I was nine years old in 1980. I wore headgear with rubber bands and corduroy Ocean Pacific shorts with tube socks that went up to my knees. My bowl-cut hair was full of frayed knots from being twirled and twisted by nail-bitten fingers. I lived on the west side of Los Angeles amid private-practice doctors and old Hollywood money, and as long as I could watch TV and buy cassettes from my local record store, I had no reason to think that LA wasn’t as good a place as any to grow up in. Even though I had already watched my neighbors’ living room get turned into a babysitter bloodbath when it was used to film When a Stranger Calls, I still wasn’t prepared to know what I would learn a few years later when I first heard X’s 1980 debut album, Los Angeles (which along with their Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun have been newly reissued by Rhino) — that LA was a city of nausea where everything can break in one night.
X unpacked their LA from a house on South Van Ness Avenue, 30 minutes and two tax brackets from where I grew up. One of my best friends lived down the street from them. She saw John Doe and Exene Cervenka, X’s songwriting couple, take daily walks around the block, backwards.
On the one hand, their city was not my city. They sang about the have-nots. I was a have immersed in the poses and the fashion of new wave. Cervenka was a Florida art hick and Doe a Baltimore beat punk, and they’d become, even after people heard what Darby Crash was really singing about before he killed himself, the poet laureates of the LA punk scene. "We’re desperate," they commanded with an attitude I could never pull off in my Guess jeans. "Get used to it." When they sang those words in Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Exene’s mascara was smeared and thick on her round ghost face and Doe was lacquered in sweat, the two of them huddling into the microphone to howl.
Their city was my city — they just saw what I couldn’t. They sang about "Sex and Dying in High Society" (after Doe did a stint working in a bookstore in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where he was, as he puts it in the album’s notes, "surrounded by rich people"). I lived in that society. There was teen sex in Malibu beach houses left vacant by parents on business trips. There were freshman-year cocaine addictions and suicide attempts. There was, eventually, the dying: a post-college-graduation overdose. The body, days stiff in a Brentwood estate, was found by the neighborhood security patrol.
In a recent interview in Index magazine, the novelist and X fan Bret Easton Ellis, who grew up in his own high society out in the valley-girl lowlands of Sherman Oaks, described the band as part of "the darker things" about LA, the decay and destruction beneath all the store-bought and surf-waxed glamor. "There was an ominous feeling during that period [the 80s]," he recalls, "something sinister under the surface of bouncy, sunny LA." X were all over Ellis’s 1983 novel Less Than Zero, which ends as their classic LA noir anthem "Los Angeles" inspires a series of images in the protagonist’s mind before he decides — after all the sex, after all the drugs, after all the emptiness — to leave. "The images I had were of people being driven mad by the city," Ellis wrote. "Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun."
As convincing as Ellis’s identification with "Los Angeles" was, the song was the soundtrack to a whole other world at odds with his own, the world of LA punk, where desperation and death were born not out of how much you had (which was the Less Than Zero curse) but out of how much you didn’t. The song is classic LA hate mail, an indelible portrait of vicious white flight from LA’s racial and sexual circus, the story of a "she" who "had to leave Los Angeles," who had to "getout getout" because of all the things she had come to hate: "every nigger and Jew, every Mexican that gave her lotta shit, every homosexual and the idle rich."
As we learn in Marc Spitz & Brendan Mullen’s new oral history of LA punk, We Got the Neutron Bomb (Three Rivers Press), the song was both a critique of one of Exene’s bigoted Florida friends and an LA punk reaction to a city of difference. Exene tells Spitz and Mullen that for her, punk "was all about creating a new art and culture, replacing something shitty with something great, and having a community." Which is in the end why a non-punk kid like me could gravitate toward X’s nausea, because they were telling the truth when no one else around me would, because they looked at LA, got sick, and knew that it was up to themselves to feel better.
