’t help but worship. I’ve seen X many times before and I always remember being one of the youngest people in the crowd. But on their last tour, I saw the audience change. Two teenage girls stood next to me, both with their cool parents: Kieran, age 16, and Paloma, age 19
My dad, a fellow cool parent who started taking me to X shows when I was 14, always told me others would catch up to me in my 20s, and they have for the most part. Everyone worth their weight at art school has heard of X. But seeing two teenage girls headbang along to a band almost thirty years their senior almost made me cry with joy. X played an eclectic set traversing many of their albums, and these girls knew almost every lyric. It almost felt like a Pentecostal church. The Holy Spirit of the LA Punk scene had entered these girls, and they screamed along with Exene as if they were speaking in tongues. Billy Zoom, who is known for his smiley stage presence, thanked the girls and me for inspiring him. People like to say that punk is dead, or has been dead for a long time, but it was alive in those girls that night. Meanwhile, their parents glowed in the light of the passing torch.
Now, a year later, X just released their final album, “Smoke and Fiction.” It is billed as their last, and it is a perfect end to their discography. The record is full of everything that makes X so beloved (across all generations). They haven’t tailored their sound to be more appealing to new generations of listeners; the record is not overproduced, John and Exene harmonize animalistically as they always have. They once again have delivered a record essential to their sound; a memento of a time period I wasn’t around for, but have bore witness to through their records. It is profound that I have seen so much of the world through X, and even more awe-inspiring that they have again given young people the opportunity to experience the wonder that is X.
No matter what stage in life you find yourself, or what religion you have practiced so far, I hope to find you at the Smoke and Fiction tour at Summit Music Hall on 8/30.
Editor’s note: We’re currently out of stock of “Smoke & Fiction,” but check back soon!
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