Punk Legends X on Why ‘Smoke & Fiction’ Is Their Final Album and Tour
X – a punk band that delivers rockabilly riffs at breakneck speeds while dual lead vocalists, John Doe and Exene Cervenka, shout poetry inspired by the dirty realism of Charles Bukowski — was one of the formative bands of the Los Angeles punk scene. On their essential first two albums, 1980’s Los Angeles and 1981’s Wild Gift, Cervenka and Doe (then married) sounded like they were dashing out diary entries from the end of the world, barely making it from one day to the next. While the band’s ninth album — the vital, reflective Smoke & Fiction — feels less fatalistic, Cervenka and Doe are cognizant that the end is nearing for X when they hop on a Zoom call with Billboard in the midst of their last-ever tour.
“I hope people will come see us play, because — not to be weird — we may never play your town again. But that’s true every night, right?” says Cervenka, calling in from her house in SoCal, wearing a puppy t-shirt but still looking unmistakably punk. “Just a reminder: Life is short, but it’s up to people to listen to the record or come see us if they want. Or not. We’re really happy with this record. And that’s its own reward, no matter what happens.”
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Critics and fans seem to agree with her. Responses to Smoke & Fiction have been overwhelmingly positive; the album even hit the top 10 of Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart, marking their best showing ever on that tally.
“We did three days at Sunset Sound, which is a great studio,” says Doe, speaking in front of a mishmash of drawings, paintings, photos and books from his house in Austin. “Like a lot of what I think are good rock n’ roll records, it was made in less than a month — three weeks, maybe.”
Below, the band takes Billboard through their decision to make Smoke & Fiction their final album/tour, what their creative process is like these days (Cervenka periodically jots down words in a notebook during our conversation) and what they think about the changing musical landscape of L.A.
2020’s Alphabetland was the first X album in decades, but you couldn’t tour behind it because of the pandemic. Is that part of what made you want to do another one?
Cervenka: For me, it was. Plus, we could — we just had the option, so we did it.
Doe: I have a little different story. I remember maybe November of 2022, I heard from somebody, maybe our manager, “You know, we’re making a record.” And I said, “Huh. I figured I would be in on that.” My head was twisting back and forth like a like a cockatoo or something. Anyway, I said, “Cool, let’s do it,” and Exene and I got to work. The real luxury is that we played four or five of the songs all year in 2023, so going into the studio in January this year was quick. We got it done.
So some of these songs you road-tested, but for the other ones, how long did it take you to write them?
Cervenka: Well, there isn’t like a starting and an ending point. Some of the lyrics of the songs I wrote a really long time ago, like 15 years ago or longer, and some of them I wrote in the studio. You just constantly write and constantly come up with musical ideas and keep touring and coming up with arrangement ideas on the fly. Then you practice.
Doe: As Exene said, the first single and video, “Big Black X,” that was written in the studio, which is uncharacteristic for us. It was uncharacteristic to write it in the studio, because we don’t like to take a stack of money and set it on fire. Some people love that, but I don’t. Some of the situations that prompted the stories [on the album] are from 30-40 years ago.
I did want to ask about “Big Black X,” because there are some interesting lyrics in there – you mention hanging out at Errol Flynn’s rundown mansion back in the day. Was there a particular memory or experience that made you want to include that in a song?
Cervenka: Well, it’s a place in the Hollywood Hills that people used to go and hang out and drink and party and stuff. It was fenced off [by a] chain link fence, you had to climb up this hillside to get to it. It was just a place to sit and drink. There wasn’t anything about it. It was ruins, you know? It was almost like a small town thing. Like, “let’s go to the haunted house.” You make up these myths about places when you’re young. It was just something to do. Maybe there wasn’t a show that night, or maybe it was after a show. We just had to find each other — because nobody had phones or anything — so you just had to find out where people were and just go and see who was there.
Doe: The song started as a as a prose piece that Exene wrote a couple of pages of, and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves by having a spoken word piece at the end of the record, like we did on Alphabetland with “All the Time in the World.” I just really loved it and thought it would make a great song. And at that point it seemed clear that this could be our last record, just because it was reflective, a lot of the lyrics. So we started putting it into a lyrical form, and [at first] we had different music that was kind of epic stadium [rock]. And I hate – well, I don’t hate it — I don’t do stadium rock very well. The lyrics were sort of strident, like, “We knew the future and also the gutter.” It’s like, we didn’t know the future. We knew the gutter. So we switched that around. It turned out that we had an inkling; the future caught up to what we might have envisioned, as far as punk rock coming to the masses, or punk rock being still being an underground, but there’s a lot of pretty popular bands now that are definitely influenced by punk rock.
