Looking for Billy Zoom

"When we would go on tour I would encounter nostalgia for the old band. I figured after ten years, that's a pretty good shot. If the band was going to reroute and become a hard core punk-rock band again, I can go along with that to a certain degree, but there's other stuff that I want to do."

For Gilkyson, filling the space left by the dynamic, bizarre figure of Billy Zoom wasn't easy. "The Billy thing was something none of us could ever really deal with," Cervenkova says now. "If we had known the bullshit we would have to go through to try to stay together and play music, we never would have done it after Billy quit. It was so hard. It was really hard on [Gilkyson]. People didn't ever really give him the credit he deserved."

See How We Are was dominated by the brief partnership of John Doe and Dave Alvin, but Gilkyson fans could have found a reason to believe in "He's Got a She," a track from Cervenkova's first solo album dominated by some frantic Gilkyson playing. His true showcase didn't come until 1993's hey Zeus!, a decent enough record that was largely ignored.

"X was a band that gave everything it had," says Blake, who hopes to unite with Bonebrake and Gilkyson for a tour this year. "X was a band that really hung in there against all kinds of reverses, all kinds of rejection, despite the success that they had. They hung together a very long time. It was truly great what they did, but I think it's time for it to be over."

So what did become of the great Billy Zoom? What happened to the man in the silver motorcycle jacket, the yellow pompadour of absolute perfection, to the maker of those massive, shimmering riffs? With X he'd been a rocker of icy, dangerous cool, remaking himself as a parody of every smarmy rock god he'd ever encountered. Zoom's guitar parts were never played with a showy expression of agony or ecstasy but with his legs planted far apart on-stage, a shiny Stepford grin across his face.

Yet when it was clear that 1985's Ain't Love Grand wasn't going to be the commercial breakthrough the band had hoped for, he left X, fed up with the endless nights on the road and a rock and roll rat race he'd first entered as a teenage surf guitarist in 1963. Two years later, Zoom headlined the outdoor Sunset Junction festival, looking a bit heavier but still super cool with his silver guitars. It was just a money gig to pay the rent, with a repertoire limited to oldies salvaged from his pre-X Billy Zoom Band. And yet as he drifted into Santo and Johnny's "Sleepwalking," he was still able to craft hypnotic passages that roared dreamily from the custom Zoom amplifier he'd built at home. When police ordered him to turn the amplifier down, Zoom replied, "It doesn't play any quieter." By 1988, he was gone.

Zoom now lives on a quiet street in Orange County, just a block from the Crystal Cathedral, that Disney World of Christian worship. He still plays guitar, but only in church on Sundays. The rest of his week is spent repairing amplifiers in his workshop or in a local studio producing the occasional local band. Right now, an amp sent in from No Doubt rests half-dissected on his workbench, under walls decorated with signed publicity stills: Social Distortion, Bruce Willis ("Peace!"), Brian Setzer, Susanna Hoffs ("Nice amp work, Billy!") and former Go-Go Jane Wiedlin ("How the Hell are you friend?!").

The guitarist doesn't miss the club scene he left behind in the '80s; he has contemplated recording a gospel album. And Zoom rarely does interviews now. What for? He enjoys his anonymity and happily notes that the www.rockabilly.com web page once displayed a photograph of Zoom with the words, "Do you know me?" and described him as "the subject of one of the most mysterious disappearances from rockabilly music."

As for X, he says, "I don't really think about it much. It wasn't my first band, it wasn't my best band. It's the one most people remember."

He's talking now to explain the release of an album of demos recorded by the Alligators in 1972, six years before he joined X. The Alligators were part of his old life, when young Zoom had turned to the wonderfully dated whiz-bang rave-up of old-time rockabilly. Zoom had even apprenticed with one of the masters, Gene Vincent, as the only member of Vincent's band who could stomach the likes of "Be-Bop-a-Lula." Not that he spends much time listening to rockabilly now. "That's what I did in the '70s because I hated '70s music," he says. Zoom now keeps his car radio tuned to jazz or R&B oldies stations, hoping to catch something by his guitar hero, Steve Cropper.