Exene Cervenka's Personal Best
After nearly 50 years together, pioneering LA punks X are calling it a day with their final album, Smoke & Fiction. Vocalist and songwriter Exene Cervenka talks Alan Pedder through five favourites from the band's complete works.
Before joining X in 1977, Exene Cervenka had no real ambition to be in a band, least of all a lead vocalist.
Although she sat in on the band’s first rehearsals, she was there mostly to sit in a dark corner writing poems and getting drunk while singer/bassist John Doe and guitarist Billy Zoom tried to figure out what the earliest incarnation of X might sound like. It was Doe who pushed her to join him behind the mic, and by the time Dave Grohl’s cousin DJ Bonebrake joined as the band’s official drummer the following year that same year, Cervenka was as much a member of the band as anyone. It’s impossible to imagine X without her, and vice versa. “I’m very fortunate that I fell in with John because I would not be alive otherwise,” she says, bluntly. “I wouldn’t have made it out of my ’20s, and if I somehow had, I don’t know what I would have done with my life. But it would not have been as rewarding.”
Born Christine Cervenka, she spent her early childhood living in a small town in rural Illinois, before her family moved to Florida where she felt like a perennial outsider. Dropping out of high school at 16, and moving out of home at 18, Cervenka had her world turned upside down when her mother passed away after a short illness. She briefly moved back in with her father, to help take care of her two younger sisters, but when a chance came up to move across the country to Santa Monica with a friend, she couldn’t have taken it fast enough. It was shortly after that she met Doe, at a poetry workshop in nearby Venice, and the path was laid for the emergence of her true form as Exene. “I had no intention of ever being normal, and I couldn’t hold a regular job,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m just really grateful that I’ve been able to make a living doing all the things I love to do.”
It's been 44 years since X released their debut album Los Angeles, widely regarded as a canonical entry in the history of American punk. Other than a cover of The Doors’ “Soul Kitchen”, Doe and Cervenka co-wrote every track, and as a songwriting team they were unbeatable. There has never been a wordsmith in the punk scene quite like Cervenka, and her maximalist commitment to unprettiness could sell any song on any subject, political or personal. And, as with any band that spend decades together, things could get very personal indeed. Roughly 4 years after meeting at the poetry workshop, Cervenka and Doe got married, not long before their debut album hit the streets. Their joy was short-lived, however, when her cherished older sister Mirielle was killed by a drunk driver on the night of the album’s release shows. “Sometimes I’ve thought that if I hadn’t made that record, if I wasn’t in the band, she’d still be alive,” she says. “I would have traded my entire career for her to still be alive right now.”
Five years later, Doe and Cervenka’s marriage was over, but X continued, even when they probably should have taken a bit of a break. After four albums recorded with producer Ray Manzarek of The Doors, the fifth X record, Ain’t Love Grand!, marked a departure in terms of sound, and also in the fact that Billy Zoom quit the band soon after. He wouldn’t come back into the fold until 1998, when X played a ‘farewell’ tour, having decided to put the band on ice. By the time they surprise released their eighth album Alphabetland in April 2020, a whopping 27 years had passed since their last studio release, and 35 years since the last recordings with Zoom.
The fact that Smoke & Fiction has arrived a little over 4 years later, with all four original members, seems almost too good to be true. The fact that it will most probably be their final album is less pleasing, but what a way to go out. Smoke & Fiction delivers a taut half hour of the band firing on all cylinders, with a victory lap that takes in surf-rock riffs (“Flipside”), bootstrap Americana (“The Way It Is”), artful punk bangers (“Winding Up the Time”) and the catchy rockabilly-tinged lead single “Big Black X”. Even after 40+ years, the feeling of excitement of putting out a record still comes with an element of fear, Cervenka admits. “It’s like, ‘What if nobody buys it? What if nobody likes us?’ but, as John says, that’s not the point of making a record, and he’s right. Still, it’s a lot of hard work, and everyone who has had a part in it wants it to do well. You don’t want to make a great record that gets forgotten about after two weeks or whatever, so I do hope it has some legs and that people find it.”
