Turn It Up - "X"-tra Special Edition

Nausea, hungry wolves, the once over twice

We’re both big fans of the great Los Angeles band X, who just released a new album that they are claiming will be the last one. To celebrate this remarkable group, this final album, and their ongoing farewell tour, here are 10 of our favorites from their catalog. Play these songs LOUD.

“White Girl” (from Wild Gift, 1981)

I’ve seen it reported that “White Girl” is about an affair John Doe had with Germs bassist Lorna Doom (“She’s a white girl!”) while he was already involved with Exene (“But I’m livin’ with a white girl!”). In the notes to the 2001 reissue of Wild Gift, though, Doe says simply, “That’s a song about temptation.” That’s what the record sounds like, too, regardless of what may have actually happened. Billy Zoom’s itchy riff, that catapulting melodic push to the chorus (“cheater’s walk, down the block… drunk and in love, out at a club”), all of it pulling John along and toward a decision—and us along with him. The best part of the record, though, is Exene’s commentary, alternating between eye-rolling and pouty, about John’s crush: “She’s blonde!” She’s “Nineteen!” Of course she is. —DC

“The Have Nots” (from Under the Big Black Sun, 1982)

X always kept an eye on the condition of working folks, splitting the difference between the fuck-it nihilism of some of their peers and the fist-pumping polemics of some others. This bruiser is one of the best examples, a restless rocker that finds John Doe offering a suitably ambivalent drinking song. It’s both a celebration of the barrooms that offer both escape and community in their “shot and a beer after a hard-earned day,” and a reckoning with how these drunken nights and days reflect a world where “the bottom step of the ladder keeps getting higher and higher.” It’s blues, ultimately, in the jagged-grain manner of Ralph Ellison’s “blues impulse,” and Doe’s vocal ability to express this simultaneous pride and sadness makes for one of his best performances. An anthem for the murk of the early Reagan era. – CH

“The New World” (from More Fun in the New World, 1983)

Speaking of which: it’s Election Day, and it’s mourning in America. Released in 1983, “The New World” reflects both the malaise of the Reagan years – with factories shutting down and nothing trickling down – and the larger, seemingly endless cycle of frustration with elected leaders. Over a rolling boil of a beat from DJ Bonebrake, Doe and Cervenka lament the situation both small – the bars are closed – and large, with the “Dancing in the Street” evocation calling back to a more robust time for the American working and middle classes. The song is flexible enough to carry forward and outward: Pearl Jam played it at “Vote for Change” concerts in 2004, for example, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it from 2016 to 2020. But, in whatever time and space, the sentiment is made more urgent – and the song more compelling – by the whirlwind of guitars that circle around Doe and Cervenka as they survey the bleak landscape with a withering eye and a wide-open heart. – CH

“Breathless” (from More Fun in the New World, 1983)

X came infused with the sound and mythos of the rock ‘n’ roll ‘50s from the beginning, signaled by Billy Zoom’s wide-legged rockabilly stance or John Doe’s post-greaser tousle and enacted in the Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran rumble that (thanks especially to Zoom) powered the freaky punk poetry of their early albums. This Jerry Lee Lewis cover – featured on the soundtrack of the Godard-remake 1983 film of the same name – is unsurprisingly one of the truest applications of that vroom-vroom energy. Replacing Lewis’ palpitations with a kind of disaffected affection, Cervenka slides around the melody as Doe, Zoom, and Bonebrake race alongside her. It’s pure joy, and no surprise that it’s remained a staple of their live sets in all eras. (I even heard a Knitter-riffic version on one of the rare tours from their collective alter egos.) The pounding stop-start after each verse gets me every time, and I still couldn’t love it enough. – CH

“You” (from See How We Are, 1987)

X doesn’t really have that many straight-up love songs, but they’ve got a few knockouts among the heartstring pullers. “You” is a head-over-heels bliss, with new guitarist Tony Gilkyson’s chiming guitars washing around Cervenka as she sings about the man she’s missing. It’s one of Cervenka’s best vocal performances, a soaring performance that reflected the band’s welcome (at least to me) embrace of the textures of ‘80s pop-rock into their sound. (It’s also a rare bit of New York groove from this most L.A. band, with location-specific lyrics that nod towards Lou Reed at his most romantic.) A glorious showcase for Exene Cervenka, and an enduring shoulda-been hit. – CH

“Country at War” (from Hey Zeus!, 1993)

