X are finally getting some respect. Their first album, Los Angeles, released in 1980 on the independent Slash label, sold some 80,000 copies, not bad for an independent release. Their second album, Wild Gift, also on Slash, has done almost as well sales-wise, but with the critics it’s been an unqualified smash. Wild Gift was voted the best LP of 1981 by the music critics of the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and by the Village Voice’s national poll of rock critics. In hometown L.A. they are local stars, able to sell out any venue they choose to play. Around the rest of the country they pull large crowds wherever they go. All this finally made the music industry sit up and take notice, and X has just signed a deal with Elektra Records. Not bad for a punk rock band.

A punk rock band? X don’t really like to think of themselves that way.

“A rock ’n’ roll band," singer Exene says. “I think it’s safe to return to that now. We’ve been waiting for the day when we finally would not have to be a punk band anymore.”

Though their rhythms are often taken double-time, the roots of X’s music are indeed in rock ’n’ roll tradition. Rock ’n’ roll and tradition, when put together, can produce something as stale and old as yesterday’s beer—unless you are that rare band that can dig out the rebellion and beauty and spirit that rock ’n’ roll is meant to mean from where it’s buried, and make it live.

"I'll be damned if I'm going to be a martyr for an independent record company. -John Doe"

To be that kind of rock ’n’ roll band in the time and place (Los Angeles, 1978) where X got their start, you almost had to be a punk band. Which is why X started that way.

“Right,” Exene agrees. “That’s a very good point.”

Why does it work so well? One reason is John and Exene’s ability to write about love without sentimentality, to be defiant without posturing. Another is X’s ability as a band to push themselves to the limit of their abilities and no further. This is punk in the hands of musicians trying to make it not more sophisticated, but more effective.

Finally, it works because X have the right combination of people. In their group dynamic, the balance to John and Exene’s earnest intellect is guitarist Billy Zoom’s taciturn bad-boy moodiness and rockabilly classicism. Zoom fronted his own rockabilly outfit, the Billy Zoom Band, which released several records on the Rolling Rock label, and toured with Gene Vincent’s last back-up band. He’s the kind of guy who’ll stroll up in the midst of an earnest discussion of X’s songs to announce “I think ‘Be Bop A Lu La’ is the greatest lyric ever written.” In his guitar playing the influence of heroes like Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Scotty Moore shines through the hard punk riffing.

“When Alan Freed made up the term rock ’n’ roll,” singer/bassist John Doe adds, “the people that were playing what had been called popular music, people like Frank Sinatra, didn’t want to be called that. And the other guys, like Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, did. But rock ’n’ roll’s definition got too diffused, it didn’t mean anything. So with punk, people could call themselves punk as a way of keeping out the other people, Linda Ronstadt might try to call herself new wave but she would never call herself punk.” But it is more than style, exclusivity or the speed of their rhythms that make X a punk band. Punk promised to free pop from its conventions. John Doe and Exene, who write the songs here, keep faith with that promise by writing love songs that deal with love in a non-romantic context, outside the bounds of normal pop morality. The clear-headedness with which they look at their lives is itself an extension of the punk revolution.

Drummer Don “D.J.” Bonebrake has played in marching bands, bossa nova bands, Dixieland bands and classical symphony orchestras. But none of this shows up in his playing with X, where he invents all the time but never embellishes.

“Right” he says. “That was the Tommy Ramone influence. When I heard him I decided that simpler was better. Just play what fits into the song. A lot of drummers try to throw in every lick they ever dreamed of.”

But most of all it works because of the singing and songwriting of John and Exene. Their vocal style is built on soaring trade-offs, their voices flying and bouncing around each other. They met at a poetry workshop in Venice, California, one that Tom Waits and Beat poet Charles Bukowski had previously attended, and their writing shows a very literary attention to detail and image, and a pervasive warmth and humanism. They are married, and their best songs are written from the inside of a love affair—a difficult one, full of pain and pleasure.

"For me, if I'm going to write something, I have to feel it so deeply that I just couldn't not write it. —Exene"

The rock-pop vocabulary has just recently opened up to the real issues of the sexual battleground, with sexually integrated groups like the Au Pairs and the Delta 5 leading the way. X add another dimension by having the songs deal with the relationship of the two people singing them. Private battles and traumas are worked out publicly in their art, without any easy, artificial solutions being imposed.

“White Girl” and “When Our Love Passed Out On The Couch,” for example, deal with temptation and the dilemma of infidelity in an “open” relationship. This particular emotional minefield has rarely been so succinctly traversed.