As it stands, X will play what could be their last ever show in May of next year, on a cruise ship, but North American fans can catch them right now as they crisscross the country on a trek they’re jokingly calling The End is Near Tour. Now aged between 68 and 76, the band still love playing live, but less so everything that goes with that. Cervenka is quick to dismiss the idea of a residency-style show, similar to what Kate Bush did 10 years ago, that would allow the band to play without needing to spend weeks or months on the move. “I don’t think we’re that kind of band,” she says, decisively. “We’re never gonna be the kind of band that plays Las Vegas for two weeks. That’s just not going to happen, though it would be fun. I’d be happy to play a couple of festivals a year. It would be great if we could swing that, especially in Europe. We can’t afford to get there otherwise.”
Cervenka isn’t worried about making ends meet without the band being active. X have regained ownership of the masters to their best-known records, and Cervenka herself lives “a very frugal life” in “a really cute, old-fashioned town” in Orange Country. For the past 20 years she’s had a side career as a collage artist, and she intends to keep doing that. She’ll also keep playing with Doe and Bonebrake in their other band, The Knitters, who toured not long ago as the opening act for British post-punk band The Psychedelic Furs. “I think I’ll be fine for the rest of my life, even if I don’t work,” she says. “But it seems like people are always going to ask us to do things now and then. You want an X song for your movie? Yeah, we’ll do that.”
When it came to choosing the songs for her Personal Best, Cervenka says it was a pretty easy task. The hardest part was choosing five songs that didn’t overlap too much in their themes. X have a lot of songs about the world going to shit, for example. “There are so many other songs I could have picked that I think would have worked just as well,” she says. “But I didn’t want to go over the same thing over and over with slightly different reasons. These are the ones that popped into my head.”
"The World's a Mess; It's in My Kiss" (1980)
BEST FIT: Your first choice is the closing track from Los Angeles, and it’s a song that has been described as absurdist, apocalyptic, and as one of the greatest punk love songs of all time. What does it mean to you?
EXENE CERVENKA: I wrote this song probably in 1977 or 1978, when John was visiting his parents out on the East Coast. I hadn’t met them at that point, and I don’t think he had even broken the news to them that this insane 21-year-old was his girlfriend. On his way to visit them, he dropped me off in Baltimore at the house of one of his friends, who was an eccentric, incredibly creative, amazing artist. John had lived in Baltimore for a long time, and he had some really cool friends there, but I’d never been before. I don’t think I had spent much time in big cities at all at that point. I’d been in New York, and was living in LA at the time, but I was a country, small-town girl. All I knew about Baltimore at that point I had learnt from John Waters and Edgar Allen Poe, and Baltimore at the end of the ‘70s was just the way you’d imagine it, in a John Waters way.
I had three days there, and it was kind of a crazy time. I remember going to Edie the Egg Lady’s thrift store, and walking around the city by myself. I remember looking down at the old cobblestone streets, which were probably from 1750 or something, and how that felt really foreign to me. At the time I was writing in a giant old bookkeeping ledger with a leather cover, which I was carrying around with me everywhere even though it was really heavy. That day I wrote the line, “I was wandering down at the bricks / hectic, isn’t it,” and the song really started from there.
The other thing I like about “The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss” is that it was the first song I wrote where I’d had the ambition to combine a lot of different things. I was writing about the bigger picture – “the world’s a mess,” which is about as big as you can get – and combined it with something more personal – “it’s in my kiss,” which was also a nod to “The Shoop Shoop Song” and the history of rock and roll. There’s a baseball reference in there too, and I feel like the line I wrote “Dirty night dying like a lovely wife” foreshadowed the death of my sister, which is weird. So, yeah, it is kind of a surrealist song, but I chose it because I feel like it was the first time I had a real, kind of developed sense of songwriting, with lyrics that were sort of combining aspects of all the writing I’d been doing since I was young.
When you first showed the lyrics that you'd written to John, what do you remember what his reaction was?
No, but we always had this constant back and forth exchange of writing and ideas and music. Sometimes I would just give him the book and he would just look through the pages and decide what lyrics and ideas would work with the music that he’d been working on. Usually he would have to adapt things, and, in the early days, I didn't like that. I wanted things to be the way that I wrote them and insist that that’s the way things had to be. Of course, he’d say things like, “But it’s really long and it doesn’t fit,” and I’d be like, “Why does it have to fit? Why does it have to have a chorus? Why can’t it just be free flowing?” “It is going to be free flowing at the end,” he’d say, “but this part has to be shorter.”
