“Nostalgia: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a return to, or of, some past period or irrecoverable condition,” recites John Doe, frontman and bassist for X — the most important band of the first-wave L.A. punk scene, and one of the greatest punk bands of all time — as he reads aloud from the dictionary.
“So, no, we’re not nostalgic,” Doe’s bandmate and former wife, frontwoman Exene Cervenka, states flatly.
Doe and Cervenka are on Zoom, in their separate hotel rooms, conducting one of many interviews in the middle of bustling SoCal itinerary that includes gigs in Los Angeles, in San Diego, and at the Orange County Fair; a Grammy Museum screening of their seminal documentary X: The Unheard Music; the publishing of a big Los Angeles Times cover story; autograph signings at Fingerprints and Amoeba Music… and the release of their final studio album, Smoke & Fiction.
“We didn’t set out in 2023 or the end of 2022 to say, ‘OK, we’re writing the last record. Here we go,’” Doe says. “It developed, and as the songs and the lyrics all came together, it seemed to be apparent to me — with the reflection in the lyrics, what it talked about — the way it was summing things up.”
Doe is referring to Smoke & Fiction’s lead single “Big Black X,” a quintessentially X-esque love/hate letter to L.A. that looks back on their early misadventures, like breaking into Errol Flynn’s abandoned mansion or setting a Christmas tree on fire in the Masque’s alley. While taking stock of the band’s nearly half-century history, that track — and every track on Smoke & Fiction — never relies on tired clichés about how much better everything was in the good old days. And absolutely nothing on Smoke & Fiction sounds like the output of a band that has run out of energy or ideas or is ready to call it quits.
“It’s reflective, not nostalgic. It’s not putting [our past] through this rose-colored lens that’s phony. Also, I think there’s a healthy dose of acceptance, of getting right with something that happened in the past. Yeah, we did fall down on the street like a drunken mess,” says Doe, referencing “The Way It Is,” another bittersweet Smoke & Fiction ode to youthful folly. “But you have to accept that. If you regret it, then you’re going to be racked with this really negative opinion of yourself. … That’s why [“Big Black X”] seems to be a good time-capsule of what we’ve done. If somebody who is 20 said, ‘What was it like in 1979? I only have three and a half minutes. Can you explain it?’ I would say, ‘Listen to this song.’”
“If you’re a writer, you’re already writing about the past, the second you sit down at the typewriter or the pen-and-paper,” notes Cervenka. “We’re writers. We write about what happened.”
It’s interesting that X are releasing their final LP, and paying homage to a long-Lost Angeles on “Big Black X,” at a time when the city’s beloved landmarks are being torn down or converted into luxury condos at an alarmingly rapid rate. Cervenka, a lover of “history and antiques and life and Americana and stuff” who lists Johnny’s Steakhouse, Nickel Diner, and Snow White Café as the shuttered L.A. locations she misses most, says this erasure saddens her. But she adds, “The thing I have to come to terms with, though I still have a love for L.A., is that it’s not my city now. It’s a bunch of young people… and they’re loving L.A., and for them, it’s the greatest city. They’re so happy to be there. They don’t know that there used to be something else on that spot, and now it’s gone. It doesn’t matter. I think the thing with life is if you’re living in the moment, then everything’s gone. So, what difference does it make? I’m sitting here talking to you; I’m not at someplace I used to be. It’s just weird. Time is weird.”
“The thing that appealed to me, coming to L.A. from Baltimore, is that everything was disposable and everything was constantly renewed, which was sort of exciting because we were young,” adds Doe, who met Florida transplant Cervenka when she was 20 and he was 23. “Los Angeles is famous for that. I think that’s part of the West and being disposable.”
But the music was never disposable. And conveniently coinciding with X’s farewell record is Cervenka and X drummer DJ Bonebrake’s recent appearance — alongside other punk royalty from those long-gone L.A. days like Mike Watt, Lee Ving, Kid “Congo” Powers, the Avengers’ Penelope Houston, and the Germs’ Don Bolles — in a viral “Old Punks” sketch on John Mulaney‘s Netflix show, Everybody’s in L.A. And during that hilarious segment, when Fred Armisen asked this focus group who was the “most punk” among them, Cervenka unhesitatingly pointed right at herself.
