Singer Exene Cervenka is somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin in a van carrying the Los Angeles punk band X from Milwaukee to Minneapolis when she answers the phone. She’s ready to talk about the tour she and her three bandmates are calling The End Is Near and the new album they say is their last.
“We’re not going anywhere yet,” she says of the tour, which has the band booked well into 2025. “But yeah, we’re not going to do this anymore. Touring is hard.
“I love playing shows; I really do,” Cervenka says. “I love driving around America. I’ve been doing it my whole adult life, and I never want to stop, and won’t. But the van rides, and the in and out of the hotels, and up and down the stairs of the clubs … . And you know, we don’t stay in the lap of luxury. So physically, it’s difficult.
“But when we’re on stage, none of that matters,” she continues. “We love doing it. I want to keep doing it until we absolutely cannot anymore.”
The End is Near tour swings through Southern California this month for a pair of shows at the Regent Theater in Los Angeles on July 25-26 and a third at Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa on July 28. “Smoke & Fiction,” the band’s ninth and final studio album arrives Aug. 2.
In separate phone calls as the van traveled west through Wisconsin, each member of X – Cervenka, 68, singer-bassist John Doe, 71, guitarist Billy Zoom, 76, and drummer DJ Bonebrake, 68 – made clear they aren’t retiring just yet.
There will be shows here and there in the future. But they are taking a step back from the constant touring of the past 20-some years since the band reunited at the end of the ’90s.
And, over two hours and 100 or so miles as the van rolled on, they were happy to talk about the changes ahead, the origins of X in the L.A. punk scene of the late ’70s, the success their debut album “Los Angeles” delivered and the familial closeness they feel with fans old and new.
“I don’t want to be part of something where the wheels are falling off,” Doe says of the decision to take a step back from the heavy tour schedules of the past two decades. “What we’re winding down is 75 or so dates a year, a lot of them in clubs. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think we can really sustain that.
“I want to go out while we’re strong,” he says.
“For me, I think my body already made that decision,” says Zoom, who successfully beat back cancer a decade or so ago.
“I’ve felt this in the past,” Bonebrake says of uncertainty about the future of X. “You wonder if it’s our last tour: ‘Well, this could be it; I don’t know.’ I’m not yet emotional because we’re still in it.
“In the past, whenever people have given us awards, like LA Weekly Lifetime Achievement, the Grammy something, my attitude is like, ‘You can’t retire us early. You can’t get rid of me yet.’”
Early days in LA
Everyone in the band agrees it was Billy Zoom who marked the spot that became X.
“I heard about the Ramones, and then I went and saw the Ramones’ show,” Zoom says of one of that band’s 1977 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood. “That Monday, I quit my job at the electronics place and put an ad in the Recycler for a bass player and drummer to start a punk rock band with – I can’t remember what I said – something about Eddie Cochran meets the Ramones, with some roots influences.”
Doe was the second bassist to audition, he says, and they quickly clicked.
“He’s got kind of a quirky style of songwriting, that sort of moved in a slightly different way,” Zoom says.
“I didn’t identify Billy as a rockabilly player,” Doe says of Zoom. “I just knew that he didn’t like jamming. As a bass player jamming is really boring. Billy didn’t want to just show off all the time: ‘Give me eight bars and I’m good.’
Around that time, Cervenka left Tallahassee, Florida, for Los Angeles, selling her 1950 Cadillac for $300 and catching a ride west with a friend in exchange for help with the gas money.
“I moved to California with no money,” she says. “It was easy back then. You could get a job for minimum wage and an apartment in the same day and survive, which no one can do now.”
She met Doe at a poetry workshop in Venice – he remembers they were the only two young people in it – and started talking.
“We went and got some wine and then we sat in my little empty apartment that had no furniture and talked,” Cervenka says. “He mentioned to me that he had heard there was a scene. He had a car and said, Let’s go sometime and see a show.”
They went to see John Lee Hooker at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica and eventually found the early L.A. punk scene.
