BY TINA BENITEZ-EVES | It’s like a marathon race for X. For nearly 40 years, the Los Angeles punk rockers never really stopped moving.
With the exception of a brief hiatus in the 1990s — Exene Cervenka with Auntie Christ (along with X drummer DJ Bonebrake and Rancid’s Matt Freeman) and The Knitters, solo ventures for John Doe, acting and filmmaking — X have always been on tour.
Things have changed since 1977, when Doe and founding member and guitarist Billy Zoom formed the band and later added in Doe’s then-girlfriend (later wife, then ex-wife) Cervenka and eventually Bonebrake to the mix. Things have changed for many of the band’s punk contemporaries, and Cervenka is surprised that X has lasted this long.
“I never thought we’d still be playing and touring around this country that we love so much,” said Cervenka on the road during the band’s current East Coast-Midwest tour, which pulls into New York City for a three-day residency at City Winery, this Saturday to Monday, Aug. 1-3, along with Americana duo Dead Rock West, featuring Cindy Wasserman and Frank Drennen.
A portion of the shows’ proceeds for the remainder of the tour will go to support hospital costs for Zoom, who was recently diagnosed with bladder cancer and had to leave the tour to undergo treatment.
Guitarist Jesse Dayton, who has played with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Supersuckers and Willie Nelson, will be filling in for Zoom.
For Cervenka, X is still punk — even though the band has recently dialed back its sound, adding in saxophones and a more “acoustic” approach — but it’s still a different beast.
“I value it more,” she said. “I love it more. It’s more fun. It’s easier.”
Without Zoom, X returned to punk when performing live — since Dayton did not have enough time to learn X songs in the “new” way.
Today it’s more fun, but she doesn’t see a point in recording a new album. The band’s last studio album was 1993’s “hey Zeus!”
“Why?” said Cervenka. “They’re free. The world is a Wi-Fi prison. Everything that’s created is immediately free.”
Other than as a promotion tool, Cervenka doesn’t see a new album in X’s future. The record-making and even touring scope has changed. It’s even difficult for some bands, including X, to land festival gigs, which scares Cervenka.
“Maybe Taylor Swift fans want to take a piece of her home, and that’s all they can get. But for bands like us, it’s live gigs,” she said. “It’s always been live gigs. So why would we make a record? We don’t have the money to make a record and then give it away.”
The singer is just valuing the time she has left with X, because, she said, today might be their last gig.
“It’s a miracle to me that we’re still around doing this, so I value it, because tomorrow may be the last show or tonight may be the last show for a myriad of reasons — not just illness or getting older or deciding to do something else,” she said. “Because we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Tomorrow everything might all be crashing down, economically, in other ways. We don’t know.
“I think at this point, it’s like, O.K., watch how long we can go. Just watch. You think we’re done with that?”
Cervenka is expecting Zoom to start playing with the band again by this fall or winter.
“We’re going to do this until the wheels fall off, because, obviously, it’s like at a certain point it becomes like a marathon race, and we’re gonna win,” she said. “I wanna be doing this when the s— hits the fan.”