Writing with John taught me a lot about songcraft and how, sometimes, to make a great song you have to throw things away, and sometimes that’s difficult.
Did the song change much when Ray Manzarek came on board to produce the album, or was it a really easy one to record?
Well, making that first record was really hard, because I'd never been in a studio before except to make a demo or just goof around. This time I was in a real studio that was costing $300 an hour or something, so we had to do everything really, really fast. Me being me, you know, I’d rather drink than take anything seriously at that point, so I don’t even know how we got that record done. But working with Ray Manzarek was brilliant. He just wanted us to be ourselves and to put forward the best version of us that we could. If I wasn’t singing something the way he thought was right, he’d make me sing it again and again and again until we got it, so there was a lot of learning in that first experience.
Honestly, I don’t remember much about it, because it all went by so fast and there was so much going on. It wasn’t until the record was done and we were going to play the test pressing for the very first time, for Claude Bessy – aka Kickboy Face from Slash magazine and Slash Records – that I suddenly thought, “Oh no, people are actually going to hear this!” We put the record on the turntable at a friend’s house, and as the needle touched down I remember freaking out a bit, thinking “Claude’s gonna hate it and everyone’s gonna hate us!”
The thing about working with Ray is that we didn’t realise what that would mean to a whole generation of people. To them, it meant that we were a new band that sounded like The Doors, but we didn’t sound anything like that. We’d play live and people would come up to us and ask “Where’s Ray?,” and we’d have to explain that he wasn’t actually in the band. On the other hand, we had people from the punk rock scene who were like, “How could you have that old hippie produce your record?” or “Why is he playing on your record? I wanted an X record, not a Ray Manzarek record!” Fortunately we also had other people saying that it was the most brilliant thing that had ever happened, and that it was the beginning of something new.
We didn’t think about any of that when we were making the record. I just thought that Ray was really cool and that it would be fun to work with him on a record. Because everything was fun then. Nothing was serious. But, yeah, from that record, and this last song, things really started to move.
It’s interesting how this song has aged immaculately and continues to be relevant to the world situation today. “No one is united and all things are untied,” is a perfect opening line.
Well, you know, I feel like that’s true with every single one of our songs. We deliberately tried not to date them. If you look at the song “The New World”, where the chorus goes “It was better before, before they voted for What’s-His-Name,” we could have put Reagan but it would have dated it and ruined the song. I wrote ‘What’s-His-Name’ because so many people don’t even know who the President is, and I think that’s maybe never been more true. You go online and see all these YouTube videos of people interviewing young people who have no idea. The character in the song is a homeless guy on Skid Row or something who just wants to get drunk but the bars are closed so he has to make conversation. But really, it doesn’t matter who is in the White House. It doesn’t matter if it’s Reagan or if it’s Obama, because it’s the same thing every time.
Right. Well, maybe it will be What's-Her-Name this time?
It doesn't matter. Things will get progressively worse as time goes on, no matter who's in there. But yeah, that would be something.
"Because I Do" (1982)
BEST FIT: You’ve said in the past that Under the Big Black Sun is your favourite X album, so I’m not surprised to see a track from it here.
EXENE CERVENKA: Oh yeah, it was my favourite, but the new one is my favourite now. It’s a better record [laughs].
What makes “Because I Do” so special to you?
Well, I loved listening to the radio as a kid, because it was the only thing I had besides school and playing outside. I remember, when I was little, sitting in the car listening to AM radio and noticing that all the songs were about love and that they were all very sad. Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away”, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”, The Supremes, Motown – it was all this really sad, lovelorn stuff. I didn’t know what love was, but I understood that these were all love songs. I don’t know if that influenced my writing, or if I was just going to turn out this way anyway, but this, to me, is the ultimate unrequited love song.