Do you think there’s still an L.A. punk scene? Or do you think it’s the city has just changed too much to foster a creative music culture?
Cervenka: Yeah, the L.A. punk scene is the next neighborhood over from the hippie scene and the Beatnik scene and the jazz scene. They don’t exist. None of that exists. It exists for a little while. Then it goes away. In Venice [Calif.], there was a really incredible writing scene. The legacy of that is still there, but those people that were there writing in the ‘50s and early ‘60s and stuff, they’re gone. What is there is that whenever people have ideas and create things, it lives forever, and people find that. They find the essence of it and they say, “Let’s create our own thing.” I would hate it if people were just haunting the same places over and over. I would love it if L.A. was still the way it was, because it was really amazing, but I think people have to create their own version of whatever it was we created and be unique and original and come up with their own idea. Because I wouldn’t want to be young and then going, “Let’s recreate the punk scene from the ’70.”
Doe: I’m sure there’s a bunch of punk rock bands that live and play in L.A.
Cervenka: Oh, for sure, but that’s not the same thing.
Doe: It’s just a different version. L.A.’s got enough people that it’s always going to have a number of really vital rock n’ roll-based music scenes.
Certainly cities like L.A. and New York have gotten much more expensive.
Cervenka: The cities are not what they used to be. Let’s just put it that way.
Has technology changed how you write songs or make records?
Cervenka: That’s how I make records, right here [holds up her notebook and several pens]. I do not use any technology to make a record, except I might sing a song in the phone to John. We do have to email each other.
Doe: I send voice memos to the band of bass and me singing. They listen to it probably once or twice, and then we get to the rehearsal studio and figure it out. I don’t know how much good that does. It changes a lot. But bass is a terrific tool for writing songs because it leaves a lot of space for people.
When you’re working on these songs, do you hem and haw over them, second guessing yourself?
Doe: Yeah, your brain is not your friend, especially in recording. You just have to be intuitive and feel it from your heart and your chest and know somehow what’s right. But that’s hard.
How do you decide who sings what vocal parts?
Doe: I think it’s determined by the lyrics, whoever wrote the majority of the lyrics, and then you just trial-and-error work it out.
Cervenka: Yeah, I think that the songs I sing are the ones that wrote the majority of the lyrics, and the ones that John sings are the ones he wrote the lyrics. But that’s not always the case.
Doe: I would say Exene wrote most of the lyrics for “Sweet Til the Bitter End,” “Smoke and Fiction” and “Winding Up the Time,” but it was clear that there was room for call and answer, so we did that.
Cervenka: I think it also depends on what the key the song is in. There’s certain songs that I’m not going to sing because it’s a lower note.
John: Fun fact: “Flip Side” was written in a different key, but I wanted Exene to be the lead, and I would sing harmony. I’d sing around her, so we moved the key up. And same thing with “The Struggle Is Surreal.”
I know X hasn’t been active all these years, but your debut came out 44 years ago and you started playing a few years before that. Does it feel like that long to you – almost a half century?
Cervenka: I don’t know what that feels like. I think that I just try to stay in the moment. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about time. I guess it does. I guess it doesn’t. I don’t know.
Doe: Since it’s the only thing that I’ve done for almost 50 years, I would say it feels exactly like that. But there’s all this other life that goes around around that. We played a show outside in Chicago, and it was a total sweat fest. It was hot and humid, and toward the end of the show, I said, “I don’t know if I feel like I’m 25 or 85” because I kind of felt like both, just jumping around and playing this punk rock show. But I mean, even when I was 25, if you play hard and you really give it your all — which we do — you’re exhausted.
One thing we hear a lot from artists is how difficult the touring market is these days. As you do this tour, have you found that to be the case?
Cervenka: No, that’s not true for us as much. But yes, the price of gas and the price of hotels and the price of food and the amount of people able to go to shows has changed markedly in the last couple years. So it is a little harder. The festivals do compete a lot with the club stuff, but this is our last club tour where we’re going from city to city, club to club, van ride to van ride. But people are turning out for the shows and we don’t have that problem right now. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know how people can afford to go out at all, you know? But somehow, they do.
