X at City Winery

Exene Cervenka & John Doe

Billy Zoom saw the Ramones perform in a Los Angeles suburb in 1977 and the former rockabilly guitarist realized he wanted to play similar music. Bassist John Doe was already a fan of the new punk music scene. Both musicians submitted want ads to the same publication using nearly the exact same wording. They responded to each other’s classifieds and performed a few shows with various drummers. Doe met Exene Cervenka, a newly-relocated Floridian, at a poetry reading in Venice Beach and liked her poems so much that he offered to perform them in his band. Cervenka told him that if anyone was going to perform her poems, it would be her, and she joined the band. Doe saw D.J. Bonebrake play in a band called the Eyes and recruited him. X was formed before the end of 1977. The band recorded seven studio albums, the most recent of which is 1993's Hey Zeus! X went on hiatus during the mid to late 1990s and reunited in the early 2000s.

X returned to New York this week for four nights at City Winery, each night dedicated to performing the entirety of one of the band's first four albums. Tonight was the second night, and X performed its second album, Wild Gift, named 1981's Record of the Year by Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Village Voice. Wild Gift featured short and speedy songs and preceded the band's wider exploration of punk-country-folk, and so tonight's performance was mostly pure primal punk, X style. Cervenka and Doe's individual vocals were rather ordinary, but together their slightly off-kilter signature harmonies still splendidly recalled a raw version of Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin and Grace Slick. Zoom played stingingly clear and crisp rockabilly guitar leads and Bonebrake hit the drum beat hard. After performing nitro-powered versions of the 13 songs from Wild Gift, X mixed songs from its other three early albums: three songs from 1980's Los Angeles; six from 1982's Under the Big Black Sun; and five from 1983's More Fun in the Real World. In the end, the evening was a live retrospective of what made X a great band, with 28 archival X songs played loud and fast. The public has not heard a new songs from X in more than 20 years, however; hopefully the success of this series will inspire the band to write and record new songs.

Visit X at www.xtheband.com.