by Marc Spitz
EXENE CERVENKA: The first thing they asked us to do was write down a list of the ten poets we were most influenced by and I was just sitting there with the piece of paper going, “Let’s see… um…” I had no fucking idea. And he was just like writing all these names down. And I was looking over at him. Looking at his list. And I saw that he had one of the same people down twice. I had nothing on my list, but I criticized him for his list. I said, “You know you wrote that name down twice.” And he was like, “Oh.” And then I said, “Can I have some of your names for my list?”
JOHN DOE: Exene and I began exchanging poems and writing and looking at each other’s material. There were a few pieces that she’d written that were obviously songs. One of them was “I’m Coming Over.” I said, “That’d be a great song. Can I sing it in my band?” And she said, “No, I’ll sing it. It’s my song.”
KITTRA ALLEN: Billy liked John and thought he could work with him. They rehearsed together a few times and all was going well before John insisted on adding his girlfriend to the band as a singer. Billy was appalled. Fuck. The chick couldn’t sing! But they were already committed to working together, so he figured he’d do the best he could and pray that John would come to his senses at some point.
EXENE CERVENKA: Physically I was taken with Billy ’cause he’s so incredible-looking and he was such an amazing guitar player. He is such an eccentric genius.
BILLY ZOOM: I admit it. I was originally horrified that John was bringing his girlfriend into the band.
EXENE CERVENKA: I think everybody is a bit on the fence at the beginning. You know, it’s like when you’re auditioning a drummer, you’re wondering, “Is this guy gonna be good?” It’s the same thing. Sure, of course. I’d never even sung before except around the house, and Billy and John had been in so many bands and were so well versed in music. They knew big band, country, jazz, and rockabilly… they’d seen Jimi Hendrix play, and I was just a little bratty poet. I didn’t know anything.
TOP JIMMY: I was renting this big old house on South Van Ness and it was just too much for one person. It was a mansion near the city’s official mayoral residence with built-in cedarwood closets and two staircases going up and all this shit. I moved out so Kittra and Billy and half of X could move in.
EXENE CERVENKA: I had been living with Fay and this other girl behind Circus Books right by the Starwood, and then she decided to move to England.
KITTRA ALLEN: Fay Heart, who called herself Farrah Faucet-Minor, was Exene’s best friend from Florida.
EXENE CERVENKA: Farrah Faucet-Minor, yes. I guess Farrah Faucet-Minors would have been more correct, but …
KITTRA ALLEN: Fay or Farrah and Exene were best friends. Farrah had a rep among guys as an aggressive tigress in bed, and she is the racist bigot John wrote about in the lyrics to “Los Angeles.” You know, “She started to hate every nigger and Jew.”
JENNY LENS: Farrah hated me because I’m Jewish. Farrah and Exene were walking in West Hollywood and Farrah just started spouting all these anti-Semitic remarks about how Hitler was right, and I just started crying. I was twenty-seven years old and nobody had ever done that to my face.
KITTRA ALLEN: I always felt Farrah was just doing some psycho Lucille Ball performance and that she didn’t really believe a word she said. Farrah was very entertaining and fun to be with, but she could also be a neurotic, high-maintenance nightmare. Average looks to pretty, but she was charismatic with a very clever mind. She was also very obnoxious. A terrible instigator. Total drama junkie. Fiercely loyal to Exene. They loved each other very much. It was a sad parting.
EXENE CERVENKA: I moved in with John at the house on Van Ness after Billy moved out. There were four or five other people living there, too. We came up with a lot of the early X songs in the garage behind the house.
KITTRA ALLEN: What a beautiful house. Paneling and huge pocket doors in mahogany. Crystal pulls and beveled glass throughout the dining room and study and an oak staircase with mahogany trim. Outside was a detached garage and a gorgeous glass atrium. The maid’s room had a cedar closet for furs when John and Exene moved in. They were already rehearsing in the garage with Billy and needed a place to live.
BILLY ZOOM: I remember doing “Blue Spark” and “It’s Who You Know,” and a bunch of rockabilly and R&B covers. I wanted to do something like the Ramones, but a little more… well, more something, I didn’t really know what.
