Save for a few years, X’s core four—from left to right, D.J. Bonebrake, Billy Zoom, Exene Cervenka, and John Doe—has remained the same for nearly five decades.
X - Big Black X (Official Music Video)
There are plenty of people, musicians and listeners alike, who will balk at this type of honesty. If someone suggests a band is doing a “retirement fund” tour, it’s typically to accuse them of trying to pad their coffers before calling it quits—as if that’s not something every human in every profession tries to do. As long as we’re still breathing, we all need to eat and pay rent. But for some reason, even as our favorite musicians age, we often don’t like to acknowledge the realities of later years of creative life.
That’s why Zoom’s comment lands as not just a quip, but a genuine assessment of this graceful third act of X’s nearly 50-year career. Smoke and Fiction, the band’s first record since 2020 and just the second since 1993’s Hey Zeus!, is a work that’s keenly aware of its place in time. Lead single “Big Black X” is unmistakably, deliciously X, riding vintage rock ’n’ roll licks and straight-on punk palm-muting. Its lyrics recount scraps and fragments of memories over the decades, like a last-minute, flash-before-your-eyes deathbed recollection. “Stay awake and don’t get taken / We knew the gutter, also the future,” Cervenka and Doe intone in powerful harmony on the chorus. The title of “Sweet ’Till the Bitter End” speaks for itself, and “The Way It Is” is a blunt, artful reckoning with punk mortality: “I know you gotta go / But that don’t make it easier,” the song opens over a mournful rockabilly groove.
X played a hometown show at the Troubadour on June 24, one of a few fond farewells to the place that made them.
Photo by Matt Marble
John Doe was thinking of his musician friends when he wrote that song—some who are still here, some who aren’t. “‘The Way It Is’ was inspired by seeing a lot of our comrades, like Los Lobos and Lucinda Williams and some other people on this Outlaw Country Cruise, realizing that we’re all destined for the end, transitioning,” says Doe. “The line, ‘I know you gotta go, but that don’t make it easier,’ I would say that I was feeling the loss of Dallas Good.” The towering frontman of the Canadian country and rockabilly outfit the Sadies died suddenly in February 2022, at just 48 years old. Doe recorded his 2009 album, Country Club, with the Sadies, and remained close friends with the group. You don’t get to be a cherished rock band for nearly half a century without learning what it means to lose.
To many, it seemed like X had packed it in by the late ’90s, after a compilation record and a farewell tour. Zoom’s departure in 1986 had changed the band, and they wandered further and further from their punk roots—a natural creative exploration that nonetheless hampered their commercial growth. (Zoom allegedly threatened to leave the band in the ’80s if they didn’t achieve greater success, and made good on that promise, returning to the band for their 1998 farewell tour.) Through the early 2000s, X appeared sporadically at festivals around North America, while Doe, Cervenka, and Bonebrake’s country group the Knitters (a wink to Pete Seeger’s folk group the Weavers) put out music and toured. Cervenka and Zoom both battled serious health issues and survived.
Then, in 2017, the year of their 40th anniversary, the band shook awake again for good: The Grammy Museum curated an exhibit on them, the Los Angeles city council declared October 11 to be X Day, and even the Dodgers got in on the festivities, inviting Exene to throw the first pitch and John to sign the national anthem at a home game in August 2017. Three years later in 2020, the band marked another 40th birthday, this time of their landmark debut record Los Angeles, and released their first new LP in 27 years, Alphabetland.
Smoke and Fiction follows that record with a familiar mix of old and new material. Cervenka says that some of her lyrics were culled from poems from 15 years ago. She writes all the time, and keeps everything she works on. It’s not unusual for pieces to go unused until years later, when they find a home in a new context, like a song. “I have boxes and boxes and books and books of writing, so sometimes I’ll just randomly grab a fistful of things and start putting some things together, and see if something from 20 years ago goes with something I wrote today,” explains Cervenka. She and Doe will workshop lyrics over the phone—her in Los Angeles, him in Austin.
Billy Zoom's Gear
Billy Zoom designs and builds amps and recording gear, and his 10-30 amplifier needed no effects for the new LP’s recording sessions.
Photo by Matt Marble
Guitar
- Gretsch G6122T-59 Vintage Select Edition Country Gentleman with Kent Armstrong P-90 in the bridge, Seymour Duncan DeArmond pickup in the neck, and custom wiring by Billy
Amp
- Billy Zoom 10-30 12-watt RMS combo with one 12” Celestion Vintage 30
Effects
- DeArmond Model 602 Volume Pedal
Strings, Picks, & Cables
- GHS Big Core Nickel Rockers Extra Light
- Dunlop BZ picks
- Hypalon-jacketed Belden 8402 cables with G&H angled plugs
"I was in a little bit of a dark place about 14, 15 years ago,” Cervenka continues. “So some of it is sad, but a lot of it’s good. I love to play with language. That’s my favorite thing about writing, is to do tricky things with words and rhymes. It keeps me really engaged and happy and self-entertained.”
