Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  Did you talk about Bukowski at those places, or did you discover him on your own?

  At the MAI, they’d have classes on Yeats or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or people like that, American literature, which was sort of a history-of-literature kind of course. At Antioch, the writing courses were private tutorial poetry, and the woman Grace Cavalieri I had, I owe a great debt to. I learned how to write better. She was very kind, and she was a terrific teacher because she would say this is where you are doing something beautiful and true; this is something that is your voice, I can see it and hear it; and this is less so, so let’s accentuate this good stuff and forget about the other stuff. The material was academic, but, she said, read the new stuff. Read Galway Kinnell or Anne Sexton. Read Diane DiPrima. Read new people. Don’t read anything that was published before World War II because the vernacular, the rhythm, the style, and the way of writing of some of that stuff can be so impenetrable, so musty.

  In the past, you’ve talked about concentrating on the small details in writing songs. Does that reflect back on the compression of poetry? If you change any one thing in a poet like Ezra Pound, it can alter the meaning.

  I try not to be so anal about it. I don’t pick it apart. If it feels good and sounds good. . . . But what I think I meant when I was talking about changing small things were the connecting words. They can make lines that much more clear, and you realize how much they do change things, like an “and” or “with.” I’m not like Elvis Costello, a real wordy wordsmith. I like to write in a more economical way. And I don’t have the wordplay that Exene does, who I think is an incredible writer. One of the best, ever. She continues to write every day. Everyone gets what he or she deserves, but Exene hasn’t got the recognition she deserves as a writer.

  What’s it like to step in and sing her songs? Is there an amount of interpretation?

  Sure, the one that comes to mind is “The Have Nots,” because she wrote a lot of that. Usually, she’d sing her song, and I’d sing mine, but at that point we were so in tune it didn’t matter, and I love being her chorus. I love that “I’m just here to support you,” but it’s more than that, because it’s more equal in the way that it is mixed. Everyone interprets it his or her own way. I love stepping into her shoes. At that point, she was writing for me, and I was writing for her.

  During the heyday of punk, were you listening to Woody Guthrie and the Band?

  No, not at all.

  Was it a year zero thing, where you cut yourself off?

  Everybody I knew drew a line. I can only speak for myself, but I drew this line and said, that was then, and this is now. All the things I have learned, I might use, but I am not going to bring them into the foreground. But it happened pretty quickly that it did. By 1982/83, when we were doing Under the Big Black Sun or More Fun in the New World, there was a little more Americana style, like the songs “New World” or “Come Back to Me,” with Billy playing sax. We felt, again, we were trying to be fearless.

  Who opened that door of possibilities? Was it bands like the Blasters?

  Yeah, I would say the Blasters had a big effect on showing everyone what rockabilly should be. The Stray Cats did to a degree, but the Blasters seemed more Southern California and more tied to Leo Fender. But we were all listening to country and western music, and I listened to a lot of blues and folk music. I began to think, these are all the same: these are the same chord changes. The melodies are simple, so let’s bring some of that stuff in there. The Gun Club was certainly part of that. It wasn’t like you needed permission. Billy was doing that stuff from the beginning. He was putting a Chuck Berry riff before “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” as a sort of wink to “Johnny B. Goode.”

  Did you feel X was a bridge between Hollywood and the East Side scene, led by bands the Brat and the Plugz?

  Oh yeah, we saw this subculture that was completely different from anything we had experienced. It was rich and blowing our minds. It had these crazy kids, but they played great. It was kind of scary. We’d go to backyard parties and someone would pull out a 45 pistol and shoot it off into the air, and we’d be like, fuck, I guess we are bohemians now! [Laughs]. We’re shooting dope and people were pulling out 45s. All right, we’re living! I think the Plimsouls had some of that too because Eddie was Latino. We certainly felt kinship to the Brat because of the people in the band, and the fact they had a woman as a singer, and that was a big part of punk rock—women were equals. It’s really astounding nowadays that it didn’t really stick. It really kind of reached a peak in indie rock, with the Breeders, Throwing Muses, and Kirsten Hersh. Those were great strong women. Mavericks, if you will. Maybe the riot grrrl scene to a big degree too. I don’t know what happened. But I just saw the Breeders two or three months ago in San Francisco, and they were fucking great. They are doing the twentieth-year anniversary of Last Splash. I was thinking, what the hell? This is a great band, where is that kind of band now?

