Happy 40th Anniversary to X’s third studio album Under The Big Black Sun, originally released in July 1982.
Going out West to California had been like a drumbeat in John Doe’s (then still John Duchac) head, that line from The Doors’ “The End” playing a dark psychedelic loop over and over: “The West is the best / The West is the best / Get here and we’ll do the rest.” He was tired of his native Baltimore, and of the East Coast. By 1975, Doe’s parents had moved to Brooklyn, and so whenever he visited, he would go into Manhattan and catch punk shows by the likes of Talking Heads and the Heartbreakers at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. Doe knew what was brewing; he thought I can do that, and I want to do that. Still, he didn’t want to do it there.
In 1976, Doe and a friend flew to Los Angeles, rented a station wagon, and stayed at a fleabag motel near Vermont Ave. “The minute I stepped out of the terminal into the jet-fueled air by LAX, the light and a sense of well-being came over me like a déjà vu homecoming,” Doe writes in Under The Big Black Sun, a history of the LA punk scene. Six months later, Doe walked into the Venice Poetry Workshop and met a strange beauty with bleach-splattered jeans, dark lipstick, and Egyptian-style hair dyed red. “I found out her real name was Christine and she had changed it to a phonetic version of Xmas,” Doe writes. It was the fateful first meeting of John Doe and Exene (Cervenka), who would soon become the magnetic couple at the front of incendiary punk band X.
A year later in 1977, the year punk exploded, I was born in an American army hospital—to Tim and Linda, people much tamer than John and Exene—in West Berlin. It was the city where David Bowie and Iggy Pop happened to be living, in the Schöneberg section, after escaping from LA that very year to clean up from heroin addictions. Meanwhile, German punk was thriving on both sides of the divided city and would eventually contribute to the fall of the Wall. These events considered, it’s possible my gravitation towards punk was preordained, that, somehow, being born into the world gasping the same air Iggy Pop and Bowie were breathing in a city thrumming with punk energy led me to Blondie, The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, and, of course, X.
In reality, it was probably Cyndi Lauper, a true punk in her own right yet much more palatable to the grade-school set, who led me to punk in the early-to-mid ’80s. My second-grade teacher Mrs. Zacharias, who had teenagers at home, noticed my punk-adjacent fashion sense and started calling me “Cyndi Lauper,” making me beam with pride. However, I was still aware of the hardcore punks, the ones you’d see in any Hauptbahnhof (train station) in any major European city, with their spiked hair and spiked leather jackets and safety pins through their ears, noses, and cheeks. They scared the shit out of me in a way that was thrilling.
When I eventually discovered X’s album Under The Big Black Sun, with its themes of adultery, death, lapsed Catholicism, and a squalid life on the road, I would feel a similar heady mix of thrills.
After John Doe met Exene at the poetry workshop, he put an ad in the Recycler for musicians who might want to form a band. A rockabilly guitarist named Billy Zoom had placed almost exactly the same ad at the same time, and the two found one another. Raised by a musician father, Zoom had been a multi-instrumentalist practically since birth. Soon, the two found Don “DJ” Bonebrake, who had been playing drums since childhood. And so X would become a punk band unlike most in that it was comprised of incredibly practiced, skilled musicians.
The only person without a lick of musical background was Exene, who had since become Doe’s girlfriend. Doe was convinced, however, that she would be able to sing. Zoom and Bonebrake weren’t so sure, and they really didn’t want to wait around for her to develop her voice. But Doe respected Exene’s writing talent deeply—her poetry was perfect for lyrics—and the two had an undeniable flow when they wrote together. Doe was also firm in his belief that Exene was going to be a fantastic singer—“She had a great tone in her voice”—and he turned out to be right.
Under The Big Black Sun is the album where X truly comes together, where you can acutely hear each band member’s unique talents, all of the various musical genres and influences, and how these elements meld into something potent and magical—a slow-simmering witch’s brew —that sets the band apart.
However, the most spellbinding ingredient has always been Exene. On X’s 1980 debut Los Angeles, their most raw-punk record, it was Exene’s distinctive bored-sexy growl that gave the band its punk legitimacy, not to mention her Cleopatra eye makeup, jet-black hair, mad-housewife thrift store attire, and microphone-gripping stage presence. Her voice harmonizes beautifully and hauntingly with Doe’s, but it just as easily stands alone, and its ennui-at-the-edges always imparts the sense that she might not care either way.
It's that push-pull dynamic between the two that creates a gorgeous, electric, sensuous tension on Under The Big Black Sun. By 1982, Doe and Exene had been married for a couple of years, and there’s a comfortable familiarity in the way their voices fuse and split apart and then come back together again. They sound like a married couple. And yet the album speaks of appetites unfilled and impending danger.