The new record, tracked at Sunset Sound with producer Rob Schnapf, is a defiant, riotous, and often joyful punk-rock ’n’ roll album that somehow still sparks and crackles with all the swagger, poetry, and explosive energy that launched them into the cannon decades ago. According to Doe, it’s just a matter of following your gut. “Intuition is your friend, and your brain is not,” he says. “I’m very proud of the songwriting, the performances, and it wasn’t premeditated, because nothing that we’ve ever done is really calculated. But as it developed, I realized that lyrically it kind of had an overview, and a lot of reflection. Even though I wasn’t really precious about the chords and melodies and things like that, a lot of the songs got reworked. It seems to wrap things up nicely.”
Doe and Cervenka made X known for artful lyrical wordplay from their early days, but they’re also expert storytellers. “Maybe that’s where the crossover is between country-Western and punk rock, and why there’s been a lot of blending of that over the years, because they’re both very simple and elemental,” Doe says. “They’re stories about outsiders or people that don’t fit in, and alcohol and drugs are involved, and dangerous things.” The songs on Smoke and Fiction aren’t all true stories, but there are pieces of their writers in them all the same. “I think all songs are autobiographical somehow, even if it’s just the writer’s participation in some events that they weren’t actually part of,” says Doe. “They have to understand and feel what they’re writing about on some level.”
Smoke and Fiction ended up being a retrospective of the band’s career, meandering through the ups and downs of nearly 50 years of punk rock.
Gary Leonard
Zoom, who has designed, built, and repaired amps for decades, recorded his parts for the new LP on the same amp he gigs with: the 2-channel Billy Zoom 10-30 12-watt combo, with one 12” Celestion Vintage 30 speaker. He was initially commissioned to design the amp for G&L Guitars in 2008, but when the market crashed, the design didn’t go anywhere, so Zoom took to using it himself. The normal channel gain goes from 1 to 10, while the “More” channel runs from 11 to 20. Built-in reverb and tremolo add texture and space, and an active midrange control can boost or cut frequencies at 750 Hz. The flexibility meant that Zoom didn’t have to use any pedals on record—the amp spans fat cleans to gnarly, chewy distortion tones, especially with his Gretsch G6122T-59 Vintage Select Edition Country Gentleman, which Zoom modded with custom wiring, a Kent Armstrong P-90 in the bridge, and a Seymour Duncan DeArmond pickup in the neck. Zoom also played Schnapf’s 1960s Epiphone 12-string on “Flipside,” and Zoom’s solo on “The Way It Is” comes courtesy of his Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster with DiMarzio Red Velvet pickups.
Doe, meanwhile, says he recorded on the first real electric bass he ever bought: a 1960 Fender Jazz bass, which is all original except a refinishing, and strung up with Dunlop flatwounds. It’s been with him since roughly 1970. In 2007, he sold it to a friend when he needed the money, but eight years later, the friend sold it back to Doe for the same amount he paid. “It was a beautiful reunion,” says Doe. “It was very emotional.” Doe recorded direct for most of the sessions, but he also made use of an early-’70s Walter Woods amp.
John Doe's Gear
John Doe and Exene onstage: If they could, X would tour forever. But life on the road has a deadline.
Photo by Matt Marble
Basses
- 1960 Fender Jazz bass
- 1967 Ampeg AEB-1 “Scroll” bass
Amps
- 1970s redface Walter Woods Bass Head Amber Light
- Genzler Bass Array2-210-3SLT (for recording and live)
- Ampeg 4x10 (live)
Strings & Picks
- Dunlop flat wound strings (.045-.105)
- Herco Flex 75 picks
These days, Zoom loves designing circuits and prototyping gear, especially recording equipment. “It’s like a puzzle,” he says. “I sit on the couch, watching TV, and I think of something, and I get some graph paper and a pencil, and I draw it out, and I put it in the box. Sometimes I go back and build them, sometimes I don’t. But that’s how it all starts. I always imagine a sound and then I draw the schematic and build a prototype.”
Zoom doesn’t pick up his guitar that much these days. He’s been playing professionally for 61 years—he joined the musician’s union in 1963 at age 15—and the decades of performance have taken their toll. Arthritis, tendonitis, and carpal tunnel syndrome have made playing an excruciating affair. Sometimes, his fingers have gone numb. “You know, in the beginning, I was known for the smile, the grinning,” he says. “And then gradually, the grin turned into gritting my teeth.”
These are the difficult realities of long-term musical life. Now that it’s drawing to a close for the quartet, it’s bittersweet. “I have mixed feelings,” says Zoom. “A little sad, a little relieved. I’m pretty old, though. Touring is getting hard. Dragging luggage through miles of airport, riding hundreds of miles every day, carrying luggage through hotels. I’m getting old for all that. But I will miss the audience.”
