The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack Interview: John Doe, Pt. 2
Our continued analysis-from-the-inside of X’s final studio LP, Smoke & Fiction, with cameos from Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and Mojo Nixon, and what Exene and Billy Zoom bring to the party.
John Doe, photographed onstage in Los Angeles in 1983 by Michael Hyatt, from X’s Lucky 13 Postcards set. [Courtesy of the Tim Stegall Collection]
Napalm Nation, I feel I owe you an apology the size of Steve Jones’ powerchords. I keep trying to keep up with my planned Substack schedule, plus bios I owe several clients. (A major reason I have not been advertising that business lately, or Wikipedia services – I want to get caught up first, even if I need the money NOW.) But we are in the final stages of my book, and it’s been all hands on deck to finish it and get it to the printer. Right now, I’ve been making corrections on the uncorrected proofs: In essence, I am reading the book before it goes to print, editing all errors in the typesetting, rewriting sentences that now have proven to be inaccurate or clumsy, or changing a word repeated earlier in the same entry, etc., etc.
So, think about how long it takes you to read a 500 page book.
No, this is not something you can punch a button and have it all taken care of instantly. AI is not that advanced, and I hope it never gets that advanced. Because then I will be obsolete. AI is a tool, not a replacement for human creativity. And so it should remain.
Now factor in that I have to work a day job a few hours per day. Yes, I have to drop everything, including working on the second book, which was about half done at the point I began correcting those proofs. I am practically waking up, throwing a couple of breakfast tacos and a pot of coffee down my throat, and turning on the computer as I shower and dress. This is no exaggeration.
But I was determined to post this second part of our chat with X’s John Doe, conducted July 3, 2024. (Yes, the day before the “4th of July!”) Last time, we began a track-by-track analysis of L.A.’s greatest punk institution's excellent final studio LP, Smoke & Fiction – essentially, John reviewing his own record! We pick up with the second track….
TIM: “Sweet ‘Til The Bitter End.”
JOHN: That was one of Exene's free-association poems, and it's about letting loose. Maybe it was referencing our past, but we still believe that you can get crazy and see what happens. Maybe for some, it's a cautionary tale as well. It all seems good until the bitter end. [laughs] With a lot of Exene's writing, there's a great amount of wordplay, and that's what she really excels at. It's just a stream of consciousness, but it allows the reader to participate. You can make of it what you want.
TIM: Yeah, that makes me want to see a lyric sheet, but written in that great handwriting style of hers.
JOHN: Yeah, that's all over the record, I mean all over the lyrics. But the music of that, I would say, is inspired by maybe Johnny Burnett, “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” I think it also honors Bo Diddley, as well, that guitar lick. [scat sings the intro] So we still mine all of our influences, we still bring them into our soup, our hybrid, without making it too obvious.
TIM: Well, that was the great thing about X, always. Unlike a lot of the people you came up with in the Masque scene, you guys could play. You had professional backgrounds.
JOHN: But it didn't matter. We could use that to our advantage, but personally I had to unlearn a bunch of stuff, especially in regard to songwriting. I was trying to write songs that were over my head before I came to LA. I was trying to play bass in a way that was too fancy. And so I learned from people that played just the best they could, and that's all they could play. But it didn't matter. I mean, the band that was the most popular and that had a number one record was The Go-Go's, and they just didn't know anything, and they said, “Well shit, I can do this!” And they did, and so that was the whole point of punk rock. Whether we could play or not, we had to play from our gut rather than play from our head. What we knew wasn't as important as the [songs]. And I still believe that.
I don't like songwriters that are constantly showing off with how many words and chords and intricate patterns that they can put into a song. It's like, great, so you're really smart. Is that it? I mean, it's like a bunch of dudes hanging around going like, “Oh, there's this and oh, there's that,” And if I hear one more group of white guys talking about The Beatles, I'm gonna go to jail for assault! [laughs] Who cares? Who cares? It's all been said. Who cares? And that's the point of punk rock. So, yeah, I'll get off my soapbox.
The Fabs: “Well, blimey! We rather like some of your songs, John!”
TIM: Well, Billy Zoom can play very good jazz guitar, but he knows when to do it and when not to.
JOHN: Yes. Like I say, sometimes you have to unlearn things. And you have to play from your gut, not from everything that someone has taught you or that you've learned on your own. Your style, your own hybrid, is to put it together in a particular way, or not play something or unlearn something. The more I play, the fewer notes I have to play. I think as you get older, you learn to appreciate the space in between things. That's what a lot of the jazz players have said for years and years: It's the space, not the notes.
TIM: But you also did point out In one of your books that punk has the reputation of being three chord music, but frequently it's four or five chords, actually.
JOHN: Yeah, can be.
TIM: My favorite ones are the three chord songs, though. That was the beautiful thing about punk: It was all based on the 2:30, three-chord rock ‘n’ roll single.
JOHN: Well, there's a few songs on this record that are under two and a half minutes.
