If You Learn From It, It’s No Longer a Mistake: An Interview With X’s Exene Cervenka (Part I)
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Photo by Kristy Benjamin
The only thing that surprised me more than a new X album in 2020 is that it was actually good. Not just good, up to par with Los Angeles, More Fun in the New World, maybe just maybe Wild Gift. The common denominator with all of these is the guitar playing of Billy Zoom, who’s since identified as some kind of conservative, oh well. On their post-1983 efforts, the absence of his punkified Chuck Berry riffs proved them to be as essential to X’s sound as the unconventional harmonies of John Doe and Exene Cervenka; those are not really anyone’s favorite X albums. (For the curious, 1993’s “Baby You Lied” is probably the best-case scenario of the non-Zoom years.) You’d never know that era took place at all, though, from the opening blasts of Alphabetland to Cervenka’s rickety spoken-word finish. One of the best albums of 2020, it had riffs, harmonies, wisdom, and no hint of the curdled songmaking (or politics) you’d fear from a band whose last brush with transcendence was the year R.E.M. released their debut album.
For four straight bangers from 1980-1983 alone — more than most punks old or new can boast — X earned their legendary rep, and Alphabetland is a fascinating anomaly where legends can still tap into their youthful strengths like it was yesterday if the right circumstances align. RIOTRIOT spoke to Cervenka via phone as X prepares to hit the road again supporting not only their first album with Zoom in 35 years but a follow-up that they’re already premiering songs from. The 67-year-old singer spoke candidly and unapologetically about the band’s history, the process behind some of their classics, and being admittedly out of touch in some key respects. She made good on her willingness to answer anything — including why “Los Angeles” no longer includes the n-word — which is all an interviewer can ask.
Hi Exene, where are you calling from? How is the tour going?
From home! We did about seven shows, maybe eight, all West Coast shows, then we’re going back out and we’ll be playing a lot more.
What is it like touring at age 67?
Same as always. It’s never gonna get easier and it’s never gonna become some kind of luxury trip around the world. I’ve never stopped loving it. It would be nice if it was a little more comfortable, but you know what? I’m just grateful to still be doing it.
Is it something you ever thought you’d still be doing for this long?
Well, I’ve never predicted my future. And if I did, I was never accurate. We do get that question a lot, but we really didn’t think much ahead of where we were, ever. I didn’t really know, I didn’t care, and it seems to have worked out pretty good.
Have you seen any good bands yourself recently? What favorite music have you been turning to of late?
There is good new music, I’m just not very hip about finding it. I love Los Straitjackets, they’ve been around a long, long time but they’re one of the most amazing bands ever. Some of the greatest music ever written, you know: surf music, instrumental music. As far as new bands go, I just don’t know what to tell you.
That’s okay!
When we started out it was ‘76, and the Ramones were just building on like 20 years of rock’n’roll, that’s all they had to sift through, right? Now it’s like 70 years of rock, how the hell are these kids supposed to go through like 70 years of rock’n’roll, have all the influences, listen to everything they’re supposed to, understand context, and be completely original?
One of my favorite bands is Skating Polly, I’ve known them since they were little kids, they’re still really young. They’ve put out a lot of records, they have a new one coming out. I like really great roots music. Carl Sonny Leyland, he’s a piano player kind of like Gene Taylor…he’s just the best. Boogie-woogie and all that American music, there’s just amazing players like that, some of them are older, some are really young. They play horns and guitars and it’s just as good as anything from the ‘50s. I like to go dancing, so stuff like that. As far as punk rock, I don’t even know. How about you, do you find stuff that you like?
I’m better at keeping up with music than, like, movies. Even just from getting press emails and stuff.
Yeah, you’re tied into all that.
There’s a really good punk band called Control Top from Philly; it’s been a fertile scene around here for the last few years. Speaking of musical generational gaps, X tracked Alphabetland and originally planned to tour with Violent Femmes before COVID hit. What did the band end up doing instead?
Well, we collected unemployment, dipped into our savings, stayed in the house like everybody else. Figured we’re all gonna die so we might as well drink some really good wine. We just made the best of the situation and we were very, very, very grateful, as was everyone, when we were finally able to tour again and see bands play and get out into the world.
Perhaps if that record had come out on schedule, perhaps if we had toured the hell out of it, maybe we wouldn’t be making a new record now because we would’ve felt like we did everything we wanted to do, toured a lot and made some money and everything was okay and we’ll just take a break. I think because we didn’t get to celebrate that record or tour it or even feel what it was like to have it released, we’re like, well, you know what, let’s make another record. Try it again and hope this time that everything works out. The new songs, we’ve been playing I think four of them live, to try and really get a handle on what they sound like in front of real people.
Did you just keep on writing or was there a little downtime period before you started up again?