Cervenka feels the same way. “We’re in and out of vans and the Holiday Inn Express,” she says on the way to a gig in St. Louis. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, we can’t play anymore.’ We can play. We played last night, it was great. And if that’s all we did, was magically appear on stage, it’d probably go for a couple more years. But it’s not easy. I would tour forever if I could. After we’re finished touring, I’ll probably just ride around and go to all the places I couldn’t spend enough time in.”
Bitter End - Smoke & Fiction-"X"- at the Warfield Theater, SF - Dec 30, 2023
Last December, X treated fans at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater to unreleased tunes from Smoke and Fiction, including “Sweet ’Till the Bitter End” and the title track. Check them out on this DIY capture.
Post X, Cervenka expects that she and Doe will continue to perform as a folk duo, plus she’ll have more time for her visual art. Doe plans to keep releasing solo records, and Exene remains his favorite singing partner. “We have a secret language,” he says. “We just get each other singing. It’s a beautiful thing.”
It’s been more than 40 years since the abrupt, jagged main riff of “Los Angeles” changed punk music forever. The members of X have gone through life’s ringer, and emerged the other side, arm-in-arm, four punks and friends making sense of a weird world. They’ve had a good run. It’s time to look back and take stock. “We were really brave and crazy and stupid and we survived, and you can, too,” says Cervenka. “You can have fun and look back on your life and go, ‘Wow, I did that. That was crazy.’”
Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.
English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock is as recognizable by tone, lyrics, and his vibrantly hued clothing choices as the sound of Miles Davis’ horn.
Itchycoo Park
“I like my songs, but I don’t necessarily think I’m the best singer of them,” he effaces to me over Zoom, as it’s approaching midnight where he’s staying in London. “I just wanted to be a singer-songwriter because that’s what Bob Dylan did. And I like to create; I’m happiest when I’m producing something. But my records are blueprints, really. They just show you what the song could be, but they’re not necessarily the best performance of them. Whereas if you listen to … oh, I don’t know, the great records of ’67, they actually sound like the best performances you could get.”
He mentions that particular year not offhandedly, but because that’s the theme of the conversation: He’s just released an album, 1967: Vacations in the Past, which is a collection of covers of songs released in 1967, and one original song—the title track. Boasting his takes on Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play,” and Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park,” among eight other tracks, it serves as a sort of soundtrack or musical accompaniment to his new memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left.
Hitchcock, who was 14 years old and attending boarding school in England in 1967, describes how who he is today is encased in that period of his life, much like a mosquito in amber. But why share that with the world now?
In the mid ’70s, before he launched his solo career, Hitchcock was the leader of the psychedelic group the Soft Boys.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
“I’m 71; I’ve been alive quite a long time,” he shares. “If I want to leave a record of anything apart from all the songs I’ve written, now is a good time to do it. By writing about 1966 to ’67, I’m basically giving the context for Robyn Hitchcock, as Robyn Hitchcock then lived the rest of his life.”
Hopefully, I say, the publication of these works won’t ring as some sort of death knell for him.
“Well, it’s a relative death knell,” he replies. “But everyone’s on the conveyor belt. We all go over the edge. And none of our legacies are permanent. Even the plastic chairs and Coke bottles and stuff like that that we’re leaving behind.... In 10- or 20-thousand-years’ time, we’ll probably just be some weird, scummy layer on the great fruitcake of the Earth. But I suppose you do probably get to an age where you want to try and explain yourself, maybe to yourself. Maybe it’s me that needs to read the book, you know?”
“I’m basically giving the context for Robyn Hitchcock, as Robyn Hitchcock then lived the rest of his life.”
To counter his description of his songs above, I would say that Hitchcock’s performances on 1967: Vacations in the Past carve out their own deserved little planet in the vintage-rock Milky Way. I was excited in particular by some of his selections: the endorsement of foundational prog in the Procol Harum cover; the otherwise forgotten Traffic tune, “No Face, No Name and No Number,” off of Mr. Fantasy, the Mamas & the Papas’ nostalgic “San Francisco,” and of course, the aforementioned Floyd single. There’s also the lesser known “My White Bicycle” by Tomorrow and “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” by the Move, and the Hendrix B-side, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp.”
Through these recordings, Hitchcock pays homage to “that lovely time when people were inventing new strands of music, and they couldn’t define them,” he comments. “People didn’t really know what to call Pink Floyd. Was it jazz, or was it pop, or psychedelia, or freeform, or systems music?”
His renditions call to mind a cooking reduction, defined by Wikipedia as “the process of thickening and intensifying the flavor of a liquid mixture, such as a soup, sauce, wine, or juice, by simmering or boiling.” Hitchcock’s distinctive, classic folk-singer voice and steel-string-guided arrangements do just that to this iconic roster. There are some gentle twists and turns—Eastern-instrumental touches; subtly applied, ethereal delay and reverb, and the like—but nothing that should cloud the revived conduit to the listener’s memory of the originals.