One of the great anti-war songs to emerge from the Gulf War moment, “Country at War” is also on point for every American war since. Our bombs drop somewhere else while here at home people keep right on washing their cars and ironing dish towels—oh, and America also keeps right on turning its back on the sick, hungry and poor. “Country at War” isn’t remembered today like it should be because, well, see the previous sentence. But it’s overlooked, too, because its place in the X story falls between the departure of the band’s brilliant and beaming founding guitarist Billy Zoom, in 1986, and the first of Zoom’s several returns to the lineup in 1998. It’s from the band’s Tony Gilkyson period, in other words, an X era in danger of being forgotten altogether. A versatile former member of Lone Justice, Gilkyson granted the band greater sonic variety, including at times a sound that was heavier than they’d ever been—and scarier. His lines here strafe like missiles streaking across the sky, like police or air-raid sirens, and near the close his guitar makes ungodly, suffocating noises. The record fades out then, but like our nation, Gilkyson’s guitar just keeps dropping bombs. – DC (originally posted 10/2/2023)

“Into the Light” (from Hey Zeus!, 1993)

X went on hiatus after 1988’s raucous Live at the Whisky a Go-Go but made its first comeback with Hey Zeus! five years later. It’s an uneven effort, but alongside “Country at War,” the album’s keeper is “Into the Light,” a Doe and Gilkyson co-write. It’s a great big blast of a cut, the whole thing shimmering and shaking with a punk + pop appeal that fit right in with that moment’s grunge kids they’d inspired: sharp contrasts between loud and quiet, DJ’s thwack popping out of the mix, Tony’s guitar stabbing through the drone, and Exene’s oohing and ahhing sucking John in like a siren’s call, “like a Hollywood wind.” —DC

“Because I Do” (from Under the Big Black Sun, 1982; Live at the Whisky a Go-Go, 1988; and Unclogged, 1995)

When I think of Exene Cervenka songs, I leap straight to “Because I Do,” her screaming declaration of till-death-do-us devotion forever being spoiled by fresh desires. She and the band have returned to the song again and again, and you’ve long been able to grab yourself a t-shirt at the merch table sporting the song’s spooky kick-off: “I am a black and white ghost.” On the original version, from Under the Big Black Sun, she promises “I will die for you” while insisting she’s already dead, and at her last run through the chorus—“What kind of fool am I? / I am the married kind / The kind that said I do”—her ravaged tone and phrasing sound as if she’s inventing Courtney Love. This version also became the soundtrack to the spooky “silent” movie/music vid’ segment in 1985’s The Unheard Music, released just after she and John’s divorce. On Live at the Whisky a Go-Go, the band plays it impossibly fast, and impossibly perfect; Exene spits her lines as she feels them, melody be damned to hell, and lets the crowd finish the chorus for her. These full-on punk versions make the unplugged Unclogged version, with DJ Bonebrake on vibraphone, the speed race transformed into a quicksand ballad, punch all the harder as she neared the end of her second marriage to Viggo Mortenson and with a third nuptials still dead ahead. My pick for the most powerfully, beautiful moment of her singular career. –DC  

“See How We Are” (from Unclogged, 1995)

Though X is sometimes perceived as nihilist romanticizers of America’s decadent, desiccated underbelly, the band is in truth as profoundly humanist a band as I know. They give more of a shit the shittier things get, embracing humanity all the tighter even as they confront the all too human. Maybe no X number shows that more obviously than the title track to See How We Are, but even more so on this later acoustic version of the song from Unclogged—my favorite X album, though only when I’m not listening to Wild Gift, so let’s just call Unclogged the most underrated album in the X catalog. Cynical about love and politics, “freedom of choice” and progress and “so-called community,” “See How We Are” is a protest song about apathy. Gilkyson’s acoustic guitar strum keeps time with doom, but DJ, when he enters, jump starts your hope while John and Exene’s vocal blend is thrilling but chilling throughout. The world’s a mess—it’s in their harmonies. Doe’s lyrical twists here are both angrier (“And the Mexico City tourist says to the indian, ‘Get the fuck outta my way’”) and more specific (“Homeboy? Isn’t that a South-Central gangster name?”). John shakes his head. “See how we are?” But then his bridge makes the hair stand on my neck and my eyes well: “I'm trying to write this letter to you,” he sings tenderly. “About how much I care / And why I just can't be there / To draw your bath”—now he’s wailing—” and comb your hair.” “See How We Are” complains that we really only sing about what keeps Americans divided “once in every twenty years.” The truth is that X sang about it every song.  —DC

“Delta 88 Nightmare” (from Alphabetland, 2020)

X’s 2020 return Alphabetland felt like exactly the welcome reminder we needed. The first recordings from the original line-up in three decades, they raised the curtain with a first single that raced even faster than their punk-era blasters. It was a fitting choice, given that the song had been floating around since even before Los Angeles, based on a pilgrimage that Cervenka and Doe took to the site of the famed Steinbeck novel and the connection they drew between Steinbeck’s characters and their own bohemian identities. Revisiting it forty years later, one might expect the duo to adopt a more wistful or ruminative tone. Hardly. Racing by in less than two minutes, “Delta 88 Nightmare” is speed-trap defiance with John and Exene gripping each other in close non-harmony as they reclaim their own legacy, powered once again by Zoom and Bonebrake’s thunderous rhythms. It’s too great to stop now. – CH

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