I’ve been a writer my whole life, so I’m not gonna stop writing, and as far as songs go, yeah I started thinking, okay so we’re gonna do some new songs, so I just gathered up…I have a huge, huge amount of writing I’ve done over the last 60 years. So I can open up a box of pages and papers, some of it’s organized, most of it isn’t. I love random stuff anyway, and I can pull out journals and books and things, and just pull out songs that I didn’t ever record or finish, or a chorus but no verses, and put it together with something from another box of papers. And then edit it, send it to John, he has music. Then it’s really easy because I can look at things with a little bit of editorial distance…I don’t look at it like, ‘Oh I was really sad when I wrote that.’ I’ll just go, ‘That’s a great line, it goes with this other line,’ and I have the opening of a song. Then I’ll sit down and work on that really hard. It’s been really fun, kind of puzzle-y, like doing word puzzles, crosswords or something, and I enjoy that very much.
You said you don’t really have an organizing principle for things you’re writing, so how do you know when those songs are intended for X or —
Oh, there’s nothing else to be intended for, it’s my only project. I either write songs for X or just to write. Which is, you know, fine, too. But I don’t craft things and edit things and really, really work hard on some things necessarily unless I know it’s gonna have that place in the X world. I’m happy making another record because it gives me more work, more things to do.
Let’s talk about how Alphabetland came together in the first place. I think it’s one of your best and it’s especially uncanny how it sounds like a total continuation of your early ‘80s albums.
I do too, it’s because of the music. We’ve always had different elements of Americana-type…I’m going for a more rock’n’roll, rhyme-y, fun, impressionistic lyrical style and the music is like that, too. It’s hard because now we have songs from Alphabetland, and new songs, but we have to play the old songs because those are good and people want to hear those. We have too many songs all of a sudden. [Laughs.]
Did you revisit your old albums to help you tap into that mode of writing?
No.
Mission of Burma, New York Dolls, and others paved this path for well-received reunion albums that may not have existed when your band was last in the studio, circa 1993 or so. Did it not really seem possible to keep on making X albums for a while?
I always wanted to make more X records but I was the only one that wanted to. They knew that, and I kept badgering them. We did a Kickstarter for this Live in Latin America record with a recording that Pearl Jam did when we were on tour with them, and I thought we could put that out, master it, make it sound really good.
There was a point where D.J. [Bonebrake] and John, but mostly Billy, recognized that we didn’t own our records and we were never gonna make a penny off anything we released because it was all free on the internet now, so why put out a new record? The record label’s going to take all the money, we aren’t gonna make any money from streaming, Pandora, what, it’s like a dollar a year? Why go to all that trouble it’s just going to be given away? We can’t live like that, we don’t have money.
Well, of course everything changes over time, we got all our records back, we own them, and we license them to Fat Possum. It’s an amazing, incredible, honest label that we’re partners with, and we have an outlet for our music that we can control if it’s on a streaming service, or we can control if it’s in a movie, and Warner Bros. doesn’t make all the money. We can say no or yes to offers. So that got us out of a doldrum period. Everybody signed their recording contracts in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and then people kept suing and suing and tried to get their records back after 35 years. Well, lucky us, we’re still around.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with what happened with Leonard Cohen in his final years where his manager absconded with millions and he had to start touring again in his 70s just to recover his savings.
It’s going to only get worse with that as people get more and more desperate, more and more mercenary. I’ve seen that myself. Luckily, we have great management, great booking, great crew people, and we have this great record label. We don’t really have any worries, I mean yeah, this virus happened and there could be other acts of God, or government, or corruption that create situations that hurt people, but I don’t focus on that. We’ve made enough mistakes in our career and in our personal lives, I can tell you the stories of my personal life and… you can say ‘oh, too bad that happened,’ and yes it is but if you learn from it, it’s no longer a mistake. You just keep going on.
On the topic of learning from stuff from the past, Billy’s guitar style is so completely different from the albums with Tony Gilkyson, and on “Cyrano DeBerger’s Back” you showed us how it could sound with Billy instead. Are there other songs from that period that you’ve wanted to rearrange with Billy?
I don’t think we have that many other songs! Billy and John were playing music together even before I met Johnny in ‘76 so pretty much all the stuff we were writing then has seen the light of day by this point. There’s always lyrics from the ‘70s that I can dig up, but you wouldn’t know that they are.
One thing I’ve wanted to know about the old songs, especially with you and John being poets, is whether several lyrics came first to you as a great title to build around. “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not,” “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss,” “Sex and Dying in High Society,” all have that quality.
Well, I’ll tell you, “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene” was the entire thing that I wrote. I thumbtacked it up on the wall next to the light switch and when Johnny came home from work and saw that, he picked up the bass and wrote the song. He came up with “Nausea” I think because he likes that [Sartre] book, he’s a very existential literature guy. I grew up listening to AM radio, especially country music; I loved the cleverness of the lyrics and the twists and turns in language. Love to turn a phrase.
That’s what I love about country music, too, taking these seemingly ordinary situations and finding some new angle to read them through, or some wordplay. So now that you’re bringing in songs again, are you and John tweaking each other’s or do the two of you bring your own ones in fully formed?
I do all the words and sometimes the melody. I feed him all the words and try to make it as close to a finished song as possible. Like “these are verses, this is the chorus, this is the bridge, this is where this goes, this is the beginning.” He puts it to music. If I do the melody, he has to use that pretty much. But when we start singing it, a lot of times I’ll just go “oh, you know what? That part goes at the end!” And he’s like, “You’re right, it goes at the end!”
To be continued in Part II. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.