It's about a woman who doesn’t even exist. She’s like a ghost, like a dead person who can’t get back to life, but she’s also a bride. She’s just getting married but she’s already searching for someone new. Everything in her life is about this desire and about wanting to be somewhere else. To me that feels kind of ghostly. The song title is, as I’m sure you can guess, a nod to the wedding vows, but it’s also sort of a response to the question, “Why are you doing that?” Because that’s what I do. There’s no reason, I’m just the way I am. Also, the line “I drink and smoke your brand,” is a way of expressing that feeling of being so in love with someone that you start smoking their brand of cigarettes, because it makes you feel close to them when nothing else will.
I love the music and the arrangement of the song, which is all John and the band. I love the way it just stops, and I love the fastness of it. It’s just so urgent and so fraught with desire and longing and sadness and happiness at the same time. For me, “Because I Do” is a very successful version of a type of song I have written 3000 times now: the unrequited love song.
I think one of the strengths of “Because I Do” is that it works so well even when you play it stripped down, like you did on the Unclogged album, and also on the Singing & Playing record you made with John.
Yeah, we often do that one live. It's neat. What we always say – and John thought of this first – is that punk rock is folk music. It's short, it's fast, it's simple, and it tells the story of what's happening now in people's lives. It's not grandiose, it's real basic, and this song is so hillbilly when we sing it, just the two of us with a guitar.
The first image of “a black and white ghost in a black and invisible dress” could also be interpreted as quite a striking image of grief, which clings to you even though other people can’t necessarily see it.
Well, that's a great comment, thank you. Yes, I guess that’s exactly what I was going for.
You mentioned your sister's death earlier, which was obviously such a very difficult and horrible time in your life, and had a big impact on the songs you wrote for this album.
Yeah, that record is kind of sad, but I just had someone say to me yesterday that Under the Big Black Sun helped them get through a death in their own family – and that's why we make music, for all the good and bad things that happen.
When my sister died, it wasn't just me that was sad, it was a huge group of people that were just devastated by the loss of her creativity. My sister was much loved in New York, and was part of this great, cool underground scene there. She was a design genius. I can’t even describe how amazing she was, and a lot of the things she did were widely imitated. She had this collection of incredible vintage 1920s clothes and other really cool stuff that people hadn’t really discovered at that time.
The night she was killed, she and her husband were in LA because they had a premiere of a movie they had made. It was just before Los Angeles came out, and X was playing two shows at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in West Hollywood that night, and Ray was playing with us. We had been hanging out at a friend’s house, and my sister and her husband had left to go to their hotel to get ready while John and I went to soundcheck. We played the first show and she wasn’t there, which was really weird, and then the police showed up. We played the second show anyway, which was insane.
Under the Big Black Sun was the first X album to come out on a major label, Elektra. How was that shift for you, in terms of the machinery behind the music?
It’s funny because Elektra was The Doors’ label, but that’s not why they signed us. There was a guy there, whose name I think was Joe Smith. He was a regular record company executive, but he just loved the band and wanted us on Elektra. We had all these labels asking. Well, not a lot, but there were others. And it wasn’t like we made a million dollars signing with Elektra. We had a little bit of an advance, and enough to make a record. Then, about a week after we signed with them, this guy left to go to a different label and the people who took over didn’t really know what to do with us. At the time we were like, “Oh no, this is that thing that happens at major labels. This is the thing people warned us about!”
We’d put out two records on Slash, but the second one didn’t sell any more than the first. We were getting great, rave reviews from all over the world, but sometimes we’d go to a city like Boston and do an in-store and they wouldn’t have the records in stock. There was only one record distributor in America for independent labels at the time, and they were an old jukebox distribution company. So, it was hard to be on Slash, and I think we had ambitions. We were always more ambitious than a lot of people in the punk scene, and we wanted more people to hear our music. The way to do that was to get on a bigger label and get better distribution. It was all about distribution, because, artistically, nothing changed.
I think being on Elektra did improve our visibility on a national level. We went on David Letterman and American Bandstand, and all that stuff, but things didn’t really change in a huge way. For us, it was just about keeping moving forward. You can’t not keep moving forward, otherwise you’ll stay right where you started, and we didn’t want to do that.
"I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" (1983)
BEST FIT: This seems to me to be a song about wanting to change the world, in big and small ways that were affecting you at the time. There’s a lot of layers to it. What’s your reason for choosing it among your personal best?