“I am reckless and impulsive, and I think spontaneously all the time; it’s one of my character defects and one of my strongest points. So, I just said what I thought. He asked the question; I answered,” Cervenka shrugs. While she fondly describes the Everybody’s in L.A. shoot as “one of my favorite punk-rock experiences of all time,” she does have some mixed feelings about how it was ultimately presented.
“They didn’t tell anyone it was called ‘Old Punks’ till after we got there. And that’s kind of dismissive, in a way,” Cervenka says. “They filmed us for 12 hours, and you cannot imagine the amazing conversations and interactions. We played music for half an hour, all together, making up lyrics and singing together. … It was so incredible and so much fun. Never had any of us done that, in all these 50 years. And so, I think it’s interesting that they had us there for 12 hours with all this footage and only used [five] minutes. That stuff is priceless. … I think they had a goldmine and they didn’t make the most of it. But having said that, I’m so grateful that they did that, because what an experience. I will never forget that. … So, people didn’t get to see what we got to see, but that’s true of punk in general. They only got to see one minute of what we were experiencing for years.”
X have actually been experiencing quite a renaissance in recent years. There’s been a career-spanning exhibit at the Grammy Museum; an official X Night at Dodger Stadium (“That was the greatest thing, because I got to throw out the first pitch,” Cervenka giddily recalls); and a proclamation from the City of West Hollywood, presented onstage at the Troubadour by Dwight Yoakam. In November 2024, Doe and Cervenka will be honored at a gala hosted by Beyond Baroque, the Venice Beach literary center where they first met in 1976. There’s even been a groundswell of support for X’s long-overdue Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination. (Cervenka admits she’d love to be in the Hall, but stresses that there are many still-overlooked ‘50s and ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll pioneers who should be inducted first; Doe says he’d like X to get in for guitarist Billy Zoom’s sake, explaining, “I think it would mean a lot to him.”)
Additionally, X’s triumphant 2020 comeback record, Alphabetland — their first studio album featuring all four original members since 1985 — was described by The Guardian as being “far better than it had any right to be.” So, it seems odd that the band wouldn’t be taking advantage of this new momentum, instead deciding to semi-retire.
“Who thinks about stuff like that, though? I mean, we’ve been doing this for 50 years. Who thinks, ‘Now it’s going to happen! Now we’re going to get popular! Now people are going to finally understand this!’” Cervenka laughs incredulously. “We don’t know [why X never achieved mainstream success], and I don’t care. Oh my God, I’d be so worn-out if I thought about that.”
X were no doubt hugely influential — Doe recalls Kurt Cobain telling him that Cobain and his peers watched X: The Unheard Music “three, four, five times” when it was screened in Seattle in 1987 — and yet, there’s really never been another band that has quite sounded like X. “I don’t think you can replicate what we do, because none of it’s conscious and none of it’s contrived,” Cervenka explains. “The way I sing, for instance — who does that? And the way John plays bass? Nobody’s going to play bass like that. And of course, no one can do what Billy does, no one, or DJ. … Maybe we will see it in the future. Maybe AI. I hate to even bring that up, but I suppose you could do an AI X. But I bet that wouldn’t even work. I bet AI can’t even make an X.”
Perhaps X’s uniqueness, their unclassifiabilty, is why they never received major radio play back in the day (despite that “last American band” claim made in 1983’s “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”). Doe doesn’t dwell on that, saying, “As you get older, you have a choice to be grateful or to be bitter, and I’m really grateful that we’ve chosen a more positive path.” But Cervenka, while admitting she was frustrated with stuffy old-school radio programmers who “wouldn’t welcome us in,” theorizes, “[X] wasn’t pretty music. I mean, when you listen to Fleetwood Mac, it’s beautiful songs with beautiful singing and playing, very polished. And we were the antithesis of that. You couldn’t play ‘Rhiannon’ and then play ‘Los Angeles’ back-to-back. It just wasn’t going to happen.”
