The Last American Band

Honest to goodness
The bars weren’t open this morning
They must have been voting
For a new president or something

X is calling it quits. They’re my favorite band ever, so it’s hard to say that and harder still to wrap my head around it enough to know I’m telling the truth. They gave me a purpose as a teenager and made me feel like I had a home as an adult. One of the rare bands that can make you feel like there’s a point to this whole racket. 

If you’re a fan, they’re one of those bands that’s more than “important,” but important to you, in that intimate coming-of-age way that means you can’t fall out of love with them. Everybody has one and it doesn’t strictly matter who it is. So objectivity is out the window here; I can’t even try to sound smart. I’ve seen them dozens of times. They’ve always been there, half the time literally, during times of confusion, heartbreak, loss, excitement. A part of growing up and finding an identity, or even learning you can have one of those.

It got to the point with me where they felt like relatives. I made friends with them. I made friends with their fans. I never felt like I could talk to anybody but at their shows I could talk to everybody. They were all family. I was usually on the guest list. Sometimes I’d stay out smoking cigarettes with Exene until 4 in the morning talking about Loretta Lynn or Richard Nixon or Harry Dean Stanton and everything else people talk about while smoking cigarettes until 4 in the morning. One time in San Diego when I was especially broke, D.J. Bonebrake gave me their catering and I ate it for a week (I bet it was from Costco). They’re the master key that unlocks my whole deal.

(Here I’ll note that I’m not gonna make any cracks about Elon Musk and his horrible website. They’ve had their name 45 years longer than he has. My only position on the subject is that he should give them a billion dollars as one of his very funny gags.)

Through them I got to meet a lot of the musicians I admire. Los Lobos, The Blasters, Alejandro Escovedo, Neko Case, Lemmy, even Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. It boggles the mind how many of my memories are tied up with them. I got to go backstage at the Greek Theatre and steal a setlist from Flaco Jimenez (he went home early). I got to meet Winona Ryder. I got VIP bullshit from places that I only knew as myths, like the Whisky, the Roxy, the Troubadour.

I’m not bragging with all that, I’m just thankful that they made me feel like I belonged somewhere. I was a homeschooled kid from the even-worse part of Bakersfield and never had friends, not ever. I learned their music on headphones in the middle of the night. When I moved to Los Angeles for school, I barely even knew how to drive, especially not over the Grapevine, that big stupid metaphor separating Bakersfield from the people who had a future, and almost right away they made me feel like the Troubadour was a place I could go and drink underage and be welcome. Are you fucking kidding me? The only place I ever went before was Target and it was because I worked there.

First time I saw them, somewhere in Hollywood, they seemed like the biggest rock stars who ever existed. There they were, John and Exene, locking in on those harmonies that felt like blood-soaked incantations and also specifically the opposite of whatever Fleetwood Mac was. D.J. murdering the drums. Billy playing his Gretsch with that silver jacket and his legs spread impossibly wide, unbreakably smiling and bugging his eyes out at random women, acting like Eddie Cochran if he was from Mars. The visceral, bone-deep reaction, whatever that thing is you feel in your gut, they created was unbelievable. The audience was moving as one life form. People were losing their minds to this band I listened to in the dark in another town. Something about this, something in here, is what I do now.

This is a piece I wanted to write for a real magazine, but nobody was interested, which I realize now is because they’re not famous, they’re just famous to me and the rest of the community who felt their magic happen. Even after I decided to just write about them for myself I thought about interviewing them. But I realized that would violate whatever the pact was I had with them.

The civil wars
And the uncivilized wars
Conflagrations leap out of every poor furnace
The food cooks poorly
And everyone goes hungry
From then on, it’s dog eat dog
Dog eat body and body eat dog
I can’t go down there
I can’t understand it
I’m a no-good coward
An American too
(A North American, that is)
And I must not think bad thoughts

In 2024, X released their final album, Smoke & Fiction. It got solid reviews but it didn’t set the world on fire. Part of me still wants to be mad about that. Imagine The Clash releasing a new album in 2024. Imagine the Ramones doing it. The Sex Pistols. Imagine them even retaining their classic lineups. It’s unthinkable. Even if it could happen it could never happen. But X did it because they’re unkillable.

And anyway 47 years is a long time and the world is different. I don’t really feel like I understand music anymore, I’m stuck back in the 20th century somewhere with dumbassed guitars going clang clang clang. Call me a music historian if it pays anything. They made an album, they’re touring it, they’re properly saying goodbye. Sonically, it's still Chuck Berry telling us we're all gonna die for half an hour. Still sounds like some kind of freedom. That’s all I’m after, I got mine.

