X SPOT THE MARKS

X SPOT THE MARKS

RAW CHEMICALS WITH A SPOON

by

Richard Riegel

As I enter Billy Zoom’s Cincinnati motel room, I glance at the usual rockband-ontour pile of black leather jackets, but I also take note of a big jar of Coffee-mate nondairy creamer in the corner. “Aha!” I silently register. “Caffeine fiends like meself. So that’s where X’s hard-edged voomboom riffs come from.”

Co-riffmeister Billy Zoom is stretched out on his bed, watching a WKRP In Cincinnati episode on the motel-bound TV. “That station doesn’t exist in reality,” he says, gesturing toward a bright-orange Dr. Johnny Fever frantic at his mike. “If it did, our records would be on the radio.”

We all agree on that point, as Billy’s spouse (and X’s road manager), Denise Zoom, dons her black leather jacket to go down to the bar. She’s going to while away the hour observing the local fauna—“Some Kentucky guys with CATerpillar caps”—and give the onstage Xs a chance to chat with this odd non-dairy CREEMster Elektra’s publicity dept, dug up somewhere. The other Xs troop into the room as Denise exits.

Husband and wife John Doe and Exene Cervenka, X’s co-writers and co-vocalists (and conjugal X image, in the popular mind), shake hands and grab chairs at the foot of the bed, while drummer D.J. Bonebrake sits down by the final fleeting image of Loni Anderson on the TV. John Doe’s handsome in an earnest rockin’beatnik-on-a-’50s-loading-dock way— plastered hair, plaid shirt, jeans, big engineer boots up on the bed—while Exene Cervenka’s pretty in a sort of plainfolks Appalachian-waif style. They’d be the perfect all-American couple to cast in a remake of Bonnie And Clyde, but fortunately someone reinvented punk rock in the meantime.

Exene picks up her long, orange-black near-dreadlocks one by one and lets them fall again, as we discuss X’s latest attempt to connect with something of the popular success their long run with the cognoscenti has always promised. X have topped every critics’ poll there is, have inspired hotblooded superlatives from the most jaded old reviewers, and yet radio and MTV have given that phenomenon far less attention than Sammy Hagar’s latest fingernail transplant. Suddenly Billy Zoom hops up, grabs and uncaps the Coffee-mate, scoops out a heaping spoonful, and swallows it straight, with no coffee chaser anywhere in evidence.

Exene flinches, shields her face from Zoom’s apparently ritual excess, and says “Ooh! I don’t know how you can do that— all those raw chemicals with a spoon!” “Well,” I offer helpfully, “I understand how it is with you L.A. bands and your white powders...” Billy Zoom is grinning a mischievous, sugarlit smirk of his own, and Exene regards him with the mock horror of a mom for her kid who’s not just naughty but perverse while he’s at it. “It’s because you don’t drink that you do that,” she counsels Zoom.

“Individual preferences vary.” That’s what it says on the back of Billy Zoom’s jar of Coffee-mate, and it’s a good theme for X’s Story So Far. They’ve got nearly seven years of existence and four big albums behind ’em already, but they can’t seem to accumulate enough of a fan constituency at any given moment to turn the corner of national prominence.

The latest roadblock to X’s achievement of a national breakthrough has been the arrival of the New British Invasion, which you may have heard about elsewhere. Just about the time X’s fine 1982 album, Under The Big Black Sun, was ready to push them into household-letter status, the Britons descended upon us, and every domestic hovel with hot & cold running cable service was quickly up to its collective keester with those blond-on-bland Duran Duran lads. For the pop-lord programmers, X’s image stock must have plummeted from “next big maybe” to “last year’s trend” overnight— after all, X have no synthesizers, and just l1/? blonds (Billy Zoom & sometimes-for-fun Exene) aboard.

X address this image-dilemma on their new album, More Fun In The New World, particularly in its wonderful “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts,” which catalogues fellow U.S. bands who aren’t getting on the mass airwaves either:“But what about the Minutemen, Flesh Eaters, DOA, Big Boys, and the Black Flag?” Implication’s that X’ve been thinking bad thoughts about the import pop that is riding the waves: “Glitterdisco-synthesizer night school!” snort that Lou Reed/Patsy Cline-sounding Doe/Cervenka fun duo. It’s a catty coinage worthy of an adjective-mad rock crit, but they sound determined to fight on the beaches.

“X are not usually known as an ‘Anglophile’ band,” Exene promises me, and what she and X are talking up in their songs and interviews isn’t simple, blind chauvinism, but rather our whole country’s coming artistic preoccupation with the decline of American products—not necessarily in quality, but as myths unto themselves. Rock ’n’ roll wouldn’t exist today if us Americans hadn’t invented Cadillac convertibles and Wurlitzer jukeboxes to start with—rock music emerged in the ’50s because we needed a new expression of our collective awe before those manufactured icons. Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” Bob Seger’s brilliant “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” and Bob Dylan’s brand new “Union Sundown” are just the tip of the smart-edged domestic songs that’re going to emerge once the loss of America’s materialistic dream really hits home.

