1997: Gclark is leaving Starkville for Little Rock, and I’m helping him pack his air guitar and drinking all his Budweiser. “Dude, you haven’t heard X? Whatsamatter with you? Here, listen, just take this—it’s a little sampler from their new anthology thing. Listen to ‘Los Angeles.’”
1997: So I do. A lot.
1999: I paint the baroque “X” on the cover of the disc, as likely scrawled by Exene, onto the right arm of my leather jacket.
2000: I’m 25 and obsessed with the Los Bros.’ Love & Rockets and I want to be friends with Hopey and Maggie and X literally suffuses the page, their logo spray-painted on walls, lyrics shouted on the page by kids wearing Germs armbands. You begin to wonder if X is a secret, and if loving them makes you part of a club, and you hope it does.
You realize on occasion that you are thinking this nearly a quarter-century after their first record came out.
2001-2002: Various and repeated listenings of varying levels of intensity and devotion.
2003: X reunites and plays New Orleans. I’m broke and in school and just can’t make the show. I regret this in varying levels of intensity and frustration over the next few years.
2004: For my birthday a friend gives me a framed photograph of Exene at the show. It is a damn fine present.
2006: Over a series of months I make Polaroid collage originally entitled “She Gives Me Her Cheek When I Want Her Lips” which I later retitle “See How We Are” but maybe I shouldn’t have.
2008: X is currently touring to celebrate its thirty-first anniversary, and we take a caravan down from Jackson to see them at the House of Blues.
What are you supposed to say when you see Billy Zoom grinning like that for the first time, dropping down into a spread-legged stance, and Exene staggers up to the microphone and grabs it like a snake, John Doe flipping hair out of his face and DJ pounding away? What are you supposed to say when it’s 2008 and they start singing “The New World” and you can’t stop jumping up and down and screaming “honest to goodness the tears have been falling all over the country’s face it was better before before they voted for what’s-his-name“?
Then they launch into “Soul Kitchen,” and you think that you never liked that song much but then it hits you that they recorded it with Ray Manzarek at the keys and in the booth and that makes them this living, breathing, screeching link to not just everything you love but drags it all the way back to 1967, too, you get a bonus decade and it’s a helluva one, and they’re right there.
You’re in the crowd next to a half-dozen of friends and everybody is in love with the band, everybody is singing along, you see the woman who bought “See How We Are” down front, and her boy’s fist is pumping in the air as he sings along with his eyes shut, and you think I would like to do this every single day. And later you hang back after the show to shake hands with Billy Zoom, but you have to wait a bit because he’s totally kissing all the girls, and later everybody’s burning up the cell phones because somebody heard that X was going to be down at Two-Eyed Jack’s, or wait, maybe they’re going to be heading down to the R Bar, and there’s this silly goosey feeling, fueled by gigantic pina colada daiquiris and cans of Coors Lite, that you’d drive around all Saturday night in New Orleans, listening to the Supremes, hoping you’d run into X, happy with driving up and down Toulouse and Royale for the rest of your life.
It was a fine thing, to have been there, a fine thing to have heard it. Thanks to all the folks who drove and hosted and bought beers and Pez dispensers. I will never forget it.
X – official website.
X on the myspaces.
X – “Los Angeles”.
X – “The World’s a Mess, It’s In My Kiss” (live from the movie The Unheard Music).
X – “4th of July” (demo).
This would have been a great post even if it had just stopped with that first polaroid image—so much to unpack! It’s like a little Raymond Carver story. A good one. The show sounds like it was amazing in all the best ways.
[...] Yes, I told you about this in 2008 [...]