To commemorate X's 13-31 tour this past Sunday, I decided to get into character. X, the formative Los Angeles punk band, whose four records released from 1980-1984, helped establish the Los Angeles punk scene, was coming to town to commemorate their 31st anniversary... I think. Or maybe they're doing 31 dates. In any case, I don't know what the 13 refers to, or the 31, but I was happy to see one of my favorite bands returning to their touring glory.
But I specifically needed to be in character. My friends created a mohawk - first with mouse, then with hairspray, then with hairspray sprayed on my head as I held it against a bathroom counter - and I found an old shirt (a 1998 gift from an especially cranky friend that read "The Boat Sank - Get Over It) stained with my blood, no less, that I ripped up with the aid of a butcher knife. I was not exactly a participant in the "punk scene," certainly not in the early 80's, nor in whatever weird manifestation the punks of my childhood were - wallet chains, Vans shoes, New Found Glory poster. None of that.
For once, though, I wanted to experience a punk show from the inside. A wonderful photographer, Nikki S. Lee, used to develop project after project where she "became" one of her subjects - a lesbian, a stripper, a housewife, a tourist - and give others her camera to capture her image. In the most interesting of all of those, she too became a punk, complete with chains and dyed hair, and leather jackes and fishnet stockings. I, on the other hand, got some hairspray and ripped up a t-shirt, but it's still a rather therapeutic transformation.
Anyway, apparently only I felt this way, because at the X show the audience - probably representative of X fans at large - was mostly middle-aged, certainly not buttoned down, but not exactly dirty or angry either. I could not have found a bottle to throw or glass to break, and in any case that sort of thing would only get me kicked out. There were some leather jackets, I think, but besides me, on this Sunday night at the Showbox, I saw one mohawk bouncing up and down in front of the stage.
Anyway, I was not the point, although I enjoyed myself. X took the stage right at 10 as planned, Exene Cervenka wearing a black dress with a french collar and an apron, John Doe looking about how he has for 30 years - which is to say, like your cool uncle in a leather coat who never seemed to ever get a job. Billy Zoom, the guitarist, looks the part of a man in his 50's, even though his guitar was bright silver and covered in sequins. At times you'd catch Zoom lip synching their 30-year-old lyrics along with Doe while grinning in a way that reminded me of "The Colonel" in Boogie Nights' grin as he asks Dirk Diggler to "see that great big cock" he heard so much about. They began by singing "The Once Over Twice," the first song from 1981's Wild Gift, and it sounded, lo and behold, about as it did in 1981.
But perhaps some background on X is required. I found myself at a bar sometime later talking about the time I heard "Los Angeles" for the first time in 1999, and that, being 8 years ago now, "Los Angeles" recalled a different era for me - a dinge and dirt that I must have thought at the time was an undercurrent of all of suburban society. It was, however, first released in 1980, and who knows how long before that it was written. To me, X has great nostalgia, but it's certainly a different nostalgia then is intended.
But that is my background, not X's. X released Los Angeles in 1980, Wild Gift in 1981, Under The Big Black Sun in 1983, and More Fun In The New World in 1984. They also released two more records in the 1980's - Ain't Love Grand and See How We Are, but the band had "a new creative direction," which was to say they tried to be famous and made a couple of half-baked pop records. Although one song from Ain't Love Grand showed up on their set list Sunday night, they almost never perform songs from those records, even though a couple ("Burning House of Love" "4th of July" "You") are somewhat interesting. Even less heard than those terrible records was 1993's Hey Zeus! which sounds, in its way, like grunge - so though it may have been considered a "return to form" at the time, the record was still an example of X trying to fit in with contemporary pop.
And contemporary was never what X did well. I've had to explain to many people over the years who they were, some turned off by all music termed "punk," some excited by it, but virtually all are surprised to hear "punk" and then hear X. If I could describe X as anything, I would say they are indeed punk, but also rockabilly, and a little spoken word rolled into one. Billy Zoom clearly grew up on Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, and his guitar is pure rockabilly. Mix him with John Doe, who, as his name might imply, has a fasciation with gutter culture, the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, and brings all of the band's most direct vitriolic, dirty lyrics, writing songs like "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline," "Sex and Dying In High Society," and "Adult Books." Then add in Exene Cervenka, the lead singer, once dubiously called by VH1 "Rock's first antiheroine," who has a background as a beat poet, and a terrible singing voice, but the right type of terrible singing voice. She and Doe create something beyond harmony when they sing together - a sort of fusion of criticism and anger, their voices are simply how their most poetic and interesting thoughts take hold. And they truly take hold.