And yet, here’s his review of his music, in general: “I hear [my songs] back and I think, ‘God, my voice is horrible! This is just … ugh! Why do I sing through my nose like that?’ And the answer is because Bob Dylan sang through his nose, you know. I was just singing through Bob Dylan’s nose, really.”
1967: Vacations in the Pastfeatures 11 covers of songs that were released in 1967, and one original song—the title track.
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“I wait for songs to come to me: They’re independent like cats, rather than like dogs who will faithfully trail you everywhere,” Hitchcock explains, sharing about his songwriting process. “All I can do is leave a plate of food out for the songs—in the form of my open mind—and hope they will appear in there, hungry for my neural pathways.”
Once he’s domesticated the wild idea, he says, “It’s important to remain as unselfconscious as possible in the [writing] process. If I start worrying about composing the next line, the embryonic song slips away from me. Often I’m left with a verse-and-a-half and an unresolved melody because my creation has lost its innocence and fled from my brain.
“[Then] there are times when creativity itself is simply not what’s called for: You just have to do some more living until the songs appear again. That’s as close as I can get to describing the process, which still, thankfully, remains mysterious to me after all this time.”
“In 10- or 20-thousand-years’ time, we’ll probably just be some weird, scummy layer on the great fruitcake of the Earth.”
In the prose of 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Hitchcock expresses himself similarly to how he does so distinctively in his lyrics and speech. Amidst his tales of roughing his first experiences in the infamously ruthless environs of English boarding school, he shares an abundance of insight about his parents and upbringing, as well as a self-diagnosis of having Asperger’s syndrome—whose name is now gradually becoming adapted in modern lexicon to “low-support-needs” autism spectrum disorder. When I touch on the subject, he reaffirms the observation, and elaborates, “I think I probably am also OCD, whatever that means. I’ve always been obsessed with trying to get things in the right order.”
He relates an anecdote about his school days: “So, if I got out of lunch—‘Yippee! I’ve got three hours to dress like a hippie before they put me back in my school clothes. Oh damn, I’ve put the purple pants on, but actually, I should put the red ones on. No! I put the red ones on; it’s not good—I’ll put my jeans on.’
Robyn Hitchcock's Gear
Hitchcock in 1998, after embarking on the tour behind one of his earlier acoustic albums, Moss Elixir.
Guitars
- Two Fylde Olivia acoustics equipped with Sennheiser II lavalier mics (for touring)
- Larrivée acoustic
- Fender Telecaster
- Fender Stratocaster
Strings & Picks
- Elixir .011–.052 (acoustic)
- Ernie Ball Skinny Top Heavy Bottom .010–.054 (electric)
- Dunlop 1.0 mm
“I’d just get into a real state. And then the only thing that would do would be listening to Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. There was something about Trout Mask that was so liberating that I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t care what trousers I’m wearing. This is just, whoa! This music is it.’”
With him having chosen to cover “See Emily Play,” a Syd Barrett composition, the conversation soon turns to the topic of the late, troubled songwriter. I comment, “It’s hard to listen to Syd’s solo records.... It’s weird that people enabled that. You can hear him losing his mind.”
“You can, but at the same time, the fact they enabled it means that these things did come out,” Robyn counters. “And he obviously had nothing else to give after that. So, at least, David Gilmour and the old Floyd guys.... It meant they gave the world those songs, which, although the performances are quite … rickety, quite fragile, they’re incredibly beautiful songs. There’s nothing forced about Barrett. He can only be himself.”
“There was something about Trout Mask Replica that was so liberating that I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t care what trousers I’m wearing. This is just, whoa!’”
I briefly compare Barrett to singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston, and we agree there are some similarities. And then with a segue, ask, “When did you first fall in love with the guitar? Was it when you came home from boarding school and found the guitar your parents gifted you on your bed?”
Robyn pauses thoughtfully.“Ah, I think I liked the idea of the guitar probably around that time,” he shares. “I always used to draw men with guns. I’m not really macho, but I had a very kind of post-World War II upbringing where men were always carrying guns. And I thought, ‘Well, if he’s a man, he’s got to carry a gun.’ Then, around the age of 13, I swapped the gun for the guitar. And then every man I drew was carrying a guitar instead.”
Elaborating on getting his first 6-string, he says, “I had lessons from a man who had three fingers bent back from an industrial accident. He was a nice old man with whiskers, and he showed me how to get the guitar in tune and what the basic notes were. And then I got hold of a Bob Dylan songbook, and—‘Oh my gosh, I can play “Mr. Tambourine Man!”’ It was really fast—about 10 minutes between not being able to play anything, and suddenly being able to play songs by my heroes.”