KITTRA ALLEN: Both John and Exene badmouthed Billy constantly. But it was Zoom who wrote the music for X and made their disjointed poetry come to life. There were control issues and I think they were intimidated by his talent and extensive musical training, so they just bludgeoned him emotionally.
JOHN DOE: The objective was to create something for our own personal satisfaction, because everything else in our youthful and limited opinion sucked, and we knew better.
DAVID ALLEN: Exene was a good gal and I hated that Billy badmouthed her behind her back. Once he called her a sack of potatoes. She heard about it and wore a potato sack next time they played.
KITTRA ALLEN: I let Billy continue rehearsing in the garage after we’d broken up and he’d moved out. I figured he’d dump the conniving [chick] he was screwing and come begging back sooner or later.
BILLY ZOOM: I moved out of the house on Van Ness after my girlfriend broke a guitar over my head, and then John and Exene moved into the maid’s room so that we could keep the rehearsal studio.
TOP JIMMY: I don’t know if Kittra broke a guitar over his head, but it could be true.
KITTRA ALLEN: John and Exene were mostly quiet with occasional bursts of loud conflict. I once remember Exene screaming at John: “Fuck you, fuck you… I never chose to be a woman!” No doubt he was projecting some stupid sexist stereotype upon her. He goaded her. I think he loved to see her rage and reel and bounce those exquisite tits of hers all over the place. There were also beautiful moments of calm serenity with John sitting at his desk in the atrium writing or laid out on the couch reading a novel. John and Exene kissed and cooed and danced in the kitchen just like all lovers do, but they were a terribly poisonous pair. They loved each other, but there was a constant power struggle. Exene usually wrote while propped up in bed beneath the large black swastika she had painted on the wall over her head. She always looked like a rumpled rag doll, but she wore beautiful flesh-colored silk slips across those beautiful breasts, a massive pair of perfectly formed globes that defied gravity. Exene and I worked together at Jerry Piller’s dress shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was like a military camp. Exene was depressed. I was depressed.
JOHN DOE: Everybody had day jobs, and then we’d rehearse two or three or four times a week. X’s first gig was in our house, this old Craftsman house built in the ’20s that we shared with David Allen, Kittra, and some others.
KITTRA ALLEN: John Doe was the most success-driven. Obscenely, ruthlessly ambitious. But nearly so was Exene.
JOHN DOE: We’d put flyers out and just play. We’d call around. Word of mouth. The audience was a mix of runaway teenagers and mid-to-late twenty-somethings. We knew most of them. They were either in a band or working on a fanzine or just hanging out, so they’d show up to these parties and we’d play. Nobody could afford drugs. It was mostly alcohol. We drank a lot of gin, which has a hallucinogenic high because it isn’t a grain… it’s a berry, like tequila or absinthe.
KITTRA ALLEN: I think K.K. played with X at their first-ever show, during Farrah’s bon voyage party at our house in Hancock Park. I know he was there. I remember Exene performing. Moaning and lumbering back and forth stiffly like a theatrical exorcist in a hypnotic trance.
K.K. BARRETT: I played the first half of the set, three songs on drums, and Pat Garrett played the second half.
DAVID ALLEN: Bobby Pyn was there at the first X show in our living room at 601 South Van Ness. Back then, he was a very sweet young kid. I think it was probably him or Kickboy who started a big spaghetti fight. I remember scraping the mess off the walls afterward. S
imilar slapstick food fights seemed to become a tradition at L.A. punk parties after that.
KITTRA ALLEN: I remember Darby—when he was still called Bobby Pyn—smearing spaghetti on the wall of the living room as if it were an expressionist’s canvas, and Farrah kept lifting my blouse and announcing to the entire room how large my nipples are.
DAVID ALLEN: Other guests I remember were John Denney and other members of the Weirdos, Margot Olaverra, Tomata du Plenty of the Screamers, Brendan Mullen, Claude Bessy, and Todd Rundgren. It was surreal. I overheard Todd on my phone saying, “I gotta get out of this place… and fast,” probably because Claude had insulted him, or maybe he was just afraid of getting smacked by a stray meatball! I have no idea how he came to be present. Some pre-Go-Go’s gals were also there. Music in the background was by the Stranglers, the Clash, and the Ramones.