Or, at least did between 1980 and 1984. It interests me that in X's terrific set Sunday night of, say, 15-20 songs, all but one were from those four great albums (the other, "My Goodness" from Ain't Love Grand, was, without a doubt, the show's only lagging point). And for the most part, they sound just like they did then. It's interesting - Cervenka, whose voice gains so much credibility on being off-key, irreverent, the voice of the gutter, but it hasn't changed at all. On "We're Having Much More Fun," the set's second song, has a climax every chorus of "We'll crawl through your back yard/ and whack your yappin' dog," and the emphasis on that lyric - hitting the long a's of "whack" and "yappin" with Doe and Cervenka in unison, did not change at all. Me and my mohawk sang along unabashed. And why wouldn't it? X knew, despite being not quite punk and not quite not-punk, how to write a perfect rock song. I'd imagined for years a sea of fans bobbing their heads and chanting in great unison the chorus of "The New World," in my mind the most perfect of all of their songs - "It was better before before they voted for what's-his-name! This is s'posed to be the new world!"
X was once considered, in those early 80's heydays, one of the great live acts of all times, and I wondered if that could be true as the songs sounded so close to the recordings still, after 24 years. What struck me was that their song order was just right - the slash-and-burn gutter punk of "We're Desperate" eminating out of the slightly calmer "In This House That I Call Home," and turning into the more churning and pointed "The Hungry Wolf." I wished I had a pad and paper to write down the smart lineup of all of these great songs.
I also wished I had a pad and paper to write down what I remembered of all of the great l yrics that never quite registered until they were played too loud and in my ear. Since Cervenka is a beat poet at heart, and since Doe is, perhaps, a social critic at heart, their lyrics are always straining on social poetry, and I used to think that though certain song lyrics were unimpeachably perfect (say, "The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss," the closest X came to a gutter-punk-poet anthem), for the most part great fragments searched for a greater whole. I don't think I agree with that anymore - the lyrics take ideas and let their beat notions fly with the same skill and abandon as the great guitar work, truly. Under The Big Black Sun, an album focused on mortality surrounding the shock death of Cervenka's sister Mary in a car accident shortly after her (already unhappy) marriage, to me maintains the best words and ideas the band came up with - the combination of "Come Back To Me," a sweet, saxophone laiden song of loss, into the beat anger of "Under The Big Black Sun" (the telltale lyric: "Everybody asks me how I'm doing/ I'm doing everything alone") was always central to that record, but they didn't perform those two songs on Sunday. They did perform the songs on either end of them, and it was the haunted fragments that stuck out to me - in "Riding With Mary" : "The next time you see a statue of Mary, remember my sister was in her car;" in "Because I Do" : "My nights are numbered/ they don't count for nothing." In fact, "Because I Do," about a bride, a fool, and a ghost in one, seems to me, even more than before, the most haunted, interesting song on that record - to say nothing of it being the loudest. As X still has no fans that I've ever met (scratch that, I have one friend in Atlanta who's a fan), maybe it takes 30 years of identical tours to get the songs truly heard in the way they deserve - for me, 9 years after my first exposure to the band, seeing them live is like hearing them the first time.
But I specifically needed to be in character. My friends created a mohawk - first with mouse, then with hairspray, then with hairspray sprayed on my head as I held it against a bathroom counter - and I found an old shirt (a 1998 gift from an especially cranky friend that read "The Boat Sank - Get Over It) stained with my blood, no less, that I ripped up with the aid of a butcher knife. I was not exactly a participant in the "punk scene," certainly not in the early 80's, nor in whatever weird manifestation the punks of my childhood were - wallet chains, Vans shoes, New Found Glory poster. None of that.
For once, though, I wanted to experience a punk show from the inside. A wonderful photographer, Nikki S. Lee, used to develop project after project where she "became" one of her subjects - a lesbian, a stripper, a housewife, a tourist - and give others her camera to capture her image. In the most interesting of all of those, she too became a punk, complete with chains and dyed hair, and leather jackes and fishnet stockings. I, on the other hand, got some hairspray and ripped up a t-shirt, but it's still a rather therapeutic transformation.
Anyway, apparently only I felt this way, because at the X show the audience - probably representative of X fans at large - was mostly middle-aged, certainly not buttoned down, but not exactly dirty or angry either. I could not have found a bottle to throw or glass to break, and in any case that sort of thing would only get me kicked out. There were some leather jackets, I think, but besides me, on this Sunday night at the Showbox, I saw one mohawk bouncing up and down in front of the stage.
Anyway, I was not the point, although I enjoyed myself. X took the stage right at 10 as planned, Exene Cervenka wearing a black dress with a french collar and an apron, John Doe looking about how he has for 30 years - which is to say, like your cool uncle in a leather coat who never seemed to ever get a job. Billy Zoom, the guitarist, looks the part of a man in his 50's, even though his guitar was bright silver and covered in sequins. At times you'd catch Zoom lip synching their 30-year-old lyrics along with Doe while grinning in a way that reminded me of "The Colonel" in Boogie Nights' grin as he asks Dirk Diggler to "see that great big cock" he heard so much about. They began by singing "The Once Over Twice," the first song from 1981's Wild Gift, and it sounded, lo and behold, about as it did in 1981.
But perhaps some background on X is required. I found myself at a bar sometime later talking about the time I heard "Los Angeles" for the first time in 1999, and that, being 8 years ago now, "Los Angeles" recalled a different era for me - a dinge and dirt that I must have thought at the time was an undercurrent of all of suburban society. It was, however, first released in 1980, and who knows how long before that it was written. To me, X has great nostalgia, but it's certainly a different nostalgia then is intended.