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Hitchcock does me the kindness, during our atypically deep conversation—at least, for a press interview—of sharing more acute perceptions of his parents, and their own neurodivergence. Ultimately, he feels that his mother didn’t necessarily like him, but loved the idea of him—and that later in life, he came to better understand his lonely, depressive father. “My mother was protective but in an oddly cold way. People are like that,” he shares. “We just contain so many things that don’t make sense with each other: colors that you would not mix as a painter; themes you would not intermingle as a writer; characters you would not create.... We defy any sense of balance or harmony.
“Although the performances are quite rickety, quite fragile, they’re incredibly beautiful songs. There’s nothing forced about Barrett. He can only be himself.”
“The idea of normality.... ‘Normal’ is tautological,” he continues. “Nothing is normal. A belief in normality is an aberration. It’s a form of insanity, I think.
“It’s just hard for us to accept ourselves because we’re brought up with the myth of normality, and the myth of what people are supposed to be like gender-wise, sex-wise, and psychologically what we’re supposed to want. And in a way, some of that’s beginning to melt, now. But that probably just causes more confusion. It’s no wonder people like me want to live in 1967.”
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In this excerpt from the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film of Robyn Hitchcock, Storefront Hitchcock, the songwriter performs an absurdist “upbeat” song about a man who dies of cancer.
Keith Urban’s first instrument was a ukulele at age 4. When he started learning guitar two years later, he complained that it made his fingers hurt. Eventually, he came around. As did the world.
He’s in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He’s won 13 Country Music Association Awards, nine CMT video awards, eight ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Awards, four American Music Awards, and racked up BMI Country Awards for 25 different singles.
He’s been a judge on American Idol and The Voice. In conjunction with Yamaha, he has his own brand of affordably priced Urban guitars and amps, and he has posted beginner guitar lessons on YouTube. His 2014 Academy of Country Music Award-winning video for “Highways Don’t Care” featured Tim McGraw and Keith’s former opening act, Taylor Swift. Add his marriage to fellow Aussie, the actress Nicole Kidman, and he’s seen enough red carpet to cover a football field.
Significantly, his four Grammys were all for Country Male Vocal Performance. A constant refrain among newcomers is, “and he’s a really good guitar player,” as if by surprise or an afterthought. Especially onstage, his chops are in full force. There are country elements, to be sure, but rock, blues, and pop influences like Mark Knopfler are front and center.
Unafraid to push the envelope, 2020’s The Speed of Now Part 1 mixed drum machines, processed vocals, and a duet with Pink with his “ganjo”—an instrument constructed of a 6-string guitar neck on a banjo body—and even a didgeridoo. It, too, shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Country chart and climbed to No. 7 on the pop chart.
His new release, High, is more down-to-earth, but is not without a few wrinkles. He employs an EBow on “Messed Up As Me” and, on “Wildfire,” makes use of a sequencerreminiscent of ZZ Top’s “Legs.” Background vocals in “Straight Lines” imitate a horn section, and this time out he duets on “Go Home W U” with rising country star Lainey Wilson. The video for “Heart Like a Hometown” is full of home movies and family photos of a young Urban dwarfed by even a 3/4-size Suzuki nylon-string.
Born Keith Urbahn (his surname’s original spelling) in New Zealand, his family moved to Queensland, Australia, when he was 2. He took up guitar at 6, two years after receiving his beloved ukulele. He released his self-titled debut album in 1991 for the Australian-only market, and moved to Nashville two years later. It wasn’t until ’97 that he put out a group effort, fronting the Ranch, and another self-titled album marked his American debut as a leader, in ’99. It eventually went platinum—a pattern that’s become almost routine.
The 57-year-old’s celebrity and wealth were hard-earned and certainly a far cry from his humble beginnings. “Australia is a very working-class country, certainly when I was growing up, and I definitely come from working-class parents,” he details. “My dad loved all the American country artists, like Johnny Cash, Haggard, Waylon. He didn’t play professionally, but before he got married he played drums in a band, and my grandfather and uncles all played instruments.
One of Urban’s biggest influences as a young guitar player was Mark Knopfler, but he was also mesmerized by lesser-known session musicians such as Albert Lee, Ian Bairnson, Reggie Young, and Ray Flacke. Here, he’s playing a 1950 Broadcaster once owned by Waylon Jennings that was a gift from Nicole Kidman, his wife.
“For me, it was a mix of that and Top 40 radio, which at the time was much more diverse than it is now. You would just hear way more genres, and Australia itself had its own, what they call Aussie pub rock—very blue-collar, hard-driving music for the testosterone-fueled teenager. Grimy, sweaty, kind of raw themes.”
A memorable event happened when he was 7. “My dad got tickets for the whole family to see Johnny Cash. He even bought us little Western shirts and bolo ties. It was amazing.”
