Fans pitch in to assist X guitarist
X has always excelled at songs about loneliness.
With an audible sneer, the band whose bootprint outlined the sound of first-wave West Coast punk (for a nation that still thought of the genre as New York’s, or D.C.’s) mapped out Los Angeles in disillusionment and defiance, cracked facades and gas tanks on empty.
The thing about loneliness is that naming it, giving voice to its citizens, will earn you a lot of friends. That’s probably why nobody in X was surprised when in July of this year they announced that they needed help — guitarist Billy Zoom, 67, had been diagnosed with bladder cancer — and some 2,000 friends scrambled to their side.
$90,000-plus raised
Within two months of launching a GoFundMe page, the band raised more than $90,000 to pay for Zoom’s medical bills, some $40,000 over their original goal. (As of this writing, the total is nearing $100,000).
“I can’t say that I’m shocked, but it’s been incredibly touching how many people want to help out,” says X’s bassist-singer John Doe, 61, by phone from his home in the East Bay. (Doe, whose 20-year solo career has since cemented him in the grand canon of punk poets, started the band with Zoom in 1977 after meeting through an ad in the local alt-weekly.)
“People are writing, ‘I’ve been watching you for the last 30 years and it’s given me a lot of joy. The least I can do is give something back.’ You read three or four of those and you start to get choked up, and then you go, ‘I’m a punk rocker, I can’t get choked up.’ And then you stop reading them.”
Doe seems almost allergic to drama — which is of course, partially responsible for X’s position in the punk ecosystem: They’re stalwarts. They’ve gone on hiatus several times, formed other bands (the Knitters, notably), but unlike some of their early-punk brethren, there was no fiery falling-out, no overly trumpeted reunion 30 years later. Live — and they’ve been playing with the original lineup of Doe, Zoom, Exene Cervenka and D.J. Bonebrake for several years now — they have the rarefied air of old friends who actually still like playing together, who show up and get the job done. That’s what they’ll do in San Francisco, at the Independent on Dec. 15 and 16.
It was never a question whether the band would carry on with the tour X had booked before Zoom’s diagnosis. Still, it shook his bandmates.
Zoom’s illness “was a reminder that anything could happen, at any time, to anybody,” says Cervenka, 59, the band’s famously outspoken lead singer, the yin to Doe’s yang, as well as his former wife. Speaking from suburban Orange County, on an evening walk with her dogs, Cervenka had just returned from Chicago, where the singer (who also tours solo as a poet and visual artist) spoke to a college writing class.
Thing of the past
Cervenka’s own (somewhat public) health issues, however, are a thing of the past; she believes she was possibly misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009. These days, she says, “I try to be healthy.” A pause. “I’m healthy when I’m not being bad.”
In Zoom’s absence, the band recruited Austin rockabilly shredder Jesse Dayton (whom Doe first met through a friend at Thee Parkside) to play guitar. “That’s not an easy role to fill,” says Doe. “But Jesse’s a great player, and he’s stepped in and played his ass off.”
It likely helps that the band doesn’t exactly want a Zoom impression. These shows promise a hefty dose of experimentation — sax, vibraphone, softer notes mixed in with the screaming and the sweating, while Doe and Cervenka’s raw harmonies still power the engine. “There’s a lot more improvisation,” says Doe. “Which also means a lot more opportunities for complete train wrecks. It’s exciting.”
As for their original guitarist — known for his near-permanent grin onstage — it turns out he’ll likely be joining the pile-up. Zoom is doing well, having undergone chemotherapy this summer; the current plan is for him to join his bandmates for the leg of shows beginning Friday, Nov. 27, in San Diego.
“It actually seems to have increased his interest in playing,” says Doe with a laugh. (“It’s an X-mas miracle!” the band announced online.)
That enthusiasm is one reason Cervenka and Doe sound optimistic about 2016 being the year X finally gets back into the studio, for what would be their first studio album since 1993’s
“Hey Zeus!” (Their last live/compilation record, “Live in Los Angeles!,” turned 10 this year.)
It sounds ambitious, timing-wise: Doe has a solo album coming out next year, as well as the book “Under the Big Black Sun,” “a personal history of L.A. punk rock from ’77 to ’82,” for which he enlisted “all my friends who are still alive” to write chapters.
Feeling about legacy
But there’s no question about his drive for X, nor the depth of his bandmates’ feeling about their legacy.
“I think a good song is a good song,” says Doe, on the Tao of playing tunes he wrote 30 years ago. “Once you have people that you’ve worked with so long and you have such emotion behind the song, it might sound different — but it might be more meaningful because of all the things you’ve gone through. It still feels vital.”
And: “Are you kidding? I love the road,” says Cervenka excitedly, when asked how touring life is treating her lately. “I know we might play 100 more shows, or one more show … so I think as time goes by I appreciate it more, not less.”
If there are any concerns about sentimentality, on the other hand, let it be known that sardonic wit and a healthy sense of defiance are still hard requirements for band membership.
On Oct. 11, a few weeks before his band planned to leave on tour without him, unsure of what the future held, Billy Zoom clicked over to X’s Facebook page to post a dutiful update for some 60,000 faithful friends.
“I almost forgot to mention, chemo is very slimming,” he wrote. “I look good.”