“White Girl,” Exene says, “was just an experience where we were living together and John was attracted to another woman. For him to have to deal with it, and for me to have to deal with it, and for him to write a song about it, and for us to sing it together—that’s an interesting way to get your frustrations and emotions worked out.”

Listening to X’s songs can be like walking in on a private conversation.

“That’s what good writing is all about. Being so personal and specific that everyone can relate to it. The old sort of thing, ‘I loved my baby and she left me,’ I mean, so what? But if you can give real specific details of your relationship, people can identify with it more. I don’t consider what we do brilliant, but I consider it personal enough so that you can get something out of it.”

. John: “Too many people in writing lyrics have shied away from the range of human experience. I think if there’s anything we’ve done it’s in not being afraid to write what we feel...”

Is it hard, making private things public?

“Naw, that’s just writing. You just try to be as honest with yourself as you can. You feel good when you can capture something that’s a part of your life and write it down.”

Some of your lines say more about their topics than almost anything I’ve read or heard. Like about infidelity: “/ hate it/1 love you/1 hate that I need to know what you do.”

John: “That’s a real syndrome, isn’t it? 1 guess what’s good is taking something that is really obvious and then saying it. John Lennon did that when he wrote that he was just a jealous guy.”

Is your relationship as tempestuous as your songs suggest?

Exene: “Off and on. But isn’t that what tempestuous means?”

John: “Not really. Whenever you make something, a film or a book or a song, it magnifies things. The songs go over a period of time, but you hear them all at once.”

Exene: “For me, if I’m going to write something I have to feel it so deeply that I just couldn’t not write it. So you write the deepest, saddest moments, or the most weird, or the best. You go to the extremes and write about that stuff, rather than just writing ‘La de da, me and John la de da’.”

☆ ☆ ☆

I talk with X during a break in the rehearsals in preparation for recording their third album (and first for Elektra). The place is a rehearsal studio on Santa Monica Blvd. in L.A.. The band is there, and Ray Manzarek, the former Doors keyboardist who has produced their first two records and is again doing the honors, and engineer Clay Rose, an unsung hero in the X story. We talk about careers and critical acclaim and John Doe tells me a story.

“I come from Baltimore, ana last Christmas Exene and I went back there to visit. We went to a party, and John Waters (director of gross-out films like Pink Flamingos and Polyester) was there. And he said to us, ‘You guys are in the same position in your careers as I am. You want to take your clippings of your reviews in the New York Times and take them back to the bank and say, Will you accept these as down payments on a house.’

“That relates a lot to our signing with Elektra. Because you get to a point where you realize that you’re not going to be doing this when you’re 50. So when you realize that, you think to hell with it. If the record company is going to give you a good deal, a fair shake and let you create your music, why not?”

Exene: “We never thought that a major label would have the mentality of Joe Smith (Elektra’s president), that a major label could be trusted and respected.”

John: “When we talked to Joe Smith, he was putting down groups on his label like the Eagles, who don’t make records. In the old days big groups would make a record every year and that would subsidize the more experimental groups on the labels. He said he wants to work with groups that want to make records, not groups that want to sit around in their houses. He also really seemed to respect our opinions about how to get the music out and around. He admitted that if his company had our first album Los Angeles, they wouldn’t have known what to do with it.”

What so you say to old fans when you hear that you’ve sold out by signing with a major label?

Exene: “We haven’t heard that yet. Isn’t that amazing? That was something I worried about. And it didn’t happen at all. Either in the press I’ve seen or with any of the people I talk to. Especially not with our fans, they are very happy for us.”

John: “I think everyone pretty much understood it. Even Slash, ’cause I’ll be damned if I’m going to be a martyr for an independent record company.”

Exene: “We heard complaints when we put our first record out on Slash. I was completely amazed. People would say ‘oh, how can you do that?’ and I was just, well, what are we supposed to do? Make cassettes in our garage and hand them out at gigs? And at that point I realized that statements about bands selling out come from people who see you as being a personal band that belongs to them and who don’t want to let go of that.”

X are proud of the fact that they have not come by their success alone, but as part of a group of L.A. bands that started out together, have consistently helped each other out along the way, and are now reaping the rewards of hard work. They’ve been especially close to the Blasters, a truly rockin’ group out of Downey, California, whose Slash LP has just been picked up for distribution by Warner Brothers.

