Now-and-then music (5)

Then Music
Wild Gift
By X
released 1981
Slash Records

While The Ramones can lay claim to being the first punk rock band and The Sex Pistols were perhaps the most notorious, Los Angeles-based X was the most musically accomplished, having an influence on American popular music far out of proportion to its modest record sales and giving inspiration to bands as widely divergent as The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Uncle Tupelo. The key to the quintessential X sound was the band’s ability to meld punk music with the musical antecedents punk purported to revive, such as Buddy Holly-era rock n’ roll and folk. For many punk bands, such a revival was merely a pretense, for they lacked the musical skill or interest to do much more than scratch the surface of older popular music. Led by the songwriting tandem of Exene Cervenka and John Doe—and flavored with the rockabilly guitar licks of Billy Zoom—X had the chops and intellect to take punk rock beyond the ken of other bands, not only lyrically, but also in the diversity of musical styles they could draw on.

For the listener familiar only with X’s later collections, it is tempting to consider X not a punk-rock band at all, but a listen to Wild Gift (as well as the band’s debut, Los Angeles) should dispel such a notion. The album’s stock in trade is pure punk: breathless, staccato singing, hectic percussion tinged with flailing cowbells, and of course, raucous, almost artless guitar riffs, but bubbling beneath the surface of many of the songs are hints of the band’s manifold talents. Most notable of these is the voice of John Doe, highlighted on songs like “White Girl” and “In This House That I Call Home.” Doe’s voice demonstrates the warm, throaty, ragged quality that he would later exploit in his drift toward country music, a voice like a hard, dark liquor, easily the most recognizable in the world of punk rock.

The songs themselves also offer an interesting counterpoint to the usual fare served up in other quarters. Far from “Anarchy in the UK,” the lyrics of Doe/Cervenka songs are more ambitious and yet less pretentious than a great many punk songs. The lyrics of Wild Gift can read like poorly written surrealism at times, but rarely engage in the kind of preachiness and gratuitous shock typified by The Sex Pistols and The Ramones. For example, in addressing sexual kinkiness, a staple of punk rock music, X’s “Adult Books” attempts to capture the point at which mere kinkiness becomes something darker, verging on violence. Musically, “Adult Books” evokes bobbysocks and sock hops, providing a creepy context for the song, which ends with the haunting, understated lyric “But he goes for that special girl who says no.” One could easily imagine how The Ramones’ version would go, all unmitigated first-person freakiness. Perhaps X’s ability to write better songs was a product of its boy-girl, tag-team songwriting (Doe and Cervenka would ultimately wed…and then divorce). But at any rate, there is a maturity even in their early efforts that stands in opposition to the music itself, and it is no small surprise that Doe and Cervenka would eventually leave punk rock behind altogether in order to find a proper musical expression for their ambitious lyrics.

By 1981, Sid Vicious had been dead for two years and punk rock as a pop music trend was following him to the grave. Unadorned, punk music was too spare and artless to reach a wide audience or to support lyrics of mature sophistication, but as X demonstrated with Wild Gift, when punk was added to a variety of other musical genres, the result could succeed beyond punk’s own small audience of youthful affected losers, and gratefully, this is the direction X pursued in its later recordings.