  I suppose bands like Cat Power, the Gossip, and others . . .

  Neko Case does well, and Aimee Mann is doing well. But bands today just don’t seem as integrated as what was happening in punk rock, and that was definitely one of our goals. It wasn’t like we had a manifesto, like you must have a woman in the band, but it just happened because of this sense of equality and everybody pulling together.

  Exene has mentioned the audiences at the Masque would consist of people of color, gay people, etc. Did the hardcore era begin to shut that diversity down?

  Totally, but that sort of started happening early on. I mean, when was the first Black Flag single, 1978 or something? It happened pretty quickly, but it didn’t gain much power until 1980 and ’81. That was something that Darby Crash certainly felt. There wasn’t all that much acceptance of gay culture. There was a certain amount of, “Yeah, but . . . ,” which I found a little strange. Everybody was too busy trying to figure out how to make this thing work.

  You’ve called yourself the traffic cop in the band. What do you mean by that?

  Like I said, I think Billy and Exene have this great originality, and I guess I have some creativity and maybe more attention to melody and song structure, so I would take Exene’s lyrics, then put a piece of music to it, and we’d refine that melody as we worked on it. We did a lot of rehearsing. I would suggest drum parts to DJ, and of course he’d alter that. “Do we need so many cymbals?” was one of our trademarks. We’d try to use floor toms and things like that.

  Like on “Hungry Wolf.”

  Or “We’re Desperate.” There’s a bunch of them. It wasn’t like being the leader but like taking the responsibility to make sure what time to be somewhere.

  The levelheaded one?

  Hmm, sometimes. I had a really bad temper. Really bad.

  What pushed that?

  I don’t know. I just got rid of it. But what would push my button? I don’t know, just someone pissing me off. I got in some fights.

  Peter Case of the Nerves told me about playing some rather outrageous places, like Randy’s Rodeo, just to be able to play during the late 1970s.

  We played Tony Alva’s birthday party on the fucking beach. People that liked Van Halen were throwing stuff at him and us. Tony had to sorta step in and go, hey man, these are my fucking friends. You know, we drove from L.A. to New York in 1978 and played three shows, then drove back.

  Detroit or Chicago?

  We didn’t know where there was to play. We didn’t have the brains to figure out maybe we could call somebody. We didn’t have a booking agent. Actually, we played one other place, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, like where one of the 9/11 planes . . .

  Went down . . .

  If you believe there were planes. Somebody said, there’s a show here, and we probably made $150. By the time that Los Angeles came out, we were touring. We sort of had a booking agent. She wasn’t a professional booking agent. She was just calling around figuring out where we could play. In Texas, thank god, we discovered the Big Boys, and they gave us a great hand figuring out where
and how to crack Texas. We were not road dogs by any means. We’d do maybe two tours, maybe three months total, spread out, then we’d go back home and write more songs and record another record, then did it again. For the first four records, it was like a record a year, and even Ain’t Love Grand was only like a year and a half apart. That was the time that Exene and I split up. It was pretty hectic in the creative process, but there was a lot of stuff going on. Exene and I were just in tune with each other, and loved each other, and understood, well, the whole band was in tune in terms of how we wanted X to sound and bring all these different elements into it and still have it sound like X.

  In hindsight, what do you think of the band’s portrayal in Decline of Western Civilization and The Unheard Music?