Doe: We’re incredibly fortunate because we have this history. We have a very loyal fan base. It’s a sweet spot for us: people either say, “You changed my life” or “you saved my life” or “I don’t know who you are.” So the people that know us and have seen us, they know that we put on a good show, and they’re very dedicated.
I saw you back in the late ‘00s and it absolutely knocked me out. I still think about it. Very excited to check out your New York show.
Doe: We’re playing the fancy place: [Manhattan’s] Town Hall. Which is funny, because I used to get pretty freaked out about playing sit-down venues. And now, since we’ve done it enough, it’s not so bad. I mean, I like to sit down. I don’t necessarily like standing for an entire show.
It is a lot. But it can be awkward. I saw a show at Radio City – which is a fancy, sit-down venue – that Jack White played, and he kind of yelled at the audience for not standing. But it can be hard to stand when the seats are so close together.
Doe: That’s just f–king stupid. [laughs] You don’t berate the audience. If you’re playing a quiet song, you don’t yell at the audience to shut up — either they’re interested enough to listen to what you’re doing, or they’re motivated enough to stand up and do it. Oh well. We all make mistakes.
It’s true, we all make mistakes. And his new record is amazing. So this is billed as your final album and tour. Of course, we’ve heard that from a lot of bands who then return to do more tours. Is there a chance of that?
Cervenka: Well, define tour. Are we going to travel around America, endlessly, getting in and out of a van, in and out of the motel, back and forth to a club at this age? Up and down the stairs to the dressing room and lug our equipment and our suitcases around? No, no, we’re not going to keep doing that. We’re going to do it to the end of the year, and then we’ll reassess. We have festival dreams for next year and Little Stevie’s garage rock cruise in May. I would be happy if we could do a couple of festivals and that, but we’ll see what happens.
Doe: And we might just do a residency. We’ll find like a Bowery Ballroom and we’ll have 20 dates instead of 80.
Cervenka: Maybe. We don’t know.
So it’s not the end of the band, but you’re done with the schlepping around and staying in sh-tty hotels.
Cervenka: Hope so.
What is your day-to-day like? When you’re not music-making, what are you doing with your time?
Cervenka: Well, I have a very old dog that I adopted from a friend who could no longer care for her, and she’s blind, and she needs a lot of care. So I take care of her. I do housework, yard work, laundry, cooking, you know, just all the things normal people do all day. Just the crap of life. I don’t have a very exciting life. I do make art, and I do have friends, but I don’t really go out much. And I like having a quiet life. I live alone. I like that. And I’m pretty reflective. I have some little creative projects. But basically, since I don’t have to do anything when I have time off, I try not to, because I’m so busy when we’re working. I’m not one of those people that goes crazy unless they have a project in front of me. I’m not on the phone all the time trying to book the next thing that I want to do. I just hang out at home.
Doe: I try to be creative. I agree that it is project-driven, but I do have a monthly poetry workshop that I get on a Zoom call with six or seven people that I know. And pretty much every day, I go visit my horse and ride and take care of her. My wife and I go out on occasion. We saw a great movie about the making of Fitzcarraldo.
Was that Burden of Dreams? I love that one.
Doe: Yes, Werner Herzog never disappoints when he starts talking about [adopts German accent] “In nature, I just see chaos and murder.” He’s so awesome. And Les Blank, his abilities as a documentarian are unmatched.
I’ll go to a record store. I try to stay current with some of the some new records. I like the new Iron & Wine record. It’s really good. There’s a couple songs that he obviously listened to Nick Drake a lot, but that’s cool, because he’s so talented. Sunny War’s new record I like a lot. And Skating Polly is a band that Exene brought to our attention. Actually, I just watched a couple videos of a band from Baltimore called Angel Du$t.They’re pretty f–king insane. Very Henry Rollins, Black Flag influenced. There was this one song where he said, “All right, all the women have to come up and sing a verse.” And all these young girls were just getting up and diving off stage. In this three-minute, two-minute song, there were probably 10 different people. It was great.
Maybe you should do that on your tour.
Doe: No.
Cervenka: I don’t like to divide people by their imaginary genders.
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