But that is my background, not X's. X released Los Angeles in 1980, Wild Gift in 1981, Under The Big Black Sun in 1983, and More Fun In The New World in 1984. They also released two more records in the 1980's - Ain't Love Grand and See How We Are, but the band had "a new creative direction," which was to say they tried to be famous and made a couple of half-baked pop records. Although one song from Ain't Love Grand showed up on their set list Sunday night, they almost never perform songs from those records, even though a couple ("Burning House of Love" "4th of July" "You") are somewhat interesting. Even less heard than those terrible records was 1993's Hey Zeus! which sounds, in its way, like grunge - so though it may have been considered a "return to form" at the time, the record was still an example of X trying to fit in with contemporary pop.
And contemporary was never what X did well. I've had to explain to many people over the years who they were, some turned off by all music termed "punk," some excited by it, but virtually all are surprised to hear "punk" and then hear X. If I could describe X as anything, I would say they are indeed punk, but also rockabilly, and a little spoken word rolled into one. Billy Zoom clearly grew up on Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, and his guitar is pure rockabilly. Mix him with John Doe, who, as his name might imply, has a fasciation with gutter culture, the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, and brings all of the band's most direct vitriolic, dirty lyrics, writing songs like "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline," "Sex and Dying In High Society," and "Adult Books." Then add in Exene Cervenka, the lead singer, once dubiously called by VH1 "Rock's first antiheroine," who has a background as a beat poet, and a terrible singing voice, but the right type of terrible singing voice. She and Doe create something beyond harmony when they sing together - a sort of fusion of criticism and anger, their voices are simply how their most poetic and interesting thoughts take hold. And they truly take hold.
Or, at least did between 1980 and 1984. It interests me that in X's terrific set Sunday night of, say, 15-20 songs, all but one were from those four great albums (the other, "My Goodness" from Ain't Love Grand, was, without a doubt, the show's only lagging point). And for the most part, they sound just like they did then. It's interesting - Cervenka, whose voice gains so much credibility on being off-key, irreverent, the voice of the gutter, but it hasn't changed at all. On "We're Having Much More Fun," the set's second song, has a climax every chorus of "We'll crawl through your back yard/ and whack your yappin' dog," and the emphasis on that lyric - hitting the long a's of "whack" and "yappin" with Doe and Cervenka in unison, did not change at all. Me and my mohawk sang along unabashed. And why wouldn't it? X knew, despite being not quite punk and not quite not-punk, how to write a perfect rock song. I'd imagined for years a sea of fans bobbing their heads and chanting in great unison the chorus of "The New World," in my mind the most perfect of all of their songs - "It was better before before they voted for what's-his-name! This is s'posed to be the new world!"
X was once considered, in those early 80's heydays, one of the great live acts of all times, and I wondered if that could be true as the songs sounded so close to the recordings still, after 24 years. What struck me was that their song order was just right - the slash-and-burn gutter punk of "We're Desperate" eminating out of the slightly calmer "In This House That I Call Home," and turning into the more churning and pointed "The Hungry Wolf." I wished I had a pad and paper to write down the smart lineup of all of these great songs.
I also wished I had a pad and paper to write down what I remembered of all of the great l yrics that never quite registered until they were played too loud and in my ear. Since Cervenka is a beat poet at heart, and since Doe is, perhaps, a social critic at heart, their lyrics are always straining on social poetry, and I used to think that though certain song lyrics were unimpeachably perfect (say, "The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss," the closest X came to a gutter-punk-poet anthem), for the most part great fragments searched for a greater whole. I don't think I agree with that anymore - the lyrics take ideas and let their beat notions fly with the same skill and abandon as the great guitar work, truly. Under The Big Black Sun, an album focused on mortality surrounding the shock death of Cervenka's sister Mary in a car accident shortly after her (already unhappy) marriage, to me maintains the best words and ideas the band came up with - the combination of "Come Back To Me," a sweet, saxophone laiden song of loss, into the beat anger of "Under The Big Black Sun" (the telltale lyric: "Everybody asks me how I'm doing/ I'm doing everything alone") was always central to that record, but they didn't perform those two songs on Sunday. They did perform the songs on either end of them, and it was the haunted fragments that stuck out to me - in "Riding With Mary" : "The next time you see a statue of Mary, remember my sister was in her car;" in "Because I Do" : "My nights are numbered/ they don't count for nothing." In fact, "Because I Do," about a bride, a fool, and a ghost in one, seems to me, even more than before, the most haunted, interesting song on that record - to say nothing of it being the loudest. As X still has no fans that I've ever met (scratch that, I have one friend in Atlanta who's a fan), maybe it takes 30 years of identical tours to get the songs truly heard in the way they deserve - for me, 9 years after my first exposure to the band, seeing them live is like hearing them the first time.
No comments:
Post a Comment