But the ukulele he was gifted a few years earlier, at the age of 4, became a constant companion. “I think to some degree it was my version of the stuffed animal, something that was mine, and I felt safe with it. My dad said I would strum it in time to all the songs on the radio, and he told my mom, ‘He’s got rhythm. I wonder what a good age is for him to learn chords.’ My mom and dad ran a little corner store, and a lady named Sue McCarthy asked if she could put an ad in the window offering guitar lessons. They said, ‘If you teach our kid for free, we’ll put your ad in the window.’”
Yet, guitar didn’t come without problems. “With the guitar, my fingers hurt like hell,” he laughs, “and I started conveniently leaving the house whenever the guitar teacher would show up. Typical kid. I don’t wanna learn, I just wanna be able to do it. It didn’t feel like any fun. My dad called me in and went, ‘What the hell? The teacher comes here for lessons. What’s the problem?’ I said I didn’t want to do it anymore. He just said, ‘Okay, then don’t do it.’ Kind of reverse psychology, right? So I just stayed with it and persevered. Once I learned a few chords, it was the same feeling when any of us learn how to be moving on a bike with two wheels and nobody holding us up. That’s what those first chords felt like in my hands.”
Keith Urban's Gear
Urban has 13 Country Music Association Awards, nine CMT video awards, eight ARIA Awards, and four Grammys to his name—the last of which are all for Best Country Male Vocal Performance.
Guitars
For touring:
- Maton Diesel Special
- Maton EBG808TE Tommy Emmanuel Signature
- 1957 Gibson Les Paul Junior, TV yellow
- 1959 Gibson ES-345 (with Varitone turned into a master volume)
- Fender 40th Anniversary Tele, “Clarence”
- Two first-generation Fender Eric Clapton Stratocasters (One is black with DiMarzio Area ’67 pickups, standard tuning. The other is pewter gray, loaded with Fralin “real ’54” pickups, tuned down a half-step.)
- John Bolin Telecaster (has a Babicz bridge with a single humbucker and a single volume control. Standard tuning.)
- PRS Paul’s Guitar (with two of their narrowfield humbuckers. Standard tuning.)
- Yamaha Keith Urban Acoustic Guitar (with EMG ACS soundhole pickups)
- Deering “ganjo”
Amps
- Mid-’60s black-panel Fender Showman (modified by Chris Miller, with oversized transformers to power 6550 tubes; 130 watts)
- 100-watt Dumble Overdrive Special (built with reverb included)
- Two Pacific Woodworks 1x12 ported cabinets (Both are loaded with EV BlackLabel Zakk Wylde signature speakers and can handle 300 watts each.)
Effects
- Two Boss SD-1W Waza Craft Super Overdrives with different settings
- Mr. Black SuperMoon Chrome
- FXengineering RAF Mirage Compressor
- Ibanez TS9 with Tamura Mod
- Boss BD-2 Blues Driver
- J. Rockett Audio .45 Caliber Overdrive
- Pro Co RAT 2
- Radial Engineering JX44 (for guitar distribution)
- Fractal Audio Axe-Fx XL+ (for acoustic guitars)
- Two Fractal Audio Axe-Fx III (one for electric guitar, one for bass)
- Bricasti Design Model 7 Stereo Reverb Processor
- RJM Effect Gizmo (for pedal loops)
(Note: All delays, reverb, chorus, etc. is done post amp. The signal is captured with microphones first then processed by Axe-Fx and other gear.)
- Shure Axient Digital Wireless Microphone System
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL (.011–.049; electric)
- D’Addario EJ16 (.012–.053; acoustics)
- D’Addario EJ16, for ganjo (.012–.053; much thicker than a typical banjo strings)
- D’Addario 1.0 mm signature picks
He vividly remembers the first song he was able to play after “corny songs like ‘Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.’” He recalls, “There was a song I loved by the Stylistics, ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New.’ My guitar teacher brought in the sheet music, so not only did I have the words, but above them were the chords. I strummed the first chord, and went, [sings E to Am] ‘My love,’ and then minor, ‘I'll never find the words, my,’ back to the original chord, ‘love.’ Even now, I get covered in chills thinking what it felt like to sing and put that chord sequence together.”
After the nylon-string Suzuki, he got his first electric at 9. “It was an Ibanez copy of a Telecaster Custom—the classic dark walnut with the mother-of-pearl pickguard. My first Fender was a Stratocaster. I wanted one so badly. I’d just discovered Mark Knopfler, and I only wanted a red Strat, because that’s what Knopfler had. And he had a red Strat because of Hank Marvin. All roads lead to Hank!”
He clarifies, “Remember a short-lived run of guitar that Fender did around 1980–’81, simply called ‘the Strat’? I got talked into buying one of those, and the thing weighed a ton. Ridiculously heavy. But I was just smitten when it arrived. ‘Sultans of Swing’ was the first thing I played on it. ‘Oh my god! I sound a bit like Mark.’”