EXENE CEVENKA: That's exactly what this song is. It's like “The World's a Mess; It’s in My Kiss”, but it's more about the bigger picture, “The civil wars and the uncivilised wars.” There’s nothing on this planet more uncivilised than a civil war, is there? A civil war is the worst war you can possibly have. All wars are bankers’ wars, as they say, run by the people in power. There are no real wars, there are only proxy wars and bankers’ wars. We all know this is true, right? Especially now. But when you think of a civil war, where people are rising up, brother against brother. That’s just the worst.
When I wrote that song, there was a lot going on in Central America, with the Nicaraguan Revolution and the civil war in El Salvador, where the US was funding one side and the communists on the other side were the good guys. I mean, if you’re backing sides, that’s kind of a hard choice to make, to support the communists because, oh gosh, that’s got its own problems. I also wrote it about the Middle East, with everything going on between Palestine and Israel, which is, ridiculously, still going on 40 years later. In a more horrible way now than ever.
There’s a line in this song that goes “Both sides are right but both sides murder,” and I don’t know what’s going on where you are but, in this country, there’s been huge eruptions of violence and demonstrations against Israel. People say those protests are pro-Hamas, but I don’t think so. I think people are just worried about all these people who are dying unnecessarily. It’s not pro-Hamas, it’s pro-peace. Like, can you please just stop killing people? I don’t fault anyone for protesting that. It’s a conundrum. People just want war to stop, but then they keep voting for the people who make wars happen. Oh my gosh, it’s such a mess, but that’s what this song is about.
Then, strangely, it goes into this whole thing about bands being played on the radio, because we had our own little civil war in music. All the English bands like A Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran, and all those New Romantic bands, were getting played on the radio but almost none of the local bands in LA were being played. Sure, we could get played on Rodney on the ROQ at one in the morning, and other shows like that, but it felt like none of the LA bands were able to get any further than where they were, and, as it turned out, many of them were never going to.
Of the bands I mention in the song, I don’t know why I chose those bands, which were all hardcore bands. I don’t know why I didn’t choose bands like The Weirdos and The Plugz. I think I just wanted to draw a line of distinction between how different it was to play bands like Duran Duran versus Black Flag. But even The Ramones weren’t played on the radio nearly enough, you know? That verse is asking, again, “Why are things like this? Why can’t they be this way and not that way? Why is it that only one side gets hurt? If one side is right, why aren’t both sides right? And why are both sides wrong at the same time?”
There are all just rhetorical questions. There are no easy answers to any of that stuff. “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” is me saying to myself, ‘Okay, just stop. Stop thinking about all this stuff and just tell yourself over and over again that it’s not happening.’ I hadn’t heard the term cognitive dissonance back then.
What do you think about toxic positivity?
I’ve never heard that phrase. I don’t know what it means.
It’s a similar thing, in that it’s when people reject or insist that other people reject thoughts that are in any way negative. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase ‘good vibes only’?
Yeah, yeah, I have. I think when bad things are happening and you’re under threat, the absolute worst line of defense is thinking ‘This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening.’ Like, no, pick something up and use it as a weapon! If something bad is happening, you don’t just stand there pretending that it isn’t. But I get it. I think a lot of people are stunned right now. So, toxic positivity is just when people refuse to admit that things are hard, that things are going to hell? Right, right. Because then you can’t do anything.
You later did some volunteer work to help the people of El Salvador. What’s the story there?
Yeah, I did. That was for an organisation called Medical Aid for El Salvador, and I think that it was completely illegal. It was a guy from a wealth Salvadoran family who’d had to leave El Salvador and came to Los Angeles. When I found out about this organisation I wanted to check it out for myself. I realised it wasn’t that far from my house, so I took the bus over there with my son in a stroller. I went into this office building and there was just one guy sitting there by himself, making cold calls to movie star-type people and other people with money, using a list that he probably got from some other organisation that was trying to help people. Let’s just say that. When I asked what I could do, he said, “Well, you can sit on the phone and ask people for money,” so I did. I was in the office for some days, and then I put on a fundraiser and played a show that raised about $4000.
The reason I did that was because all they were doing was trying to raise money for medical supplies. El Salvador didn’t have any aspirin, bandages, or anything. They were completely embargoed and blockaded. Nothing was getting into the country and people were suffering. Were they using the money to buy weapons? I don’t think so. I felt confident that what I was doing was helping people and not exacerbating war or friction, and I did that for as long as I could.
