On Saturday night (8/20/2011) John Doe and Exene Cervenka took the stage at Neumos in Seattle. The venue was filled but not packed, and many of fans crowded round the stage were, like me, middle aged. A modest looking man walked to the microphone on stage and fiddled with it for a moment then picked up a guitar and started tuning in, and with a small jolt of recognition, the audience realized it was John Doe. A couple minutes later Exene took the stage to a polite round of applause. She was wearing a black dress and looking less the rock star than a slightly disheveled woman at a family gathering. She addressed the audience, thanking them for coming, then began singing the first song, a country folk number, with John Doe accompanying on guitar. Thus began a great evening of music with John Doe and Exene Cervenka.
John Doe and Exene are, of course, the lead singers of X, the group customarily described as the “legendary LA punk band.” The “legendary” is accurate. Now in their mid 50s, Doe and Cervenka, sang songs from Cervenka’s current repertoire of country-folk, along with classic X songs. It was an intimate and stirring performance. Former marriage partners and band mates since X was formed in 1977, Doe and Cervenka harmonized effortlessly in their trademark style, Doe the fast crooner and Cervenka the wailing punk chanteuse. As Exene sang she rolled her head like a Raggedy Ann doll, her hair cut in a pageboy flopping this way and that. In a statement in June 2009, Exene announced her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, and for fans of X this news came as a shock. I had missed seeing X perform in Seattle in January of 2009, and my instant thought was I would never see X perform again. Exene continues to perform with X and with her other bands and with Doe, embarking on an east coast tour with X this fall, followed by a South American tour with Pearl Jam and X. As if in defiance of her disease or perhaps in mocking fun, Exene clutched the microphone and shook her head slowly.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that punk was an American invention and export that began not with angry underclass youths, but girls who wrote poetry. Exene moved to LA in 1976 at the age of 20 and met John Doe at a poetry workshop in Venice. They formed X a year later. Like Patti Smith songs, the lyrics of Xs songs read like poems. The debut album “Los Angeles” came out in 1980, and the title song to this day remains the best rock song written about the city somehow capturing the weird alienation of the place. Both Exene and John Doe moved to LA from the east coast, and like many transplants (myself included), must have been struck by landscape so disorienting to new arrivals. “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene”, “Sex and Dying in High Society”, “Sugarlight” — X songs are like polaroids of the time and place, imagery of sex and death and longing. The writer director Paul Schrader wrote the screen play for Taxi Driver in the mid 70s while living in Los Angeles during a period of despair over the breakup of his marriage. That’s the feeling X has for me. Its filled with energy and observation and darkness present in those bleached out Californian vistas.
X was at the vanguard of an LA punk scene that flamed out quickly. The group released a series of critically acclaimed albums in the first half of the 80s without ever making it to big commercial success. X deserves greater recognition. In interviews Exene makes it clear she is not interested in rehashing stories of X on the road, and Exene’s and John Doe’s careers have branched out in several different directions, including collage art, poetry, acting and forays into folk and country music. Exene’s folk country material is both ironic and heartfelt, the strength deriving from the style of delivery not the quality of the vocals. Both Exene and John Doe deliver in performance; even in the spare set up at Neumos in Seattle on Saturday they conveyed the propulsive energy and intelligence of X in the 80s. Exene’s ballads of love and longing and hope have gritty strength, and there is something admirable in these explorations of artistry. Exene’s and John Doe’s musical partnership is undiminished. At one point in the evening at the beginning of a quiet elegiac song Exene abruptly stopped Doe and chided him for playing too loudly. “Punk rock John” she said. We in the audience laughed appreciatively. My advice to everyone — go and see X and John Doe and Exene at every opportunity. This is great American music.
– Mike Kowalski
