“Los Angeles,” the 1980 debut record by the band X, packs nine songs into less than 28 minutes. Monday night at City Winery, it took the band about two minutes more to play the album in its entirety.
Not that X has slowed down or softened in the last 34 years. The extra time was due to a few uncomfortable moments that passed in between some songs while singers Exene Cervenka and John Doe exhorted the soundman to fix the volume on their stage monitors.
That combination of economy, velocity, forceful determination and attention to detail made the songs from “Los Angeles” even more ferocious than when they first drew attention to the L.A. quartet. The same was true of many of the songs from later records that X played after the band took the briefest of intermissions.
It was the first of X’s four mostly sold-out consecutive nights at the club, during which they’re performing each of their first four records completely, one per night, plus additional material. Merging loud-hard-fast punk with rockabilly guitar, honky-tonk harmony and Beat poetry, those records have proven strong enough to overcome Cervenka and Doe’s divorce, lesser subsequent releases, X’s late-’80s breakup and the lack of any new songs since the band’s original lineup began playing together again in the late ’90s.
As ever, Billy Zoom drove the music with roaring, turbo-charged riffs he played on his silver spangled guitar, while Doe and Cervenka traded careening lead vocals and joined together in skewed George-and-Tammy harmonies. Doe’s reptile-crawl bass lines added to the momentum, while D.J. Bonebrake displayed a jazz drummer’s deft touch even as he committed felony assault on his kit.
A second guitarist and keyboardist occasionally supplemented the group, the latter playing parts originally recorded by the late Doors member Ray Manzarek, who produced all four of X’s classic albums and to whom Doe dedicated the evening. X covered the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen,” but the lyrics of their own material hold up much better today than Jim Morrison’s bluster.
In fact some songs were all too relevant, from the unnerving sexual violence of “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene” and the spiraling chaos of “The World’s a Mess; It’s In My Kiss” to the damning declaration “both sides are right, but both sides murder” in “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.”
Yet X also found beauty amid the darkness, whether it was the jazzy guitar arpeggios on the chorus of “The Unheard Music” or the lovely harmonies on a rendition of the dance hall-era chestnut “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes.” And would that every nostalgia act – looking at you, Mick – clearly took the genuine pleasure in performing that showed as Zoom and Bonebrake mouthed the words to the songs, Doe lunged at his mike stand with such fervor that he sent it toppling into the crowd and one point, and Cervenka shimmied.
That X still was having so much fun performing songs they’ve played for decades was the strongest testament of all to that music, however unheard it has remained.
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