“Messed Up As Me” has some licks reminiscent of Knopfler. “I think he influenced a huge amount of my fingerpicking and melodic choices. I devoured those records more than any other guitar player. ‘Tunnel of Love,’ ‘Love over Gold,’ ‘Telegraph Road,’ the first Dire Straits album, and Communiqué. I was spellbound by Mark’s touch, tone, and melodic choice every time.”
Other influences are more obscure. “There were lots of session guitar players whose solos I was loving, but had no clue who they were,” he explains. “A good example was Ian Bairnson in the Scottish band Pilot and the Alan Parsons Project. It was only in the last handful of years that I stumbled upon him and did a deep dive, and realized he played the solo on ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush, ‘Eye in the Sky’ by Alan Parsons, ‘It’s Magic’ and ‘January’ by Pilot—all these songs that spoke to me growing up. I also feel like a lot of local-band guitar players are inspirations—they certainly were to me. They didn’t have a name, the band wasn’t famous, but when you’re 12 or 13, watching Barry Clough and guys in cover bands, it’s, ‘Man, I wish I could play like that.’”
On High, Urban keeps things song-oriented, playing short and economical solos.
In terms of country guitarists, he nods, “Again, a lot of session players whose names I didn’t know, like Reggie Young. The first names I think would be Albert Lee and Ray Flacke, whose chicken pickin’ stuff on the Ricky Skaggs records became a big influence. ‘How is he doing that?’”
Flacke played a role in a humorous juxtaposition. “I camped out to see Iron Maiden,” Urban recounts. “They’d just put out Number of the Beast, and I was a big fan. I was 15, so my hormones were raging. I’d been playing country since I was 6, 7, 8 years old. But this new heavy metal thing is totally speaking to me. So I joined a heavy metal band called Fractured Mirror, just as their guitar player. At the same time, I also discovered Ricky Skaggs and Highways and Heartaches. What is this chicken pickin’ thing? One night I was in the metal band, doing a Judas Priest song or Saxon. They threw me a solo, and through my red Strat, plugged into a Marshall stack that belonged to the lead singer, I shredded this high-distortion, chicken pickin’ solo. The lead singer looked at me like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I got fired from the band.”
Although at 15 he “floated around different kinds of music and bands,” when he was 21 he saw John Mellencamp. “He’d just put out Lonesome Jubilee. I’d been in bands covering ‘Hurts So Good,' ‘Jack & Diane,’ and all the early shit. This record had fiddle and mandolin and acoustic guitars, wall of electrics, drums—the most amazing fusion of things. I saw that concert, and this epiphany happened so profoundly. I looked at the stage and thought, ‘Whoa! I get it. You take all your influences and make your own thing. That’s what John did. I’m not gonna think about genre; I’m gonna take all the things I love and find my way.’
“Of course, getting to Nashville with that recipe wasn’t going to fly in 1993,” he laughs. “Took me another seven-plus years to really start getting some traction in that town.”
Urban’s main amp today is a Dumble Overdrive Reverb, which used to belong to John Mayer. He also owns a bass amp that Alexander Dumble built for himself.
Photo by Jim Summaria
When it comes to “crossover” in country music, one thinks of Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, and Dolly Parton’s more commercial singles like “Two Doors Down.” Regarding the often polarizing subject and, indeed, what constitutes country music, it’s obvious that Urban has thought a lot—and probably been asked a lot—about the syndrome. The Speed of Now Part 1 blurs so many lines, it makes Shania Twain sound like Mother Maybelle Carter. Well, almost.
“I can’t speak for any other artists, but to me, it’s always organic,” he begins. “Anybody that’s ever seen me play live would notice that I cover a huge stylistic field of music, incorporating my influences, from country, Top 40, rock, pop, soft rock, bluegrass, real country. That’s how you get songs like ‘Kiss a Girl’—maybe more ’70s influence than anything else.”
“I think [Mark Knopfler] influenced a huge amount of my fingerpicking and melodic choices. I devoured those records more than any other guitar player.”
Citing ’50s producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, who moved the genre from hillbilly to the more sophisticated countrypolitan, Keith argues, “In the history of country music, this is exactly the same as it has always been. Patsy Cline doing ‘Walking After Midnight’ or ‘Crazy’; it ain’t Bob Wills. It ain’t Hank Williams. It’s a new sound, drawing on pop elements. That’s the 1950s, and it has never changed. I’ve always seen country like a lung, that expands outwards because it embraces new sounds, new artists, new fusions, to find a bigger audience. Then it feels, ‘We’ve lost our way. Holy crap, I don’t even know who we are,’ and it shrinks back down again. Because a purist in the traditional sense comes along, whether it be Ricky Skaggs or Randy Travis. The only thing that I think has changed is there’s portals now for everything, which didn’t used to exist. There isn’t one central control area that would yell at everybody, ‘You’ve got to bring it back to the center.’ I don’t know that we have that center anymore.”