The band and I have done benefits for just about everything you can imagine, and always with good intentions. There was a show I did with John as The Knitters, at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, trying to raise money for guitar strings. We also did a show to raise money for baseball equipment, because, in Mexico and Central America, baseball is huge, and sometimes that’s all people have. I’m a big baseball person, and I wanted to help people in any way that I could. It’s not like I wanted to overthrow anybody’s government, I just wanted people to be able to give a baseball to their kid for Christmas.
What's your baseball team?
The Los Angeles Dodgers, since the late ‘70s. I was a Chicago White Sox fan before that.
There’s a line in “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” about Woody Guthrie singing “about b-e-e-t-s not b-e-a-t-s,” which people have speculated is maybe a comment on how music in the ‘80s had changed from often being about social issues to becoming more obsessed with itself. What’s the significance of that line to you?
Well, I grew up in the Midwest, where the landscape was all cornfields and farms. There was a movement at the time to help family farmers to pay off their mortgage debts, and Farm Aid started a few years later with people like Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp organising. We had the mistaken belief that we could save the family farms, that people could live on their farms for generations and that everyone could eat healthy. That’s rapidly going away, day by day. At the time, though, that line was just a play on words. It was just a funny thing to say.
"Water & Wine" (2020)
BEST FIT: Let’s jump forward almost 20 years to the Alphabetland album, which was a surprise release during the pandemic. What is it about “Water & Wine” that earns it a place on your list?
EXENE CERVENKA: To quote the people of the old American Bandstand show, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. It’s X’s most danceable song. It’s a real rock and roll song. It’s not kind of punk and kind of rock, it’s all-out rock and roll and I love that. That’s why I’ve picked it here, because it’s probably my favourite X song to play live, and that’s a different reason to the other songs I’ve chosen which had a lot to do with the lyrics. I think the lyrics to “Water & Wine” are great and all, but I just love the music that the band made for it.
John always introduces this song as if it’s about the rich and the poor and the haves and the have nots, but I didn’t write it like that. He sees it that way, because, like the lyrics say, it’s about who gets water and who gets wine; some people are at the back of the line, some are at front. In that regard, what he says is true, but for me the song is more about a spiritual battle. There’s a lot of old Catholicism and religious and spiritual stuff that runs through my lyrics, like “The divine that defines us / the evil that divides us.”
It's funny, talking about these things, because it can feel like you write the same song all the time. Like, how many times can you talk about this versus that? Well, I don’t know… a lot, apparently.
Would you say that you're a particularly spiritual person?
Well, I think that whether you want to believe it or not, we all are to some extent. I do have the higher power thing going pretty strong. I do believe in something, and I hope it's powerful enough to fix what's wrong with the world. But I don't know if it ever will.
When you surprise released Alphabetland in April 2020, “Water & Wine” was the focus track. Was it an obvious single for you?
Oh, I don't know, the Covid thing happened right then. So, you know, we just put out the record, about six months before we’d originally wanted to. We didn’t tour. We did a bunch of press, and that was it. Honestly, I don't remember what the focus was. It was just about getting through the next six months to get through the six months after that.
What were the challenges for you, personally?
Oh, you know, living alone for a year with just my dog and not seeing another human being was pretty hard. It was the same for me as for everyone else. Worrying if I was going to die or if someone I know was going to die. Not knowing what’s going to happen. It was a very strange situation living on unemployment, not having any money, and putting out a record. We didn’t know if we were ever going to get to play again, or if anybody would. It was so bad that our manager sold the vans that we travelled in, because he had to. Then when we did start playing again, it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I guess we gotta get a van!’ It was just crazy. People had a lot worse experiences than I did. At least I got to stay home.
Did any of the songs from Smoke & Fiction come from that same period of downtime?
Probably. I mean, some of the lyrics on the new album are very, very old. I have so many books and pieces of paper stashed away. I can open any drawer and pull out a song, but it won’t be ready to go. I have to finish it. “Winding Up the Time” was something I started about 15 years ago but could never figure out the music. John and I went back to it, changed some of the words and made it into a song. Other songs, like the one we’re going to talk about next, were written in the studio.
