No Nostalgia Necessary: X Brings It In On Smoke & Fiction

It can be hard to stay still long enough to pick up on the signs and accept when the end is near in a range of situations; businesses, relationships, physical structures and oftentimes, bands. For X, formed 47 years ago in Los Angeles, all four original members knew it was time to step back.

This summer, the band announced their ninth and final studio album Smoke & Fiction in combination with their current The End Is Near Tour which will make a stop in Houston on Monday, October 21 at White Oak Music Hall with support from Squirrel Nut Zippers frontman Jimbo Mathus.

“I think it’s been building for the last couple of years,” says vocalist, bassist and founder John Doe from his home in Austin in between legs of the tour. Doe along with vocalist and lyricists Exene Cervenka, guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake have collectively created one of the most influential and often underrated sounds in music.

“Touring is difficult under the best circumstances. We still tour with a couple of vans, a couple of sprinters and getting in and out of hotels every day, it’s not easy. I don’t want to be part of something where the wheels are falling off and you can’t actually do it well.”

Doe and his bandmates didn’t exactly go into the studio thinking this concretely about stepping back but throughout the project, it became clearer and clearer that the band’s days of non stop touring with little rest, playing small clubs and working themselves to the bone are behind them.

“It’s a last tour so to speak,” clarifies Doe who has seen an uptick in audience sizes since the band announced their final run in this format of touring. “It’s the last tour that we’re going to be playing clubs and 75 shows a year and it just means we’ll be doing 20 instead of 75. We may have to eat our words, I don’t know but this is our plan.”

Smoke & Fiction fits perfectly into the band’s current spot in their timeline of life as it is classic X; fast, short and sweet filled with an intense jolt of poetry and punk rock with a dash of humor.

“Everybody is getting less young so it felt like you had to reconcile what you’ve done in the past with what you’re doing now and what you’re doing in the future so I think it’s a little like this whole record, it’s past present, future all in one,” says Doe.  

“We don’t reinvent ourselves but we keep challenging different ways of being ourselves,” says Doe. “There’s always something new that you can experience and you can express in the lyrics.”

The poetic nature of X lyrics has long made their songs stand apart, a real strength for the bands songwriting and an aspect of them which Doe recognizes was probably something that led the Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek to produce their first four albums.

“Some people didn’t think it was punk rock but we didn’t care,” he says of working with Manzarek. “Exene and I at least, we are huge Doors fans and it added a certain legitimacy to who we were and Ray was a terrific mentor and great producer. He knew a good performance when he heard it and he also knew how to make a record on ten thousand dollars.”

For Smoke & Fiction, X went with acclaimed producer Rob Schnapf who Doe likens to Manzarek in the sense of both being intuitive and not pushing the band to use sounds that would ultimately date them or they would grow to hate but instead seeing the big picture of what is best for the songs and the band.

“I think the music ended up being a little bit like Bo Diddley meets the Johnny Burnette Rock and Roll Trio. It has a nod towards “Train Kept A-rollin” even though we didn’t set up to do that. Everything we do, it just happens. There’s nothing we’ve done that is contrived or premeditated.”

Fitting to this sentiment and the nature of the band, some songs on Smoke & Fiction are so clearly reflective of the journey winding down, though they didn’t realize this would be their last album until about halfway through making it.

“In the writing of it we realized that there was a lot of retrospection, not nostalgia but reflection,” says Doe describing how the band wrote the autobiographical track “Big Black X” in the studio, an uncharacteristic move for them.

“Big Black X” really paints the picture of their career and early days in the LA punk scene. The song tells the complete story for those who weren’t there to live it, breathe it and smell it first hand. One spin of this track takes the listener through long highways in crowded vans, venue after venue followed by house parties that seemed to go on forever.

“I was convinced that it was going to be a good song,” says Doe, summing it up as a response to a hypothetical youngster who wants to know what it was like for X in 1978 and only has three minutes for an answer.

“Although maybe the music would have been a little faster but it has a lot of the images of what that experience was like. We didn’t know but that was what happened.”

How could they have known that their band would be the quintessential soundtrack for so much of the youth seeking out a desire for something different at that time.

X has always been one of those bands that despite leaving a huge mark on music, people either know them or they don’t as they never quite translated to mainstream success or radio charts. Ironically, Smoke & Fiction debuted in the top ten of the Billboard charts, a fitting send off for the band.

“As far as our experience, it was a lot of fun because we didn’t know any better but it was incredibly challenging because we were pushed to the back. We were disregarded as a musical force,” says Doe, comparing their landing in the musical hierarchy of the time with artists like Nick Lowe, The Pretenders, DEVO or Blondie who were embraced by the land of radio play.

“Maybe they were just better, had better songs and were better looking or had a better image? Maybe that’s why they succeeded but I think a lot of it had to do with the type of music that they played was just a little more accessible.”

Maybe one part of what made X’s sound at the time more difficult for the major labels to pin down or wide audiences to digest was their rockabilly roots that made their particular brand of punk rock stick out.

“I always give Billy credit for bringing rockabilly style guitar into punk rock because he did,” says Doe proudly of their guitarist who absorbed rockabilly first hand from the likes of Big Joe Turner, Etta James and Gene Vincent.

“There wasn’t anybody else doing that,” says Doe naming The Blasters and Los Lobos as bands that helped to further push the cow punk sound which eventually moved the needle for alternative country to blossom.

“Once people started listening to Sun Records, which Phil and Dave Alvin would give people cassette tapes with all these lesser known rockabilly people, that was a real eye opener to so many people.”

Doe isn’t bitter about a thing and is happy and proud that his band isn’t known for just a song or two, never had a dumb, trendy haircut and can actually go to the grocery store without being approached or harassed on a regular basis.

“I say it’s a good place to be,” says Doe of being able to slip under the radar while being an inspiration to so many. “But getting back to this nostalgia thing, there’s no reason for it because there were so many images, events, friendships, collaborations and inspiration because it was very open. You don’t have to exaggerate that, it is what it is but like I said, the difficulties were huge.”

X will perform with support from Jimbo Mathus on Monday, October 21 at White Oak Music Hall, 2915 N. Main, 7 p.m, $35.

This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.