LLos Angeles was so central to punk-rock pioneers X that they named their 1980 debut album after it. For Brooklyn-born bassist/vocalist John Doe, the city held all the promise of a new frontier. “I’d seen Talking Heads at CBGB, the Heartbreakers at Max’s Kansas City,” he says. “I wanted to be in a band, and I packed up and moved to L.A. because I loved movies and literature, and because there wasn’t a punk scene there yet.” For singer Exene Cervenka, it was salvation from a mortal existence in St. Petersburg, Florida. A restless, inveterate hitchhiker, she was “always searching, my antennas out, just to see what was out there in the world.”
At 20, Cervenka followed those antennas to Hollywood, where she met Doe and guitarist Billy Zoom, an Illinois native, and they formed one of the first—and arguably the most enduring—L.A. punk-rock bands, in 1977. Documenting a nihilistic Los Angeles, and soon featured in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, they became local, then national, punk heroes before losing their way amid friction, divorce, and major-label misdirection.
The band releases a new album, Smoke & Fiction, today. Billed as their last, it’s remarkable: a dialogue with their past that never boils down to mere nostalgia, a record that somehow sounds as stripped-down, poetic, and fiery as their debut. “It was made by the same people,” Cervenka says, deadpan. “None of us died, so we were lucky in that respect.”
Luck played a regular role in X’s story. Having succumbed to the siren call of Los Angeles, Cervenka found work at the venerable art space Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach, where, during a poetry workshop, she sat next to Doe, another newcomer who had decided that this was where she would find “kindred spirits.” When the workshop facilitator asked her to name ten poets they loved, Doe caught Cervenka copying down her list. “John had studied poetry,” she says. “I had no education. I was illiterate. I had dropped out of school at 16. But in Florida, for fun, my sister and I would buy old ledgers at a thrift store and fill them with words and drawings. I loved to write.”
Cervenka and Doe quickly became friends, then lovers. Doe asked Cervenka if he could use one of his poems as lyrics for a song over Zoom. “That’s when I realized I had something that could be valuable in this world, and I better not give it away,” Cervenka says. “So John said, ‘OK, will you sing it?’ And I was terrified, because I had never sung in my life.” But, Doe says, punk “was all about freedom of expression and fun. I knew Exene was a great writer. She was fearless. She had lived a life. I could tell she had the presence of mind to be a lead singer.”
Welcoming “Buddha-like” drummer DJ Bonebrake on board, X played parties and friends’ basements, where, alongside contemporaries the Screamers, Black Randy and the Metrosquad, the Weirdos, and Germs, they inaugurated the Los Angeles punk-rock scene. Documented by filmmaker Penelope Spheeris in The Decline of Western Civilization, these bands lived fast, and some—notably Germs’ self-destructive frontman Darby Crash—died young. But while songs like The World’s a Mess: It’s In My Kiss chronicled the scene (“We were like, ‘This is moving too fast, it’s going to implode,’” Doe recalls), X had taken a different path. An influx of suburban skinheads in the early ’80s turned Hollywood punk into hardcore, and, Doe says, the band realized that “our beautiful little bubble didn’t exist anymore.” There was a lot of testosterone, open violence, some homophobia and racism, and that’s not what punk was supposed to be.
“None of that bothered me as much as the spitting,” Cervenka adds. “I just wanted smart people at our shows.”
But luck had provided the band with an unlikely champion. They had added a punk cover of the Doors’ Soul Kitchen to their set, attracting the attention of the band’s former keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. By this point, X had become a standout proposition, Cervenka’s anguished howl complementing Doe’s slow growl, Zoom anchoring their attack in the foundations of rock’n’roll. “We loved Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran,” Doe says, “the imagery, the economy of storytelling, the truthfulness.” Manzarek recognized in these new Los Angelesmen a poetic menace similar to that of his own band, and produced their 28-minute debut album. “These songs all had a similar darkness, which was what drew Ray to us,” Doe says. “Los Angeles can be a dark place, under the sun.”
Over the course of three more albums with Manzarek, their songwriting matured, with complex, nuanced works like I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, their “sarcastic take on the state of the world, taking in wars and colonialism,” Doe says. But while X earned critical acclaim and became a key influence on later punks, commercial success proved elusive. Frustrated by their lackluster sales, they traded Manzarek for Michael Wagener, producer of Christian metallers Stryper, for 1985’s Ain’t Love Grand! It was their biggest hit but, Doe says, its polished college rock “didn’t sound like us.” Zoom retired soon after, while Doe and Cervenka, who had married in 1980, divorced in 1986 (“I didn’t understand a lot about myself,” Doe says. “I didn’t understand ego.”) The split wasn’t the end of X, but their income was dwindling. Their albums were uninspired, and by the 1990s, as Nirvana was finally becoming a mainstream punk-rock band, X was playing bars. “It was depressing,” Doe says.
Zoom returned for a farewell tour in 1998, after which Doe pursued a solo career and a sideline as an actor, and Cervenka focused on poetry and multimedia art. Reunion tours followed a decade later, but they didn’t record a new album until 2020’s scathing Alphabetland , their first in 27 years, which was far better than it should have been. Smoke & Fiction , meanwhile, is a revelation. The lead single, Big Black X, revisits the wild antics of late-’70s Hollywood, all acid and angel dust and drunken expeditions to find Errol Flynn’s abandoned mansion.
“There were rumors going around, like, ‘There’s this cool place with a pool where you can skate and drink beer, and nobody knows it exists,’” Cervenka recalls. “I don’t think it was actually Flynn’s house,” Doe adds, “but we all snuck out into the Hollywood Hills. It escalated pretty quickly: cop cars showed up, and Exene and I ran down the hill and got separated.” Doe reminisces, then smiles. “It was just the chaos of youth.”
The album was billed as their farewell, as was the tour that supported it. “It was grueling,” Doe says of making Smoke & Fiction. “I’m not sure we have the will or the energy to do another one. As far as touring goes, I don’t want us to be a shadow of what we were; I want us to go out on top.”
But while X is on borrowed time, Doe and Cervenka’s friendship has only grown stronger. “After the divorce, there was some friction,” Doe admits. “But I made amends. It was hard to break up and still be in a band, but we figured it was worth it. We’re probably better friends now than we were when we were married.”
“There’s no road map,” Cervenka adds, of the unpredictable path of their life together. “We can’t know the future, we can only make the best choices we can. But life is long, life is hard, and life is rewarding.” She pauses for a moment, perhaps remembering that night in the Hollywood Hills, searching for Errol Flynn’s mansion, running from the cops, all that chaos and unlikely magic. “It’s amazing how things twist and turn.”