“I think the first punk band I saw was probably the Screamers,” she says. “Someone was getting evicted and they were playing an apartment-wrecking party. And that’s when we started meeting some of the other people, because the scene was just kind of starting. You meet a new person every day. You work on your writing every day.”
Cervenka showed Doe a song she’d written, which he liked, and he invited her to meet Zoom to see what they could do with it. That song, “I’m Coming Over,” appears on X’s 1981 sophomore release “Wild Gift.”
“She has an incredible sense of mystery,” Doe says of Exene, to whom he was married from 1980 to 1985. “She had written ‘I’m Coming Over’ and I thought, This makes sense. Here’s someone who was a born lead singer even though she had no intention or aspirations to be a lead singer.”
Zoom says the final piece of the band clicked into place a year or later when after trying several different drummers the band spotted Bonebrake drumming for the punk band the Eyes.
“It was a small scene and John saw the Eyes play, I think, at the Masque,” Bonebrake says of legendary Hollywood punk club. “The way the mythology goes, Billy started saying, ‘I want a drummer who plays a really big snare drum, and I was using a marching snare, 12 inches by 15 inches.”
Doe liked what he heard and invited Bonebrake to audition.
“DJ, since he loved, for example, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, he wasn’t afraid to try different things,” Doe says. “He was a musician first and a drummer second. And if someone who plays drums loves songs, they have a real advantage.”
As Bonebrake says, once he joined X in 1978, “The rest is history.”
A ‘Smoke & Fiction’ finale
“Smoke & Fiction,” a terrific record that X says is its last ever, arrives Aug. 2 with the band sounding as strong and inspired as ever, its 10 songs harking back lyrically to the band’s early history, its sound closely following suit.
None of that was on purpose, Doe says.
“Well, this is gonna come as a real shock to you,” he says, laughing. “Literally, nothing about X is calculated. We just do stuff. We do stuff and think, ‘Oh, well, that works.’
“Billy didn’t have some grand plan to join a punk rock band and infuse rockabilly-style guitar playing, but he was the first,” Doe says. “And Exene and I weren’t looking for a singing partner, but it turns out very handy because you share the duties pretty equally. So it doesn’t get boring or physically taxing.”
While the record is reflective of X’s past, it’s not nostalgic, which is a distinction Doe, who with Cervenka writes the lyrics, is careful to make.
“We’re not pretending that everything was incredible and wonderful in the old days,” he says. “But there’s lines like, ‘Let’s go ’round the bend, get in trouble again.’ So you have this desire to see the other side, but maybe you’re not as foolish as you had been in the past.”
Cervenka says much the same, pointing to the new song, “Big Black X,” which closely chronicles the scene from X came, as a clear-eyed look at that moment in time.
“‘Big Black X,’ is a funny kind of romp around in the past and not at all nostalgic or wistful,” she says. “Just kind of going, ‘Hey, remember that time we did this crazy thing?’”
Doe points to the same song as a musical mirror of that time and place.
“‘Big Black X’ would be sort of No. 1 if someone asked me, ‘What was it like?’” he says. “I could say, ‘Well, if you have three minutes and some change, just listen to that.”
The new record came so soon after 2020’s “Alphabetland” in part because the pandemic kept X from touring behind it, Bonebrake says.
“We said, ‘We’re not going to be able to do this forever,’” he says. “Let’s do one more and let’s promote it right. So basically we’re having a second chance to do what we should have done with ‘Alphabetland.’
“I mean, if we could do five more, that would be great,” Bonebrake says. “If I could live forever, that would be fantastic. And we’re still playing well, but we get aches and pains. You just know you can only do so much for so long and do it well.”
Zoom, who avoids unnecessary words like he does unnecessary guitar notes, says he hasn’t really considered the historic roots of “Smoke & Fiction.”
