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| Heroes/legends. |
Los Angeles punk legends X have only one member actually from LA – drummer DJ Bonebrake, and it turns out even he’s a valley kid. The rest of band hail from Tallahassee (Exene Cervenka, vocals/spirit animal), Illinois (Billy Zoom, guitar/style), and Baltimore (John Doe bass/vocals/anchor). The better your feel for American geography, the more those starting points align, but there aren’t many things more quintessentially American than chasing dreams in the City of Angels.
Over the past week looking into X, the fact they actually tried to get famous surprised me as much as anything. After the reasonably polished More Fun in the New World failed to gain enough cash and attention, Zoom threatened to leave the band if they didn’t get big enough returns on the next album. The band handed production over to Michael Wagener, the same guy navigating the hair metal scene for Stryper and Dokken, and 1987's Ain’t Love Grand came out on the other side. It’s a stunningly awful album, the first side in particular, one that “sounds like it was recorded in a strip club for a strip club.” The pay day didn’t come either. Whatever his role in the entire snafu, Zoom offered this perfect riposte to anyone who ever accused the band of selling out:
“Selling out is when you get a bunch of money. If you didn’t get a bunch of money, you didn’t sell out.”
Over the past week looking into X, the fact they actually tried to get famous surprised me as much as anything. After the reasonably polished More Fun in the New World failed to gain enough cash and attention, Zoom threatened to leave the band if they didn’t get big enough returns on the next album. The band handed production over to Michael Wagener, the same guy navigating the hair metal scene for Stryper and Dokken, and 1987's Ain’t Love Grand came out on the other side. It’s a stunningly awful album, the first side in particular, one that “sounds like it was recorded in a strip club for a strip club.” The pay day didn’t come either. Whatever his role in the entire snafu, Zoom offered this perfect riposte to anyone who ever accused the band of selling out:
“Selling out is when you get a bunch of money. If you didn’t get a bunch of money, you didn’t sell out.”
X did, however, push against the heart of their appeal on Ain’t Love Grand, of what made them feel so authentic. I pulled a lot of the above from a 2019 retrospective on X in an outlet called The Outline (with some filling in from a 2017 Rolling Stone retrospective on the band’s 40th anniversary). Anyone curious about how X formed (poetry classes, through the classified ads), whether or not the girl from the song “Los Angeles” was real (yes), how their sound evolved will do a lot better to stop reading this, and go read both of those. The Outline piece, however, gives the best and fullest account of their sound, inspirations and influences. The author, Andrew Holter, also knows what to borrow, as when he lifts a quote from a 1987 review in The New York Times on “American rock-and-roll” in the mid-1980s, and lumps X in with that sound:
