X

From the mid-'70s, Hollywood and Los Angeles caught fire with the punk scene. A plural scene, dominated by women and chicanos, where cultural, ethnic and gender differences found room for personal expression and shared experience. In this context the star of X emerged, the band led by the couple Exene Cervenka and John Doe, incredibly compelling and desperate (Exene's sister, Mirielle, flew instead to New York and took part in the no wave scene, alongside her husband Gordon Stevenson, between Dna and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks).

Just as Amos Poe and Ivan Kral in New York chose to open "The Blank Generation" (1976) under the sign of Patti Smith, so Penelope Spheeris chose X to present the punk ferment of the time in her landmark documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization" (1981), with an incendiary version of "Nausea". The band was thus assigned the emblematic role of connector and driving force of a scene that thrived in the venues of the City of Angels (Fleetwood, Club 88, Whisky a Go-Go, Roxy, Hong Kong Café) and that brought together disparate musical projects, from Germs (produced by Joan Jett), Alice Bag Band, Circle Jerks, all the way to Black Flag, who would become, within that same Southern California context, almost antagonists with their uncompromising "DIY hard-core" creed.

"Los Angeles" (1980) itself, the band's debut album and a landmark record in punk history, is the sublimation of the artistic and cultural unrest running through LA from the '60s to the '80s: an album written by the band, made together with Ray Manzarek of the Doors and (self-)produced by Slash Records, the label arm of Slash Magazine's zine, for which Claude Bessy (Catholic Discipline) and Chris D (Flesh Eaters, Divine Horsemen) also wrote.

The riffs dished out by X carry a buried idolatry for the hard, pure rock of the early '60s within an ocean of noir-tinged nihilism. Uncomfortable, incendiary lyrics act as a flywheel for a full-blown cascade of inner melodramas, at times exorcised with the irreverence of those who've decided to burn and self-immolate as if there were no tomorrow on the horizon (chief among them the aforementioned "Nausea"). Well, it's from this clot of moods and disorienting feelings that the title track is born: a concentrate of rockabilly wrung out into a bucket of sulfuric acid, with Billy Zoom's guitar played as if Chuck Berry had suddenly joined the Sex Pistols, giving birth to an embrace as magical as it is surreal.

It's the swan song of '70s hippie utopia still echoing, while the bells of punk ring out relentlessly at their own inconsolable, mad party. A wild, sick party, degenerate to the bone, with Exene as a snarling matriarch at the mic, caught between a social invective to scream at the world and an inner grievance to spit in the face of anyone who crosses her gaze. What X set in motion is a nonstop outrage. A frontal assault mounted between a mantra of Morrisonian memory ("The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss") and yet another rock ride sent to the Moon, perhaps with a "simple" retch ("Sugarlight").

X move along coordinates that would shortly give rise to the hardcore revolution of the venerable American West Coast. A tsunami that eases its unstoppable rush in less urgent moments, though no less skewed for it, like the lopsided, magnetic gait of "The Unheard Music". Likewise, if there's one song that, more than any other, lays bare the magmatic soul of the California band and what would become the foundation of the entire "L.A. punk" movement, it's the driving "Johny Hit And Run Paulene": a genuine boogie for serial rapists, to whom one entrusts, in a purely figurative way of course, one's own demons to hurl at supersonic speed against a paralyzed society ever more steeped in capitalism.

In this sense, the opening "Your Phone's Off The Hook, But You're Not" remains emblematic, written by Doe and Exene, with the ghost - repeatedly cited by Doe himself - of the great '50s rockabilly man Eddie Cochran (whose rebel anthem "Summertime Blues" from 1958 is sometimes considered the first true punk song in history) steering the ship between one retch and the next, while good old Billy Zoom's guitar drags everything along with its usual riff in an ultra-accelerated pseudo-blues vein, and the words leave little to the imagination, lodging everywhere like stray shrapnel, in the unusual attempt to describe the shabbiness of the other side of the States, represented on this occasion by a New York elevated to a symbol of decadence that X themselves considered vaguely "cut-rate":

Someone clean to chew on

A wife that no one likes

I called and they said all of New York

Was a tow-away zone

We paid sixty dollars on 12th Street today

And now all our money’s gone

“Los Angeles” would go on to mark California's culture of the '70s and '80s so deeply that it would echo as a memento mori on the final page of Bret Easton Ellis's novel “Less Than Zero” (1985), where the protagonist, barely more than a teenager but already “over the hill,” abandons the city in despair:

There was a song I'd heard when I was in Los Angeles, a song by a local band. The song was called “Los Angeles,” and the words and images were so raw and bitter that the lyrics would keep coming back to me for days. The images, I only realized later, were personal, and no one I knew shared them with me. The images I had were of people driven mad by the life of the city. Images of parents so hungry and dissatisfied that they devoured their own children. Images of people, kids my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and vicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterward. After I'd gone.

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28/07/2019