TIM: “The Way It Is” now comes up on the playlist.
JOHN: That was inspired by one of the Outlaw Cruises. I love Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle and all the people that were on those, and I realized that it doesn't last forever. It also looks back into history when we were young, but it didn't feel like we were kids. It felt like we were grown-ups.
TIM: Yeah, that is interesting because, yeah, growing up at that time, X seemed like the most adult, most grown-up of all the bands.
JOHN: Yeah, for better or for worse, I think that the fact that I knew some poets and read poetry, I was able to bring some of that discipline into the writing. Whereas Exene was more just a fountain that just came up with really beautiful, inventive things.
TIM: Sort of divine inspiration.
JOHN: She writes every day. She's one of the greatest writers ever.
TIM: She definitely has discipline. You were talking about the Outlaw Cruise. Did Mojo Nixon passing away on this last one trigger a lot of this?
JOHN: No, it was written before that. I wrote it on one of the other cruises, and then Mojo made it come true. So did Jeremy Tepper, which is just so strange and sad, but kind of poetic.
TIM: Okay, we've already talked about “Flipside” and “Big Black X.” We've got the title track now, “Smoke and Fiction.”
JOHN: That's another one of Exene's pieces. The music kind of reminds me of “In This House That I Call Home.” Some of the rhymes kind of blow my mind: “In a bed I am borrowing/My face turns to sorrowing/When I'm dreaming about tomorrowing.” It's that longing or sadness where you still do something, but you can't quite get there. Which is the refrain on each one of these: “I still hurt a little bit/But there's no cure for this…I still wish a little bit/But there's no star for this.” It's wistful, but again, there's that conflict between a serious subject or a sad story, but the music is still a celebration. The music is still fast and hard and exuberant. That's one of the things that X has always done, and that's probably one of our big contributions to punk rock music: It's not just one thing.
TIM: I always loved that dichotomy — the reflectiveness, and then the music says, “Let's git real, real GONE for a change!”
JOHN: [chuckles] Yeah.
TIM: “Struggle Is Surreal.” Okay, nice wordplay there.
JOHN: A friend of ours said that to Exene. And she also said it to me, and then Exene sent me the lyrics to it. And I thought, “Oh God, is that a phrase that's become popular? Oh God, no. It's a great phrase, but I don't know if….” And then I realized this week I have this same friend, and she said it to me a week or two or a month before Exene sent me the lyrics, and then I realized that the source was the same. So, Exene wanted to write a song using that phrase, because, yes, the struggle is becoming more and more surreal. And again, it's a little bit of a nursery rhyme. It's a bit like a kid's song, but it gets into some other realities when you're talking about a dream from the other side and that part of it.
Exene Cervenka searching out that perfect turn of phrase, Los Angeles 1981. Photographed by Michael Hyatt, from the Lucky 13 Postcards series. [Courtesy of the Tim Stegall Collection]
TIM: To go back just a little bit, it occurred to me that when you're talking about those verses rhyming “tomorrowing” and “borrowing” and all of that, that's like something Chuck Berry would have done!
JOHN: Yeah, Chuck Berry or Lewis Carroll. Did he write the Jabberwocky, where you're just making up words, but they mean something? Yeah. Truly brilliant.
TIM: We just bridged Chuck Berry and Lewis Carroll. That’s cool!
JOHN: Right on, aren't we smart? [laughs]
TIM: Good job, John.
JOHN: Well done, Tim.
TIM: “Winding Up The Time,” that sounds like it might be a little self-explanatory.
JOHN: Yeah, again, it's more wordplay that becomes…. It's wordplay that develops the story, if you know what I mean. You just start having contrasts. Is it raining? Is it dark? Is it fever? Is it, you know, what's real, what's not? And then, as you're winding up to time, you still want to drive fast sometimes — the linear part of that song structure, so that the winding up the time and tearing up the road and sleeping on the blink and all these different versions of that kind of a phrase. It just becomes a kind of chaotic montage of wordplay and images, and you're howling at the sun and you're all these things are happening at once, where time maybe isn't even relevant. Or time is good, some quantum present/past/ future.
[laughs] I know that sounds really sort of silly and almost evasive, but it's just the way that things [work]. It's an example of how you start with an idea, and if you let it run then you have an anchor which is “winding up the time, tearing up the road.” So there's some freewheeling going on, and If you just let that freewheeling continue in the song and in the lyrics, then it can become its own thing. Then you're not directing everything, it takes on its own life. And there's maybe another version of some of Billy's surf guitar. It's a very particular, very specific kind of melody line that the guitar is playing.
TIM: Yes, he's doing some of that chordal soloing and using the Bigsby [tremolo] quite a bit, to get those bends going. But he was never the guy that was going to do the two-barre-chords-up-and-down-the-neck/all downstrokes thing like Johnny Ramone, even though he greatly appreciated that approach.
JOHN: Yeah, he does that when it's called for, but I think he has a little more range.
End Part Two
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