X marks the spot where, in the early to mid-eighties, my own internal contradictions came home to roost. Thanks to Ronald Reagan and America’s complicity in the atrocities in Central America, the era signaled the dawning of my permanent disenchantment with the U.S.A. But at the same time, it also marked a period of incredible jingoism in my musical tastes. I owned an embarrassing few non-American albums, and listened almost solely to music coming out of a country I passionately detested. X, Black Flag, The Meat Puppets, The Minutemen—these were the bands I played virtually around the clock.
Black Flag and The Meat Puppets were apolitical; the Flag’s world was as narrow as the Hermosa Beach punk scene and the cops vs. punks mayhem in which it played its shows, while The Meat Puppets’ world, thanks to hallucinogens, was simultaneously as shallow as the local swimming ground and as vast as the universe. But The Minutemen and to a lesser extent X cared about what the United States was up to in the world, and their songs attacked Reagan, economic disparities both in the U.S. and the Third World, and U.S. covert involvement in the wars in Central America.
1983’s More Fun in the New World marked a departure for X— Exene Cervenka on vocals; John Doe on vocals and bass; Billy Zoom on guitar; and D.J. Bonebrake on drums and percussion—away from punk and towards rockabilly, and away from the rawer ethos of its first three LPs towards a more polished and (theoretically) more radio-friendly sound. The album also signaled the band’s increasing politicization. With rare exception (“The Have Nots” off 1982’s Under the Big Black Sun) X had previously ignored political realities in favor of anatomizing the dark side of El Lay (“We’re Desperate,” “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” “Los Angeles”). But More Fun in the New World included at least two folk-like songs (“The New World” and “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”) that addressed the political situation head on.
More Fun in the New World opens with a bang in the form of “The New World,” a sneering song of protest by the down and out against their new President. Propelled by big power chords, and moving at a slightly slower clip than such X classics as “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not,” “The New World” opens with Cervenka and Doe singing the great lines, “Honest to goodness, the bars weren’t open this morning/They must have been voting for a new President or something.” The lines signal alienation, but not hopeless detachment, as the chorus makes clear: “It was better before, before they voted for ‘What’s his name’/This is supposed to be the new world.” “The New World” is a savage spit in the eye of false promises—the only promises politicians make—and remains one of punk’s great protest songs, along with The Ramones’ “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” The Minutemen’s “Big Stick” and “King of the Hill,” and The Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor.”
“We’re Having Much More Fun” is a punch-drunk, lightning-fast tune featuring some great rip-and-run Zoom guitar and a creepy-crawly lyric that evokes the Manson Family: “We’re having much more fun/You don’t know where we’ve gone/We’re having much more fun/We’ll crawl through your backyard/And whack your yappin’ dog.” Once again Doe and Cervenka sing together, and can’t resist throwing a bone to their one true love, the City of Angels: “Los Angeles treats everyone like a drunk in bed/Washing dirty bums with rain like dishes.” “True Love—Part 1” is a punker with some wild and wooly Zoom guitar; Cervenka handles the verses, while Cervenka and Doe mesh on the choruses. “True love,” sings Cervenka, is “the devil’s crowbar.” He uses it “to pry you out of your car and into the arms of/The Devil drives a Buick, he sits inside and eats lunch.” Doe handles lead vocals on “Poor Girl,” a smoother, mid-tempo number with some syncopated drumming by Bonebrake about a “poor little girl” who “won’t say a thing.” It features the great lines, “When you ran out/Out of Pete’s Hotel/You didn’t look so good/And you didn’t feel so well/You said, “Hold me tight”/But I couldn’t get it right.” “Poor Girl” isn’t a fave—it’s a bit too slick, like the songs to come on 1985’s more commercially oriented Ain’t Love Grand—but its final words (“she was only drunk”) are good.
“Make the Music Go Bang” is a full-tilt punker with great guitar, a big bottom, and excellent dual vocals, and its lyrics are the perfect complement to the music. Doe and Cervenka sing, “I can’t understand people who bitch and whine/Let’s drink a beer from a paper bag while we got time/Bang, bang let the music go bang!/Brilliant shining & nasty nasty/Bang make the music go bang!/Let me hear a guitar sound like a train.” And speaking of a guitar sounding like a train, X’s cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Breathless” is a speed punk masterpiece, highlighting as it does the emotive vocals of Cervenka and a chugging guitar solo by Zoom, one that throws off cinders and rushes down the tracks scooping up cows and threatening to go flying off the rails like Casey Jones’ doomed choo choo.