  I don’t want to bag on the Decline too much, but it was sensationalized. There was so much more going on than what they portrayed. They just wanted to make it sensational so they could get it released. Every documentary has to have a point of view, so it was true, but the scene was not as nihilistic, wasn’t as violent, wasn’t as single-minded, and it was a lot more fun than the way they portray it. They filmed us after we had played two shows at the Whisky, unloaded the gear, then met back at Exene’s and my place at two in the morning. Well, of course we thought, this is a perfectly good reason to snort some speed. Because we are going to be doing a movie, we’re going to be filming all night. The reason they stopped is because the sun came up and the light was ruined. We were drinking and snorting speed. You only need to do that once, at the beginning of the night, or in the middle of the night. It’s not like cocaine. That’s why speed was so much better than cocaine. It was clearly a superior drug because you only had to do it once and you were up for ten or twelve hours. You’re invincible, and that was good. You could drink as much beer as you wanted to, and it didn’t have any effect at all. When they filmed Darby, they had someone score him some dope, so he seemed like a complete fucking idiot. Darby, on the surface, was not a genius. He was a complete enigma because he seemed like an idiot half the time. I think it portrayed a small side of punk at the time.

  But what about your film?

  The Unheard Music is a great movie. I think it’s a really good documentary: it’s got a little too much music video type stuff in it, but that was a whole new art form at that point, so it’s excusable. It’s as much about the social impact of our music, or of the whole music scene, as it is about our contribution to it. It goes into what the record companies were thinking . . .

  Or not thinking . . .

  They had thoughts, but they were just limited thoughts. No one can really go back in time to get that feeling of what weird repression there was, the Ronald Reagan era. You’re in Hollywood, but meanwhile if you just look a little bit odd, you get called a fag and something is thrown at you. It’s like, I’m on Hollywood Boulevard—this is the place to be weird. This is THE place to be a fag, if you want to be outrageous. That was kind of mind-blowing.

  If the first record, Los Angeles, evokes this lurid landscape of L.A., the decaying houses and youth out of control, See How We Are seems to be an elegy for such a city. By the time you wrote those later songs, had you begun to think very differently about L.A.?

  Hmm, that’s a very deep question. And as a matter of fact, I was thinking about the decay . . . [half-joking].

  It seems to be about the human condition, like the kids with no shoes on their feet.

  That’s because I went to Mexico and had seen that. We certainly grew up a lot in that time, in those years, from ’77 to ’86. That was the point at which, since Dave Alvin was playing in the band, and we had done a lot of Knitters gigs, and Exene and I had looked a lot into country and folk music, “See How We Are,” and maybe “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” would be the two places where folk music stepped into our world. We missed Billy, but Dave felt he was locked down by Phil, and we felt we were locked down by Billy. We had this feeling, like we could do whatever we want: we can have our best friend in the band. This is really cool. But the fact is that Billy would say, “That is not music, it has too many chords. You need something else there. It needs to be harder.” You got to have a frame for your picture. You got to have some boundary, or else it’s limitless. There’s a good point and a bad point to it. See How We Are, the record, was like, we can play whatever we want.

  Do you feel the post-punk roots-rock phase of Los Angeles music, like Blood on the Saddle, Gun Club, and other bands, has been overlooked or fallen to the margins?

  I guess they didn’t have a good name. I’m serious. Cow punk sounds like cow pie. It’s unfortunate because Blood on the Saddle, Tex and the Horseheads, and Rank and File were all really good bands. They didn’t have as cohesive of a scene or style. There wasn’t time for that, and the L.A. punk rock scene wasn’t big, but it had some impact. It almost went right from there to the hair bands. It was defined enough. The Beat Farmers were also part of it, although they were from San Diego. It was like taking the Rolling Stones and letting them play country music. It was country rock kind of stuff. It was terrific. They didn’t have a leader or one band or one songwriter that took it to the next level, if that’s not too cliché. I love Tex and the Horseheads. I just saw Texacala last night in Austin.

  Does it surprise you that Ain’t Love Grand was the biggest-selling X record at the time?