It’s curious that Cervenka mentions Fleetwood Mac, another band that famously stayed together for years after their lineup’s core romantic couple split up. When asked why her 1985 divorce from Doe didn’t signify the end of X, Cervenka replies, “I didn’t feel like there was a choice there. I valued the band and felt we could work out the difficulties between us personally. I valued the creative partnership more than just being a couple.
“It’s not just me and John — it’s Billy and DJ, too,” Cervenka continues. “We’ve all been together for almost 50 years. That’s really hard to do. I know these guys like the back of my hand. I know everything about them. I know over the years how I’ve changed as a human being, how they’ve changed as human beings, how we all get along, what our interactions are, what our triggers are, what our dynamics are. And you have to learn how to coexist with people. I think it’s an incredible gift to be able to know people for so long and not just walk away. I mean, it’s really brave. … It’s not always easy, but it’s a noble thing to do. It’s a real character-building thing to do. The creative part of our relationship and just who we are as people, that’s more important than being married or anything else.”
X’s DJ Bonebrake, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, and Billy Zoom (photo: Gilbert Trejo)
“I’d add that your closest relationships are just part of your own personality. You’re projecting something of yourself, or you’re having someone else’s personality projected onto you, and you’re going to press the ‘learn’ button and figure out who you are, what you want to be, what you want, and encourage what you want to nurture or what you want to change,” says Doe. “I agree that my relationship [with Exene] is more of a creative, spiritual bond that is unbroken — and won’t be broken.”
That being said, after four-plus decades, the X band members are understandably tired of spending weeks together on the road, crowded in a van, and that burnout is one reason behind their formal farewell. “[Touring] was never easy. It’s not easy. Once in a while I’ll have a friend come with me and ride along for two or three shows in Southern California, and of course all of my friends are younger than me, and they invariably go, ‘How do you do this? This is so hard!’” chuckles Cervenka, 68. “Physically, it’s just really, really challenging. People don’t understand. They think that you get in some kind of bus, you go to a city, you get taken to a nice hotel where your luggage gets brought to your room, you eat a really nice meal, and then five hours later you walk into a club and play. That has never been my experience, ever, since day one of touring. And it never will be. It’s very blue-collar; it’s physical labor and not luxury at all. … The dressing rooms and most of the clubs we play now are pretty nice — there’s a bathroom and there’s sandwiches and some Diet Cokes and some beer and stuff — but some of these places that we’ve played in our career, there’s no bathroom, no food. I love it, or I wouldn’t have done it all these years, and I’m not complaining about it. I’m just saying that as you get older, if you have any kind of financial stability whatsoever, even if it’s minor, if you can make a choice between just really killing yourself or having some level of comfort, you might want to just go, ‘I don’t need to make this much money. I only need to survive.’”
“It is grueling, and luckily the hour and a half that you’re onstage makes up for all the deprivation that you experience, but I have a desire to do things that I like, rather than things that I don’t like,” says Doe. “So, figuring out ways of touring or ways of making a living that are more positive is attractive, rather than saying, ‘Well, this is what I’ve gotta do.’ … It’s like, no, you don’t. You do have some choice.”
Smoke & Fiction is X’s final full-length record, but Doe, 71, says they might occasionally release one-off benefit singles, and they won’t stop playing live entirely. (His “dream” is to “do 20 shows a year and maybe set up in a bigger city like New York or Atlanta or Chicago and play two or three nights, rather than playing 75 shows and going from town to town to town to town.”) So, while Doe quickly eschews the idea of X’s epic story being turned into a biopic (“Oh yeah, it would be probably as good as the Germs movie,” he snarks), their story isn’t exactly over.
“No one can actually predict the future,” Cervenka quips. “I mean, what if there’s another pandemic and I’m in Austin and I can’t go home and I’m staying at John’s house for three months, and all we can do is write songs and play music and we come up with 20 songs? You just don’t know.”
Watch X’s full conversation in the video at the very top of this article, in which Doe and Cervenka also discuss surviving the ’90s, Doe’s punk anthology More Fun in the New World, the L.A. roots scene, what the Germs biopic got wrong, and how they feel about Elon Musk using their name.