The opening song, the raucous, careening “The Hungry Wolf,” is built around complex, Bonebrake-constructed rhythms, and was inspired by an 1890 painting by Polish artist Alfred Kowalski that depicts a wolf eyeing a village in the dead of winter. “He's looking down, and there is this little idyllic cabin house, and there's smoke coming out of the fireplace—it's a winter night. He's just looking at this house,” Exene told Songfacts. “I think John was probably just lying in bed one morning and woke up going, ‘Hungry wolf... I am the hungry wolf,’ because that's how songs get written. Inspiration can come from anywhere at any moment.”
The following song, one of my favorites, “Motel Room in My Bed,” is madcap in its rollercoaster of rhythm and speed, and yet there’s a playful sunniness to it, with Doe and Exene shouting in near-laughing unison. “Put the doorknob on my side / If you don’t mind, I don’t care / Put the doorknob on my side / It’s self-locking, give me your key” goes the chorus, and the repetition of it and a second chorus (about icky rubber sheets) creates a sense of routine, of a seedy motel existence that keeps happening over and over. “It was about being on the road and sharing a room with a roadie or two every night in some shitty motel room somewhere,” Exene said. “And never having a room to yourself. And bickering over that. No privacy.”
The mood shifts noticeably on the next song, dark and murky and danger-tinged. “Riding with Mary” combines lyrics that imply an illicit affair—“Her husband knows they’re together”—and a Catholic allusion to the Virgin Mary, as a figurine on the dashboard bobbing along while the lovers drive stealthily through the night. The song is actually about Exene’s sister Mirielle (a.k.a. Mary Katherine), who died on a trip to Los Angeles while visiting John and Exene. X were about to take the stage at the famous Whisky A Go Go, Mirielle was on her way to the club, and then a drunk driver crashed into her Volkswagen, killing her instantly. “Exene was understandably inconsolable,” Jane Wiedlin, of The Go-Go’s, writes in Under The Big Black Sun. “Nobody knew what to do. Everyone was in shock. John Doe threw a chair through the big plate-glass window of the dressing room, unable to handle his feelings.”
The song’s ironic Catholicism was typical of early punk. “Most of the punk kids I knew had been raised Catholic like me,” Wiedlin writes later on. “There was just something about that religion that brought out the inner rebel in teenagers.” I, too, was raised Catholic and I remember my father tsk-tsking when we walked past those punks in the Hauptbahnhof. “They clearly have low self-esteem,” he would cluck.
I can’t remember exactly how I was introduced to X, but it was probably in high school through my German boyfriend Frankie, who had a vast collection of punk albums and 7-inches—Black Flag, Circle Jerks, The Dead Milkmen, Dead Kennedys. Even better, his best friend Evo was a hardcore punk of the gritty train-station variety. The first time my mom saw Evo in her house—with his orange mohawk, PUNX tattooed across his knuckles, and his mangy dog drinking water from one of her bowls in our backyard—I think she almost lost consciousness. Fortunately, by that point my parents were divorced, and the Catholicism had left with my dad.
On “Come Back To Me,” a waltzing ’50s-style song soaked with sadness, Exene begs “Please, please come back to me / I cry and talk to you through the bathroom wall / Oh please come back to me.” The track captures Exene’s fresh grief over the death of her sister, with whom she was incredibly close. In fact, before John Doe, it was Mirielle who first championed Exene’s writing. “I started writing because my sister was a writer,” Exene says in The Unheard Music, a 1986 documentary about X. “She gave me a blank book to write in, I started writing in it, and then I just always kept up with it.”
The album’s titular song “Under The Big Black Sun” is my favorite song on the record, my favorite X song, and if I could ever write an exceptional song myself, it would probably be that one. It’s upbeat, pure rock ‘n’ roll; Exene’s voice is sublimely sassy and drone-y and drawly, and her harmonies with Doe arrive at exactly the right time. The lyrics mention “plaid perfume on my breath,” “a honeymoon scream,” and drowning the prom. It’s perfect.
As for the remainder of the album, “Blue Spark” is herky-jerky stop-start full of dramatic staccato and drawn-out vocals, while “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes” has a campy Hawaiian feel and expresses regret over a breakup—“Dancing with somebody new / When it’s you my heart is calling to.” “Real Child of Hell,” dangerous and fast-driving, is about a staticky evil that lurks at the corners of life. In contrast, “How I Learned My Lesson” is a head-bopping rockabilly romp, while the closing song “The Have Nots” is a punk homage to Irish working-man drinking songs.
On “Because I Do,” a song at the album’s center, Doe and Exene sing beautifully in unison, “What kind of fool am I / I am the married kind / The kind that said I do / Forever searching for someone new.” That same year, Exene would publish, with Lydia Lunch, the first of a series of poetry books called Adulterers Anonymous. Whether all of this was ironic or not, Doe and Exene would split by 1985. They remained bandmates, however, churning out an album that same year titled Ain’t Love Grand!, and then subsequent albums after that. In fact, they still perform together to this day. “It wasn’t easy at first… it was pretty hard,” Doe said. “But it certainly was friendship based on respect first, and then it became more of a romantic relationship.”
Enjoyed this article? Read more about X here:
Los Angeles (1980) | More Fun in the New World (1983)
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