John: “Actually I’m very happy that we started when we did and are not starting out now. It’s harder for new groups now because L.A. thinks it has its “new music” —us, the Blasters, the Go-Go’s, and it doesn’t have to worry about going out to see something new. There aren’t as many clubs as there used to be so it’s harder for bands starting out.

“But it’s great that the Go-Go’s have done what they’ve done, that the Blasters have been on television, that we’ve been on television, that we got signed to Elektra and the Circle Jerks got signed to IRS and the Unknown got signed to Sire.”

Manzarek: “Let’s get Top Jimmy And The Rhythm Pigs in there... They’re not signed yet but they’re going to be a national band too. Great blues band. It’s only a matter of time.”

John: “There’s a pretty strong rhythm and blues renaissance here, with Top Jimmy, Fast Phreddie and The Precisions, the Plugz and some others. The Blasters sort of fall into that category, not that they’re rhythm and blues but that they draw more directly from older music.”

Why is this happening now?

“I think that after you divorce yourself from the older music for awhile so you can make new music, then you can go back and use your influences from teenage and childhood.

“I think the record labels are finally realizing that they just can’t keep holding on to the same people, that there’s got to be some new music coming up somewhere. But I still believe, even though we’ve signed to Elektra/Asylum now, that they are now as responsive as they could be to new bands. The Plugz should be signed to a mjaor label, a lot of groups. Even the Circle Jerks and Black Flag, the hardcore. There are a lot of fucked up angry teenagers all over the United States, not just in L.A.”

The next X album will have one cover song, a Leadbelly blues called “Dancing With Tears In Your Eyes,” and a lot of new songs that John and Exene wrote during a binge of writing in December. Hearing the new songs in rehearsal and played live, I thought they sounded like X songs should sound—soaring vocal melodies, hard and dynamic guitar parts, strong and rippling rhythms. They sounded great.

“I think the next album is going to be stronger and clearer,” John says. “Instead of using the money to make more of a production I think we’ll use the money to get stronger individual performances, getting the right vocal take with fewer punchins from one line to the next, getting really strong guitar parts without as many overdubs. It’s hard to say, but that’s what we’ve got in mind.”

Exene: “We’ve been pretty rushed in the studio in the past. Getting all those mentions as best record of the year for Wild Gift just seems sp funny because when we’re in there we’re thinking, ‘God, if we can do this now what about when we can get some money to work with.’

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 43

At this point, since we are talking about production, it seems appropriate to ask Ray Manzarek what first attracted him to X.

Manzarek: “Strength, power, poetry, drama, excitement, passion...”

John: “Silver sparkle.”

Manzarek: “Brillance. I won’t go so far as to say genius because they’re sitting in the room with us, and we don’t want to give them swollen heads. Other than that, not much. I went to see them at the Whiskey—actually I was going to see Levi and the Rockats and X was opening, and I was amazed. Phew!”

What do you see as your contribution to the band?

“Minimal. I just try to make it sound good and offer a few opinions and throw out a few ideas. Some ideas sure used and some aren’t.”

John: “I think I can answer that better. His contribution to us is in attitude. Getting us to do the right things in the studio by keeping us moving forward. By after a good take, saying ‘yeah, that was just fine, so let’s do it again.’ ”

Manzarek: “See, people don’t need to be criticized. Tell me what I do well. That’s what people need. The real you is in what you do well, what your dream is.

“X is the new music, along with all the other new bands that are coming up. They have to get on to it. It’s the music of the 80’s.”

☆ ☆ ☆ -

I’ve believed that for a while, arid seeing X live again reconfirmed my belief. At one of three sold-out nights at L.A.’s Roxy, they put on a show as full of passion as any I”ve seen, a moving treat to watch.

Exene is a short, diminutive girl, who, if you met in normal circumstances, you would never imagine as a fiery dynamo onstage—but give her a stage and that’s exactly what she becomes. Singing with X, Exene discovers a gracefulness, a sexuality and an energy within herself that seem to totally transform her.

John is also a great performer and a fantastic singer, * his voice deep, full of emotion, nuance and caring. Then there’s Billy Zoom, who stands statue-still the whole set, feet spread apart, tossing off cascading chords and short, intense bursts of notes with a sly, aw-shucks grin on his face.

This being a hometown gig, the crowd are of course in total pandemonium from the first note. The entire Roxy is a swaying, leaping, heaving mass of dancing bodies. When the set is over, band and audience alike seemed drained and happy.

L.A. definitely has X fever. I don’t'see any reason why the rest of the country shouldn’t soon follow.