November 2025
“Our goals were just to find another gig; to go to more shows…”
Exene Cervenka, vocalist for the pioneering Hollywood, California punk band X is recalling the band’s collective state of mind around the time of their formation in 1977.
“I mean, if you think that every week you could go to see Blondie or Tom Petty or Devo or The Weirdos or the Screamers or The Damned or Nina Hagen… It was really moving too fast, too much was happening to think past today or tomorrow or this week!”
X, currently slated to perform in Reno on November 7th sharing a bill with Los Lobos, are in their 49th year as a band, which is no small feat considering that not only is the band still made up of its four original members, but have found themselves surviving past many of those other young bands that Cervenka cited as making up the art and punk scenes in those early years.
“We had no models,” Exene continues describing those early years. While these days bands can use the internet to find the audience in whatever sub genre fits their style and coordinate tours on a well mapped out route criss crossing the country, X got together at a time when small bands stuck together, and regardless of their influences or sound, they banded together under the label of ‘punk.’
“I think John [Doe, bassist for X] had a lot of goals and was the driving force as far as always believing we should play more shows and we should get paid,” Exene says of when the band got together. “I’d never sang before. I was a poet. One of the first times I met John, I had this song I wrote, and I sang it for him. He said he had met Billy [Zoom, X’s guitar player] and he wanted to do that song in his band that he was starting with Billy. I said absolutely not. So John said ‘Good, so you could do it’ and I said ‘Okay, I will.'”
Little did they know at the time that this would be the beginning of a musical project that would still be continuing after nearly five decades.
Along with having to create their own path during the years as punk was in its infancy, Cervenka also talks about the music and the group’s visual image spreading at a far slower pace than what might be so today.
“You could go a whole night and go see three bands in two different clubs and not one picture was being taken. Most of it wasn’t being filmed or documented. There was no internet, no cel phones.”
She talks about one night in particular when X showed up to play a show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and a crowd awaited them.
“They would show up at soundcheck because they were dying to see what we looked like! They had only seen the album, Los Angeles, and maybe one little press picture. They’d never seen our faces. This was before The Decline [The Decline of Western Civilization, a punk documentary of several Los Angeles area bands by director Penelope Spheeris which spread on VHS nth-generation copies and helped bring bands like X, Fear, Black Flag and The Germs to wider attention]. We’d pull up and there would be 50, 60 people standing out front waiting.”
Here Cervenka talks about the disconnect she feels exists in modern music – relishing when finding out about artists was a more social and shared experience. She describes that an artist or band would come up casually or drunkenly in conversation, and she would remember the name and seek out their work in Hollywood clubs or in small art spaces.
“You wanna see a band, you gotta go see em. You wanna hear them, you gotta go see em. You wanna see what they look like, you gotta go see em. I don’t like social media. I’ve never liked it. I wish everyone would turn their backs on it and walk away.”
While the 70’s and 80’s were punk’s formative years, the latter of which saw members of X branching off and experimenting with different musical projects, the 90’s brought sequences of the group reuniting and going on hiatus, which would last until the 2010’s, and the 2020’s seem to be the era when more concerted efforts to put punk’s history and cultural role on display. As one of the earliest, not to mention most popular, punk groups from the Los Angeles scene, X has found themselves mentioned in a number of books (including Under The Big Black Sun co-penned by Cervenka’s X bandmate John Doe), films and museum installations attempting to preserve and communicate the history of the music. However Cervenka will also admit that the official records aren’t to be trusted.
“Nothing’s every going to be accurate. Nothing. Everything is a really tenuous every minute. When you talk to different people about the early punk days, they had different motivations for being in bands, they had different motivations for what they chose to do or not. Even in a small little scene like that.”
One narrative frequently repeated is of how the Hollywood scene was a tight clique of social misfits where a shared artistic vision reigned, and the violence that was exaggerated by the portrayal of punk in mainstream television and film only entered the scene when a more macho element of Orange County hardcore kids made their way into the Los Angeles scene.
“I might be 22 or 23 at the time, and they’re 16 – that’s a huge generation gap back then. They find out about this punk scene and they start going to shows and they see Black Flag, Germs, Suicidal Tendencies and the Flesh Eaters and they just go crazy over it. They hated Hollywood. They thought we were like rich Hollywood people and that we were really corporate and anybody who would sign to a label like Slash Records [the band’s first relatively small Los Angeles based record label] was a corporate sellout. It was confusing to us. They would turn their backs on us, like ‘we hate you’ and they would pay money to go and do this. They’d sit on the stage with their backs to me to show how much they hated us. We were shocked because there was no violence in the [Hollywood] punk scene. And man, they brought violence!”
With hindsight, Cervenka now acknowledges that for better or worse, this was punk evolving .
“I have more appreciation for it now, and I do respect it as a general cultural movement of people who were expressing themselves and showing contempt for what they considered society. But it did kinda lead to a lot of bad things happening. The Germs broke up. I had a talk with Darby [Crash, singer of The Germs] about it right before he died. He was confused, but he wanted those people to like him. But we couldn’t understand why it couldn’t integrate. If a 14 year old kid could start a band and The Zeros could play at 16 and we could do what we were doing and Billy Zoom could come from the 50’s as a rockabilly guy and be part of it, why couldn’t these kids be part of it? Why couldn’t they join in?.”
Without the ability to affect how it played out, in the end Cervenka can only look back on the influence of this outside contingent of kids leaving their mark on the direction that punk would go.
“I do respect it for what it was. And who’s to judge anyway, right?”
Today, with 9 full length albums in the X discography, Exene talks about her own art. John Doe continues to tour and perform music, Billy Zoom was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2015. Having named recent tours “The End is Near”, Exene talks about the band’s upcoming Reno, Nevada show, along with one other show in Riverside, California following a week later, as what may possibly be the band’s final performances.
“We have no shows planned for next year and I think it would be a weird miracle if we do get a show next year. Our 50th birthday is coming up after that, but I just don’t see us playing past these two shows. I’m just trying to tell people the end was near, now the end is here. I accept whatever happens in this universe as meant to be, and that something better’s coming. So to me, I’m really excited about Reno and Riverside because they’re going to be really good show. We might get offered a show or one of those cruises or a festival or something, but as far as clubs and smaller venues, this’ll probably be it.”
While the idea of a band that has been a staple in the West Coast music scene for decades now bringing their time together to an end is hard to digest, Cervenka reflects on the drive of their younger selves and the chemistry that propelled them onto this path with a positive note.
“It was a magical thing and it only happens rarely in life. And I think that everyone has magical things but they don’t always recognize it or they don’t believe in themselves enough and pursue it. I give John all that credit for pushing me because I was just ready to, you know, get on a train and go to someplace I didn’t know and just find a bar and drink and meet people. I didn’t care about a future. It was just an amazing thing. And it still is an amazing thing in my opinion.
X coheadlines the “99 Years of Rock ‘N Roll” performance with Los Lobos on Friday, November 7th at the Silver Legacy in Reno, Nevada. Tickets are available here.
