Looking for Billy Zoom

She's helped by the presence of Freeman, whose razor-sharp sideburns give him a kind of rock and roll Mr. Spock flair. "I still can't quite believe he's doing it," Cervenkova says of the bass player, who casually volunteered for the gig. "He has a lot of respect for me and D.J. People in Los Angeles tend to take me for granted. My peers, people who are my age and older, I don't think they take me very seriously, because I'm a woman and because I've been around for so long."

Cervenkova was doing this when it definitely wasn't about to get anyone on the cover of Vanity Fair. It was far more likely to attract the attention of the LAPD, which sometimes had riot police waiting outside certain Hollywood clubs during punk's early days, ready to pounce. It was a running battle that would seem laughable now were it not for the real injuries suffered by fans. "People got arrested, shows got closed down, people got beat up all the time," Cervenkova remembers. "In general, people were just screaming at you. Everywhere you went you felt like people just hated you and thought you were vile, filthy and hideous."

Yet for all the mainstream rage against Mohawks and safety pins, what mattered was the new music. It was more than a simple rebellion against the likes of Genesis and Peter Frampton. Doe and Cervenkova sang of a Los Angeles aswirl in an ocean of decadence and decay, where not even an endless supply of drugs, sex or false Hollywood glamour could disguise an unspoken class system. Balanced against the brutal pounding of Bonebrake and the super loud rockabilly-meets-the-Ramones guitar of Zoom, their voices blended unevenly, raw and desperate, tapping into the deeper American experience like a pair of post-nuclear Weavers.

The music and culture were dangerous then. In 1980, Cervenkova couldn't get on a bus or be served in a restaurant with her tattoos and blue hair; now it's fodder for a thousand boutique shops. "What they've done is defanged, declawed anything that could be a threat -- it's now co-opted immediately by the advertising industry," Cervenkova laments. "This is the first generation to my mind that can't rebel, they just can't -- okay, maybe Tupac Shakur. It's really sickening. No matter what they do, ten seconds later it's on a Nike ad. What more can they do besides shave their heads and put on huge nose rings and eyebrow rings and tattoos? I suggest bombs and overthrowing the government, but you go to prison for that, I suppose. They don't care about that anyway."

The only solution is to keep working. Cervenkova already has nine X albums and two solo CDs behind her, along with a continuing spoken-word career. And now, with Bonebrake and Freeman, there's Auntie Christ. "At some point Matt's going to have to go back to Rancid," Cervenkova says casually. "That's the deal. Then I might not want to do this anymore. I don't want to go through this replacing people. You can't replace people. I didn't want to replace Tony either. They're not like things. They're people. They're artists."

Breakfast at the Ma Maison Sofitel seems just like home to Michael Blake, a genial hardhead in fresh denims who once prowled L.A.'s lowly streets in classic starving artist mode. That was before Kevin Costner made a movie from Blake's script, Dances with Wolves. So this morning he's dining in the hotel restaurant, joking with friends Tony Gilkyson and D.J. Bonebrake about the old times, back when X was king.

Bonebrake can still remember a 1986 gig when he found Blake outside the band's hotel writing out his Wolves story in longhand. Now Blake, Gilkyson and Bonebrake have just collaborated on the writer's first spoken-word album, End of the Century, which puts music behind Blake's dark musings. It's the first project for Gilkyson since he left X. The music was produced by Gilkyson and stretches from the up-tempo roots of "After Seeing John Doe at Raji's" to the edgy guitar rock of "Boy in the Rain."

It's also louder, but not necessarily darker, than the solo album Gilkyson is now recording. Ballads such as "Home in Angelino" are closer to his country work with Rosie Flores or old Flying Burrito Brothers records than to punk -- which indicates that for Gilkyson, X's possible return to its primal sound was not a welcome suggestion.

"I didn't want to redefine my guitar playing to the point that I felt I was compromising who I was as a guitar player," Gilkyson says. "I had given X ten years of my life, and a lot of that time I had to sit and wonder if this was really working -- for me and for them.