HAL NEGRO: X was playing in the middle of the parlor of this big house. I remember thinking, “What a great name for a band—weird but effective.” They played on one of those big oval American rugs, it was really an all-American parlor. Very Norman Rockwell. They had this whole American vibe going. John Denney said Billy Zoom was like a semifamous rockabilly country star. There was no CBGB new waviness about them, and even better, there was absolutely nothing English about X at all. And that setting, with the wooden furniture, only added to the atmosphere. They were awesome even then and they only played a real short set. I remember X played around with a bunch of drummers after that, Mick Basher, people like that. But they really came together as a great band when they got D.J. Bonebrake from the Eyes.
D.J. BONEBRAKE: I was playing with the Eyes and John Doe saw us play. They were looking for a replacement drummer. Mick Basher was in the band and had just quit. This must have been near the end of ’77. John said, “You wanna try out for my band?” I played in five bands at the same time ’cause I get bored, so I said, “Oh, yeah, I’ll do this.” I did a rehearsal with them and I liked the music. So I was playing in the Eyes and playing in X, sometimes at the same show, until John said, “You need to be in our band exclusively. You need to commit.” They pressured me to do that, and I agreed. The Eyes, I was getting tired of them. They were a really good band, but X had more variety.
DAVID ALLEN: Black Randy also performed for the first time at Farrah’s farewell do. Randy playing in the living room is still my most vivid memory of that night, playing his ode to African despot Idi Amin.
HAL NEGRO: He declared Idi Amin a hero and a saint… the crazed cannibal president of Uganda who drank blood and ate his enemies’ entrails to show everybody who was boss.
EXENE CERVENKA: Black Randy was this amazing personality. A wild, dangerous, fucked-up guy who would do anything. Really fun to be around. I was very shy ’cause I’d never been in a big city and I wasn’t used to these personalities from all over the country that were such outlaws.
JOHN DOE: John “Jackie” Morris, better known as Black Randy, was a figment of his own imagination. He was friends with people like Cherie the Penguin, who was a dominatrix. Randy was friends with her and with this guy Tony, who was this male hustler who worked Santa Monica Boulevard. Randy was just one of these incredibly colorful characters. He was a compulsive liar with a sort of Don Rickles type of insulting humor, who was constantly cutting people down, but he would always have everyone in stitches laughing.
HAL NEGRO: Black Randy was a bigger-than-life figure. The legend was that he was this white kid raised by black people in a black neighborhood in Long Beach.
GORILLA ROSE: He just wanted to be a Negro. It would’ve made him happier because he thought black people were doing all the cool things. So just be one!
BLACK RANDY: My stepfather was a horrible man. He was a gun collector and a violent geek… a racist, truck-drivin’ pigfucker who kept a raccoon in the garage and about thirty guns around the house. He was at a Ku Klux Klan level of insanity, and he beat me and my mother up all the time. Every time I came home there was some new goddamn thing. I ran away a couple times and was caught with LSD, but Napa was such a conservative place that they sent me to the youth authority. Why would my mom marry a creep like that? She was a born insecure twit, that’s why. My real father was a junkie. He’s a well-known petty thief, creep, and dope dealer. His nickname is Morphine Jack. He lives in Long Beach. He looks like the skankiest dog. I didn’t meet him until I was twenty-four. As soon as I met him he was borrowing money and shooting me up with dope. He borrowed money from me and shorted me on a heroin deal within an hour of meeting me, I swear to God. He was on welfare. He’d lived with Lenny Bruce in Laurel Canyon for a time in the ’50s. They were good buddies. He got Lenny interested in heroin from speed. That was my old man’s contribution to twentieth-century entertainment culture.
HAL NEGRO: Another part of the Black Randy legend was that he’d grown up hustling on the street for money. He’d sold his ass, done petty crime, and had been heavily involved with nasty drugs.
BLACK RANDY: El Duce from the Mentors always said that I got butt-fucked in the youth authority. Well, I have gotten butt-fucked, but never in jail. I did it on the street for the money.
JOHN DOE: Randy romanticized the whole street-hustler, drug-culture, criminal dark side of L.A. in his writing. But he didn’t live on the street and he wasn’t a hustler. He wasn’t good-looking enough to be a hustler. Still, he totally embraced it, saw it as something that was pure and totally countercultural. It was antigovernment, anti-society, antieverything.