“I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” features some superb Zoom guitar and Bonebrake drum bash and is one of the finest songs to come out of the punk movement, what with its two-pronged lyrical assault on both America’s foreign policy and the failure of American punk music to get played on the radio. It begins with acoustic guitar and some fine brushwork by Bonebrake, while Doe and Cervenka sing, “The facts we hate/We’ll never meet walking down the road/Everybody yelling, “Hurry up, hurry up”/But I’m waiting for you, I must go slow.” From there they move into the realm of the political, singing, “Both sides are right, but both sides murder/I give up why can’t they?” and “I’m guilty of murder of innocent men/Innocent women, innocent children, thousands of them/My planes, my guns, my money, my soldiers/My blood on my hands it’s all my fault.” From there they move onto radio’s blackout of American punk, singing, “I hear the radio is finally gonna play new music/You know, ‘The British Invasion’/But what about the Minutemen, Flesh Eaters, DOA/Big Boys and the Black Flag?/Will the last American band to get played on the radio/Please bring the flag? Please bring the flag?” It’s an amazing song from poignant beginning to savage end, which has Doe and Cervenka first evoking the spirit of Woody Guthrie, who “sang about B.E.E.T.S. not B.E.A.T.S.,” then repeating, “I must not think bad thoughts” over and over again.
“Devil Doll” is another all-out punker, with Doe rushing through the lyrics while Cervenka provides back up. Zoom’s guitar is feral, all fire and brimstone as Doe sings, “Devil doll, devil doll/Rags and bones and battered shoes.” He opens one stanza by singing, “People turn their heads/She scares little kids” and closes it with the line, “I’d wrap her up in a bullet and shoot her round the world.” “Painting The Town Blue” is another powerhouse, with Doe and Cervenka singing together (“Roses are red/Violence is too/Everyone knows I’m painting the town blue”) while Zoom tears off savage chords on the guitar and Bonebrake provides a rock-steady beat. It’s a sad-ass tune about a woman out to paint the town blue, but without a hint of country hokum thanks to Zoom’s gnarly guitar and Doe’s pitiless vocals: “The bartender’s eyes are full of pity/As he tells her, ‘You’re alone, and it’s two-thirty/All the chairs are on the tables and it’s time to close/She said, ‘A minute ago they were starin’ at me/Where the hell did they go?’”
“Hot House” features Zoom at his hottest and Doe at his smoothest, and while I like the former the latter leaves me cold. That said, I enjoy the “Hup hup hup” Doe lets loose towards song’s end, and the way he and Exene sing, “The whole world loves a sad song/And they don’t have to sing/We hide in the hot house/Loaded with thrills/Second only to none/Here in this hot house.” “Drunk in My Past” opens with some big power chords and bears a more than passing resemblance to (believe it or not) a Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Zoom’s guitar in particular has a Skynyrdesque feel, and Doe and Cervenka sing in tandem: “There’s a drunk in my past/Who swears every drink is the last/Thought I give him another chance/There’s a drunk in my past/Each time I go past my house/I’m trying to find my way home.” X and Skynyrd together at last—let’s hear three cheers for Sweet Home Los Angeles!
“I See Red” is one frenetic, breakneck number, with Bonebrake bashing away and Zoom playing his guitar like an AK-47; I especially love the ending, which sounds like the band commenced to hurling cymbals around the recording studio while Zoom kept playing in lockstep, like a madman or a machine. Doe sings lead, and Exene leaps in when she feels like it, and together they speed sing, “I see red when I see you/Fan belt breaks at 3 a.m./I get mad, drinks get spilled/At 5 past 2, I don’t feel sad/But then I see you and I see red.” Album closer “True Love—Part 2” is a funk number, and a great one at that, with handclaps and Doe sounding his most soulful (and Cervenka her most sultry) while Bonebrake kicks out the jams Funkadelic style and Zoom serves up some great chukka-chukka guitar. Meanwhile Doe and Cervenka hurl stream-of-consciousness lyrics: “True love is the Devil’s yes-man, hot house, lunch box, wishbone, door knob, pass key, choke hold, widow, true love…” before launching into a dance marathon’s litany of songs: “True love is the land of a thousand dances… be-bop-a-lula d-i-v-o-r-c-e skip to my lou…/A hunk-a-hunk-a burning love/I’ve been working on the railroad…” It’s truly a fantastic ending to a fantastic album, and one that I must have listened to a thousand times, more than any other X album that’s for certain, thanks to “The New World” and “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” and “I See Red” and “True Love—Part 2.”
But all good things come to an end, and X foundered on 1985’s Ain’t Love Grand, which not only failed commercially but also led to the desertion of Billy Zoom. Ain’t Love Grand sounds stilted, as X made concession after concession not to be the last American band to get played on the radio. The result: fiasco, as not only did radio ignore it, but X sacrificed its greatest strengths to make it—its fire, lightning quick tempos, and wild ad hoc feel. And for what? Slicker production, a sound that lacked immediacy and burning intensity, and songs (“Love Shack”) that were less wild gifts than second-rate B-52 tunes.
But the X I choose to celebrate is the one that sang, “The facts we hate/We’ll never meet walking down the road/Everybody yelling, “Hurry up, hurry up”/But I’m waiting for you, I must go slow.” Those lyrics symbolize the band’s solidarity with an underground confederacy of great groups making an unheard music that the radio refused to play. X’s dedication to “go slow” was admirable, until they made Ain’t Love Grand. Because there’s going slow and there’s playing slow, and the latter, in X’s case, was just another way of selling out.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