“I haven’t really gotten around to listening to the words yet,” he says, and laughs. “I’m still trying to remember the chords and the arrangements. I don’t pay much attention to the lyrics. That’s not my job.”
As for any conscious intent to play on the record as he had on the original few?
“I don’t know. I don’t really think about it like that,” Zoom says. “I just play like me, you know?”
Finding first fame
With its 1980 debut album, “Los Angeles,” X caught the attention of national and even international music publications. And they could see signs that fans in Los Angeles and beyond were increasingly interested in what they were doing.
“Even before the album came out, we started to get an audience,” Bonebrake says. “We were playing the Hong Kong Garden and I remember seeing a line around the block: ‘Wow, there are people here to see us.’”
Ray Manzarek, who’d been the keyboard player for the Doors, caught X at the Whisky one night and didn’t notice they were playing his band’s song “Soul Kitchen” – three or four times faster than usual – until his wife pointed it out, he says. He met the band and offered to produce the album that become “Los Angeles.”
“I saw the transition,” Bonebrake says of the widening appeal of X’s music. “We played a couple of nights at the Whisky and we started seeing more of my folk, the kids from the Valley. You started seeing people outside of the scene who were coming to the shows.”
As their star ascended, some in the L.A. punk scene began to resent X’s success, Doe says.
“We suffered some judgment but didn’t really care,” he says. “It sucked that Exene and I couldn’t go see the Circle Jerks because some of their audience thought we were rock stars and wanted to see if they could get in a fight with us. It was stupid, but that happens.
“We always believed we were accessible,” Does says of X’s music and lyrics. “We weren’t Throbbing Gristle or Sonic Youth, just being an iconoclast and as obscure or obtuse as possible. We wrote fairly traditional songs. It so happened that the songs were still a little bit too weird, or the way Exene and I sang together wasn’t acceptable.”
The night X debuted the “Los Angeles” album at the Whisky was also the night that Cervenka’s sister died, forever blurring memories of joy and sorrow for her.
“She got killed pretty much on her way to see us play,” Cervenka says. “Then the ‘Wow, we’re in a band, we’re great’ became: ‘I’m going to get up today and I’m going to play a show. And I’m going to drink and then I’m going to go to bed, and I’m going to do whatever I can do to have some kind of life.’”
For Zoom, the debut album set in motion a different kind of blur.
“‘Los Angeles’ came out and then we got on a tour bus,” he says. “The Eagles were playing in the background. Then I got off a tour bus in, like, 1986 and Rick Astley was on TV, and I missed everything in between. I was in a tour bus for most of the first half of the ’80s.”
Fans and farewells
Homecoming shows in Los Angeles and Orange County like those this month are always special. Both Cervenka and Zoom live in Orange, and Bonebrake has spent most of his life in the San Fernando Valley. Doe pulled up stakes for Austin, Texas a number of years ago.
Their fandom was never big enough to make them superstars, but with its steady touring in later years, X has come to view many fans like family. And that connection will be missed, they say.
“I’ve met thousands and thousands of people because I would always hang out in the crowd,” Cervenka says. “I always go out with people after the show: ‘Hey, let’s go to this old man bar. You’ll love it. We can get some Hamm’s beer and some whiskey and then we’ll go play pool.’ I just would always have so much fun.”
For Zoom, the step back from touring and recording brings mixed feelings.
“In some ways, it’s a relief,” he says. “And in other ways, I’ll miss the audiences. Our fans have been coming so many years, it’s kind of like a family reunion when you go on tour.”
To the members of X, the fans have always seemed like kindred spirits, restlessly looking for something fresh, exciting, different.
“It’s something about the way that our songs are challenging but they don’t piss you off because there’s no place to hang your hat,” Doe says. “They’re accessible but they’re weird. Each one of our members offers something different.
“Lyrically, and maybe musically, we appeal to outsiders,” he says. “They feel different and can be anyone, it just doesn’t matter. We do have a pretty, pretty broad appeal by our fan base.
“That’s something to be proud of, I think.”
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