It’s completely appropriate that they’re winding things down on this album. They’re from the class of '77. They’ve been together longer than most marriages, including John and Exene’s. 47 years is a staggering amount of time to endure as a band. It doesn’t happen. They’re objectively lucky just to be alive, because that usually doesn’t happen either.

If you don’t know X, they’re a rock and roll band from the Los Angeles punk scene. They were the center of that scene because of their Johnny and June go to hell stage presence and because they could all play their instruments. Both those things were extraordinarily uncommon. By the way, now that I think about it, the only thing I remember about the first time I heard them was that they had a girl singer. I truthfully didn’t know punks could have those. And they had serious, literary lyrics. Some proprietary recipe involving Raymond Chandler, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, John Fante, Bukowski but in a good way, people like that. 

It’s probably the lyrics that did me in. They were thoughtful and timeless, never an afterthought. And the fact that there was so much classic, gutbucket country in the blood of the writing. I only ever talked about Merle Haggard with my grandparents and here was a band that could cover his songs without smirking. And the fact that there was a sense of doom and dissolution to the lyrics, an earnest desperation. But a personal one, not a grandiose political one. The kind of poetry that kicks your teeth in, leaves you bleeding on the curb.

I should try and sell the band to those who aren’t from California. X’s songs are audibly from Los Angeles mostly because they sound cool while you’re driving and smoking, but they sound good anywhere, and most of the band isn’t native anyway. These are ultimately American songs. They were Americana before that genre had a name. These songs are all stalked by the ghost of Woody Guthrie, who sang about B-E-E-T-S, not B-E-A-T-S. They’re songs about itinerance and decrepit motel rooms and freight trains and driving all night long. They also sound really really good, and huge, which is true of, all told, about seven and a half minutes of any other American punk music. And their first four albums are as consistent as punk rock ever got, more consistent than anybody really thought it could be.

Now that you pulled the school underwater
And drowned the prom
Which man will you save for this Friday
You can put him in a fish pond
And watch him swim around
Then have a catholic dinner
If it isn't men it's death
It's the same old testament
At the cross her station keeping
Stood the mournful mother weeping
Where my man extended hung
Driven with nails to wood
Smoke in one hand looking for a drink
Drink in the other hand
Pointing out midnight

It’s fitting that I write this immediately after the death of Jimmy Carter. He was the permanent president in my neck of the woods (it's a figure of speech, we didn't have woods), just his spirit of well-intentioned despair, and X started under Carter. It was a world of huge lines to get gas and the gas station didn’t even have any gas left, a world where we’re the losers now and we have to make sense of it and make peace with it. The malaise speech subconsciously runs through all this music. But so too does the Carter era belief in the unique power of historical American music. That it’s all born of jazz and hillbillies and outcasts and migrations, something you caught from a radio station in another town somewhere you haven’t seen, and it all winds up intoxicating. They’re the only American punk band that effectively tapped in to that and had a perspective on that. These songs are America. It’s an America that’s on fire and down we go, cradle and all, but that’s America too. (Here I think it’s interesting that I don’t want to compare them to any other punk band, but precisely Merle Haggard.)

X isn’t terribly well-known even though their four classic albums were all worshipped by critics. I have a theory for that, and it’s that the New York and London punk scenes were really good at self-mythologizing, and Los Angeles people never really cared. They hung out in shitty apartments in Hollywood drinking beer and doing speed. They never had anybody to do their mythologizing for them, and it’s maybe the only reason you still see Ramones on T-shirts everywhere but not X. X is not lesser, and not local by any stretch. You could seriously argue they were the best punk band period. But they didn’t have the advertising or the navel-gazing. At no point did any of them pretend they were famous or try to be famous: even in Hollywood, they were somehow as far from showbiz as a band can get. I know that because Exene told me that and maybe because it’s obvious. I firmly believe X could have been from Wichita. They couldn’t because Los Angeles is how the outcasts found each other, but they could’ve been.

I’m not the guy to review their final album or put it into perspective, but I can say it’s roughly as good as their four classic albums and their previous "final" album that they wanted a do-over on because it came out during the pandemic. It doesn’t aspire to be anything more than an album of new X songs, but it succeeds perfectly at that, which makes it my favorite album of the year, if only when I’m driving, because that’s the ritual, that’s how these albums work. It’s a minor miracle that they found a way to do this. When groups have been around this long, you generally hear that not recording new music is the only way to keep touring, or if they do record they descend into weird ego-clashing, lawsuit-heavy mediocrity. They no longer have a way to work together. But X figured it out, the engine still runs, and that blows my mind. It’s the last album by the last American band. Please bring the flag.

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