"Big Black X" (2024)
EXENE CERVENKA: Some people have said that this song is about nostalgia, but that’s not what it is to me. It’s not like saying, you know, back when I was a kid we’d have ice cream socials at the church. No, no. To me, this song is like a graphic novel of what our life in Los Angeles was like when we first started out. For people who were there, it’s really fun to hear those songs again, but it you weren’t then it’s still really cool because everyone always wants to know what it was like.
What we did was to just pick the funniest stuff, the most iconic stuff, or the weirdest stuff that happened, and really that song could be 10 pages long. When we started writing it in the studio, I was using one of those yellow legal pads, and we would just sort of pick out whatever memories came into our minds in the moment. I’d be at the mic and John would be in the control room, and we’d go back and forth with trying out different lines to see what worked until it was done. We had to kind of mess with the chorus a bit, because it sounded a little pompous at first, so we changed some of the words and the music for that. It came together nicely.
BEST FIT: In what way did it sound pompous?
It was partly the chords. The thing about music is this: if you write something really heavy but the music is fun and really rock and roll, it doesn't seem as heavy as if you write something banal and the music is really heavy chords and kind of trite. You don’t even want to touch on the banal or the trite, or the heavy chords that don't do more than just rock. You want to make sure that everything fits together in a way that either minimises or exaggerates your intent. With this song, it was just a case of playing with the chords and lyrics to get it to where it needed to be. Funny enough and serious enough.
There are quite a few characters that populate this song, like Errol Flynn and the Hillside Strangler, that really help to set the scene. A lot of iconic Hollywood stuff.
Yeah, Hollywood was still Hollywood when we first moved there. It’s not like it is now. When we moved there, Schwab’s Pharmacy where Lana Turner was allegedly discovered was still there. You could go have a Coke and sit at the counter. Picfair was still there. Things that were iconic from the silent movie days, or the ‘30s and ‘40s. So much of that stuff is all gone now.
There were a lot of stories going around about the Errol Flynn mansion, which was falling down. I guess he lived there for a while but it didn’t actually belong to him. The funny thing about playing that song is hearing everyone else’s stories. Like Craig Packham, who plays drums in our live band when DJ plays vibes and guitar, he was saying how he used to go there as a kid. You’d have to crawl through a hole in the fence to get in, and we’d go up there and drink. A lot of people remember that. Someone who heard “Big Black X” even said that they were the ones who set the Christmas tree on fire, which we mention in the song, and we were like, “Oh, come on. John set it on fire. We know that. You can't say that you did it. We did it!”
You’re deep into the farewell tour now. What has been the reaction to “Big Black X” and the other new songs that you've been playing out?
People love the new songs. And, you know what? I'm not saying this to be patronising, but we have a really smart audience. We have an audience that loves us and love each other. So if there’s a new X song it’s a cause for celebration. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go to the bathroom because they’re playing a new song.’ People have been really great about hearing the new songs, and I think that they're good songs to play live. We’re really happy with how it’s going. The reviews of the record that I’ve seen have been good. I’m sure that there will be some people who don’t like it, but I think it’s doing really well so far. I just hope we can ride it out for another year, and that we can have a great time playing shows with people. Another year and I’ll be happy.
To be on tour, you have to buy into the whole thing. You have to say, ‘Yeah, I love riding around in the van. I love sleeping in crappy motels. I love eating when I can and not eating when I can’t.’ We used to drink a lot and do all kinds of stuff on tour, but we don’t anymore and I haven’t for a long time. These days I think young bands are a little more prudent and smarter than we were. All the young bands I know take touring really seriously. They take care of themselves and they work really hard. We worked really hard, too, but it was a more carefree time for sure. I mean, a car was $500, a guitar was $150. Nobody had insurance. Nobody had TVs. There weren’t a lot of expenses. It is definitely harder for young people to be in a band now, but they seem to still be wanting to get out there and do it.
I’m really stuck in the music that I love from the 1920s through to the ‘70s, so I don’t see a lot of new bands. Probably my favourite is Skating Polly, who are in their early 20s but already have, like, eight records or something. I’ve known them since they were little children. They’re really fun live, especially. They’re wild.
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Shawn Mendes
Shawn