X are personally acquainted with America’s loss-of-producthood mythic crisis, as Billy Zoom, for one, spends his spare time lovingly re-creating the glory days of good old American knowhow. He’s a collector of special-interest “American iron” (“Is there any other kind?” he asks me, with that shywiseass grin), and he fills his off-X hours polishing up his ’53 Hudson Hornet, his ’61 Stiidebaker Lark, and his ’53 Ford panel delivery, vehicles straight from the heart of the Ameripop dream. (Elvis P. bought a ’47 Lincoln outta his first Crown Electric pay envelope.) Sez Billy: “Denise had a ’66 VW when we got married; it was always breaking down, so I got rid of it, and the Lark takes us wherever we want to go with no problems now.”

Putting X’s music on consistently Interstate-conquering wheels is another matter. They’ve got the go and the show, but need more fans in the know. I mention that I’ve seen X’s “New World” video—a loving travelogue of all of America’s technicolor weathers—only once so far, on Radio 1990. “Well, it is on MTV,” says Billy Zoom, savoring his punkabilly punchline, “If you wanna get up at 4 a.m. to see it.”

John Doe quotes from More Fun In The New World again, from the song “Make The Music Go Bang!”: “I can’t stand people who bitch & whine,” a warning to himself as much as to anybody else, that X have no time for bitching & whining even if MTV doesn’t program their vid right between Martha Quinn’s dizzy primetime eyes. X’ve gotta make themselves known to the U.S. public in whatever way they can. Hence this semisleazy Cincinnati motel and the big C&W tour bus pulled up out front,

“Normal” is a word that keeps popping up in this conversation, as John Doe and I continually reassure each other that X are “normal” enough (early punk rep notwithstanding) to appeal to a wide-based rock audience. Yet X have been toasted in the Village Voice already, so they could never be satisfied with being just “normal.”

“There are no groupies,” says Exene wryly, alluding to the popularity of monogamy within X, “But I don’t want to make it sound like I’m an old married woman.” She chuckles about a CREEM photo caption that yukked up “John & Exene’s Tupperware party,” and as a member of the young married set myself, I know just what she’s talking about. As soon as you celebrate your first anniversary of the wedded stuff, all those rootless singles out there are ready to slander your lifestyle with suggestions of Tupperware orgies.

But, as X’s songs have clearly insisted, even the best marriages have their dark (but not fatal) sides, and John and Exene would like to believe that whatever happiness they’ve found together, that shouldn’t keep them from understanding what’s going on outside in that big bad world Ward & June never inhabited. John cites the biting portrayals of various Doe/Cervenka-observed L.A. lower lives (not lowlifes) in X’s songs, and reminds me how many grotesques populate the books of writers like Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, who led decidedly non-bohemian lives. “Oh well,” I fatuously conclude, high on Zoom’s Coffee-mate fumes, “‘Normal’ is whatever’s going on around you, no matter how bizarre it seems to the public...”

To keep X from noticing how goofy my intellectual poop’s getting, I interject my standard interview query about the influence of Lou Reed (everybody’s fave antichrist) on their band, and John Doe allows as how he “heard” his “older brother’s copies of the ‘banana’ album and White Light/White Heat” when John was a mere lad of “10 or 12. The band I wish I’d known about earlier is the Stooges,” he continues, and Exene adds, “Yeh, we didn’t pick up on them until ’78 or so...” (be still, my arteriosclerotic heart!) “...until after we had heard Iggy Pop’s solo albums.” I give X the sage advice that the Stooges actually “go all the way back to 1969,” and then I quickly change the subject.

These X people still have to get America acquainted with their many (abnormally good) virtues, after all; we can’t have a whole new generation grow up who don’t realize until 1991 or so that they wish they’d gotten into X way back when. But, let’s give confirmed shadetree mechanic Billy Zoom the last word on pop music’s J.C. Whitney catalogue of imagery: “David Bowie admits he’s not bisexual, and then his sales take off. George Jones, on the other hand, could never admit he’s not bisexual; he couldn’t even bring up the subject; in fact there’s a lot of things George Jones hasn’t denied...”

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X

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25

Over at Bogart’s later, nobody can deny just how good a rock band X really are. They’re introduced as hailing “from the United States of America!” and they quickly show off their real-Americans-driveAmerican-cars origins.

On stage, in fact, Zoom and Doe are a reverse caricature of the Limey Who’s Entwistle and Townshend. Billy Z. stands stock still in a legs-spread “X” pose, moves only his insolent prodigy eyes and Yankingenuity fingers, and yet scratches whole assembly lines of raw rockerbilly sound vehicles out of his guitar. John Doe hops around the stage like the lost mad Phil Ochs, shouting X’s lyrics as his lank hair falls over his forehead, and smashing big booms out of his bass when it gets in the way.

Exene looks tiny between Doe and Zoom, but her voice is a gigantic country-punk presence as it blends in and out with her hubby’s. Their wavery harmonies have something as American-mythic as the sound of Roy Orbison’s Harley Davidson (riding away) in them. Up above, D.J. Bonebrake (words will never hurt him) pounds away with the steady, less-is-more fury Tommy Ram one set him up for.

Just like their records, X on stage are good, really good, better than you ever thought (American) rock ’n’ roll could be for you again. Exene’s and John’s love-amongthe-doom songwriting could be the best of the whole decade. Or, as X themselves put it, in a metaphor that never attended any poetry workshops: “True Love is the devil’s dragstrip.” (You ready for Shut Down Vol. 3?)