  Yeah, because it has horrible production because we released the reins, and that was a mistake. We were sort of seduced by the little success we had with “Wild Thing,” and then thought, well, let’s give this a try. The production is very impersonal. There’s no discovery. We had pretty much demo’d those songs exactly the way that they were and had kind of written out the drum parts and things like that and then recorded it. That’s a terrible way to make a record. It’s so lifeless, but with bands like the Scorpions, with the people that Michael Wagener worked with, it didn’t matter. It was all about bombast. “Burning House of Love” was a really good song, and we had a good video with that. All the work we had done up to that point finally started taking hold.

  Is working with Allison Anders on film like working with a really good music producer? Is there a correlation between making music and acting?

  Well, yes, because I trust Allison and she gives you real information and advice, like try this. I love that, like “That’s not as good,” but you don’t feel you’ve done a bad thing, you just need something different, and Ray was like that too. Ray Manzarek was incredibly positive and mystical. He would have no fear talking about weird, crazy, floaty stuff, but he’s still the captain of the ship.

  He’s still steering.

  Yes. We had so much respect for him. Exene and I loved the Doors, and even though the Doors were not Billy’s favorite band, he saw Ray as a guy that knows music. And his band did have some fucking big songs. They were kind of an incredible band. You take different things from different art forms. You can get more violent and more out front in a film by using what you do on stage, and then you can get more internal and more romantic or quiet from what you’ve done in a movie when you are recording a slower, quieter song in a studio.

  What draws you to people like Jill Sobule, Grant-Lee Phillips, or Neko Case?

  The advantage of getting to record records every two or three years is that you meet people, and you work with them, and you like them. Like, “Aimee Mann and I enjoy working together, and she would be good on this song.” And Jill is just fun. I have played with her so many times, and sometimes I have to go on after her, and she’s so fucking adorable and the audience loves her so much, and not in a phony way, because she’s so hilarious and politically astute and amazing, and then I’d have to go on, and I feel like a big lead balloon. I’m like, we need to work out a whole set together because I am not going to go on after you.

  You’ve talked about writing “unbridled romantic songs” but stemming from “earned romanticism”—does that mean not wishy-washy?

  They have to be real. You have to know of what you
speak. You have to have failed and done stupid things, and done things the wrong way, in order to really figure out how to do them the right way. And that goes back to what we talked about in terms of being grateful and to be able to continue doing this. At this point, everybody in X, because we have seen people fall away, we’re happy with this. To sing a romantic song you have to be pretty brave, and maybe that’s a reiteration of being fearless. You have to pick out the details that are different and specific and hope that somebody else can relate to those details even though theirs may be different, so they can invest romantic feelings into those elements, like physical items.

  On “Love Can Be a Tragedy,” you talk about walking across the floor on your hands and knees, and it doesn’t sound wimpy, it doesn’t sound fake. It sounds very honest, like “this is a trial and tribulation.”

  I am trying to do that less [laughs]. Trying to be nicer and just enjoy it. There has to be some sort of edge to it, otherwise it is just wishy-washy. It has to have some gravity to it. It should be a little, well, not pretentious, but have some epic quality or at least some weight to it.

  A few years ago you said that everybody should have a little focus on politics—they should be atop something so they perhaps don’t get cheated or manipulated. Do you still feel that way?

  How I feel about politics right now is liked armed insurrection. It’s so fucked up. I’m feeling a really dark presence in America’s politics right now. And it’s not just Obama: it’s the fact that he represented something, and it is obviously not coming true. And it’s the powers that be . . . I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t know. Yes, I think that people have got to be involved, but it’s getting harder and harder to see where you can have an effect, and how many things are out of your control, and how incredibly backwards and conservative this country is—it’s like, oh my god, really? Like the motherfucker Ted Cruz. And it’s not just him. Ron Paul is a kook too, but I sorta agree with libertarianism because government is so ass-backwards there is no reason for them to save any money. You’ve got to spend all the money, unless you want less money. It’s really hard to know where to put your political money and power, or lack of power.