HAL NEGRO: Randy was very charismatic and intimidating with that street thug thing. His band the Metrosquad was like tight rhythm and blues punk rock, and Randy would do these sick-out raps like “Loner with a Boner,” “Beershit,” and “Trouble at the Cup”… he even had a tune called “I Tell Lies Everyday” set to some Sly Stone rip-off. Randy always had scams going. He’d steal neon signs from old buildings and sell them to antique dealers. He had an office supplies telemarketing company. He was always a little more flush with cash than the other punks.
K.K. BARRETT: Black Randy was a diabetic smart-ass who made his ends through phone sales. He was the most brilliant phone actor. He could sell anything to anybody. He could set up a phone room anywhere and make money, but because he was diabetic and alcoholic he’d always get too much sugar and pass out and end up in the drunk tank.
BLACK RANDY: I was a natural for lying over the phone because I was good at convincing people of things, and I like talking on the phone. I tell the truth even when I lie. Listen to the cut “Tellin’ Lies Every Day” on my album. Phone sales are just this side of dope peddling or something… just this side of acceptable white collar crime… we’re a nuisance… it can’t be stamped out. There’s no law against what we do. We’re just thieves, and that’s what I do for a living.
JOHN DOE: Black Randy was a precursor to punk rap. He was all about an ironic take on Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Dolemite… blaxploitation movies, black pulp literature, and the whole pimp culture underworld… and his lyrics were creative in their rhymes and their rhythm. He was a great writer who wasn’t afraid to be funny. Writing a song about Idi Amin, who was obviously a monster, was an example of the extremely dark humor that Randy loved. He loved the sheer preposterousness of someone eating part of their enemy to make a point.
K.K. BARRETT: Black Randy was the original prankster. If he thought something was boring, he’d call the cops and say, “There’s somebody here with a gun.” That was his idea of humor. His other big thing was he’d go to a party and if a girl had her purse down, he’d take a crap in it… they’d go into the bathroom to freshen up and they’d get their brush and drag it through their hair and Randy would be in the background dying laughing.
BLACK RANDY: My drummer Joe Nanini told me, “The first time I ever saw you, you were with your best friend John Doe, drinking beer, and you were supposed to be getting a ride in his car, but John was passed out drunk in the dressing room and you were pissing on him.” I said, “Listen up, man… everybody knows it’s
not cool to crash out at a punk party.”
KITTRA ALLEN: Black Randy was a total deviant. He was an abused and angry kid struggling with sexuality. He liked to shock people. He was very vulgar. And coming from me, that’s quite a statement. I remember going to a party at his house and he’d made all these home movies of himself blowing up a plastic sex doll and shitting in its mouth. Randy was also a blustering bully. Brilliant but sick.
D.J. BONEBRAKE: One day I got a jury notice in the mail, so I asked Black Randy for advice! I must have been crazy. I said, “What do I do about this? I got jury duty. I don’t want to go to jury duty.” And he goes, “Well, here’s what you do. You get a big, black felt pen and you write in big letters across the form VIVA LA ANGEL DUST and you send it back in. They’ll never bug you again.” So I did that and sent it in. I didn’t get another jury notice for ten years.
BLACK RANDY: Everything I was doing at that time was a calculated type of behavior. I was a very rowdy, frustrated guy. I was big and fat, and I was very frustrated by this culture that I felt excluded from that had grown up in the ’70s, the disco culture and the hippie culture that had grown up and given up. I was drunken and rowdy. I tried to steal the cash register at the door on my way out from a Slash benefit. I had to be restrained by a bunch of security guards, and I had to beg the editor of Slash to let me go. This was my way of social gesture. It was a calculated move in the sense of “I’m a punk and this is what punks do.” The punks certainly responded to me in the right way, because it made everyone talk about me immediately.
GEZA X: Cuckoo money is SSI, Supplementary Security Income. Basically the government gives it to crazies or disabled people. It’s really hard to get on it. I tried to show them I was crazy by acting so crazy that I didn’t know I was crazy. It took me five years to get on it. I’d go down to the Social Security office and fill out all these forms. Black Randy smeared himself with excrement when he went down to get it. He was on it a long time, but Randy really was crazy. I was never really like schizoid crazy, it was basically putting on a show.