Stating his position regarding the current crop of talent, he reflects, “To someone who says, ‘That’s not country music,’ I always go, “‘It’s not your country music; it’s somebody else’s country music.’ I don’t believe anybody has a right to say something’s not anything. It’s been amazing watching this generation actually say, ‘Can we get back to a bit of purity? Can we get real guitars and real storytelling?’ So you’ve seen the explosion of Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers who are way purer than the previous generation of country music.”
Seen performing here in 2003, Urban is celebrated mostly for his songwriting, but is also an excellent guitarist.
Photo by Steve Trager/Frank White Photo Agency
As for the actual recording process, he notes, “This always shocks people, but ‘Chattahoochee’ by Alan Jackson is all drum machine. I write songs on acoustic guitar and drum machine, or drum machine and banjo. Of course, you go into the studio and replace that with a drummer. But my very first official single, in 1999, was ‘It’s a Love Thing,’ and it literally opens with a drum loop and an acoustic guitar riff. Then the drummer comes in. But the loop never goes away, and you hear it crystal clear. I haven’t changed much about that approach.”
On the road, Urban utilizes different electrics “almost always because of different pickups—single-coil, humbucker, P-90. And then one that’s tuned down a half-step for a few songs in half-keys. Tele, Strat, Les Paul, a couple of others for color. I’ve got a John Bolin guitar that I love—the feel of it. It’s a Tele design with just one PAF, one volume knob, no tone control. It’s very light, beautifully balanced—every string, every fret, all the way up the neck. It doesn’t have a lot of tonal character of its own, so it lets my fingers do the coloring. You can feel the fingerprints of Billy Gibbons on this guitar. It’s very Billy.”
“I looked at the stage and thought, ‘Whoa! I get it. You take all your influences and make your own thing. I’m gonna take all the things I love and find my way.’”
Addressing his role as the collector, “or acquirer,” as he says, some pieces have quite a history. “I haven’t gone out specifically thinking, ‘I’m missing this from the collection.’ I feel really lucky to have a couple of very special guitars. I got Waylon Jennings’ guitar in an auction. It was one he had all through the ’70s, wrapped in the leather and the whole thing. In the ’80s, he gave it to Reggie Young, who owned it for 25 years or so and eventually put it up for auction. My wife wanted to give it to me for my birthday. I was trying to bid on it, and she made sure that I couldn’t get registered! When it arrived, I discovered it’s a 1950 Broadcaster—which is insane. I had no idea. I just wanted it because I’m a massive Waylon fan, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that guitar disappearing overseas under somebody’s bed, when it should be played.
“I also have a 1951 Nocaster, which used to belong to Tom Keifer in Cinderella. It’s the best Telecaster I’ve ever played, hands down. It has the loudest, most ferocious pickup, and the wood is amazing.”
YouTube
Urban plays a Gibson SG here at the 2023 CMT Music Awards. Wait until the end to see him show off his shred abilities.
Other favorites include “a first-year Strat, ’54, that I love, and a ’58 goldtop. I also own a ’58 ’burst, but prefer the goldtop; it’s just a bit more spanky and lively. I feel abundantly blessed with the guitars I’ve been able to own and play. And I think every guitar should be played, literally. There’s no guitar that’s too precious to be played.”
Speaking of precious, there are also a few Dumble amps that elicit “oohs” and “aahs.” “Around 2008, John Mayer had a few of them, and he wanted to part with this particular Overdrive Special head. When he told me the price, I said, ‘That sounds ludicrous.’ He said, ‘How much is your most expensive guitar?’ It was three times the value of the amp. He said, ‘So that’s one guitar. What amp are you plugging all these expensive guitars into?’ I was like, ‘Sold. I guess when you look at it that way.’ It’s just glorious. It actually highlighted some limitations in some guitars I never noticed before.”
“It’s just glorious. It actually highlighted some limitations in some guitars I never noticed before.”
Keith also developed a relationship with the late Alexander Dumble. “We emailed back and forth, a lot of just life stuff and the beautifully eccentric stuff he was known for. His vocabulary was as interesting as his tubes and harmonic understanding. My one regret is that he invited me out to the ranch many times, and I was never able to go. Right now, my main amp is an Overdrive Reverb that also used to belong to John when he was doing the John Mayer Trio. I got it years later. And I have an Odyssey, which was Alexander’s personal bass amp that he built for himself. I sent all the details to him, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s my amp.’”
The gearhead in Keith doesn’t even mind minutiae like picks and strings. “I’ve never held picks with the pointy bit hitting the string. I have custom picks that D’Addario makes for me. They have little grippy ridges like on Dunlops and Hercos, but I have that section just placed in one corner. I can use a little bit of it on the string, or I can flip it over. During the pandemic, I decided to go down a couple of string gauges. I was getting comfortable on .009s, and I thought, ‘Great. I’ve lightened up my playing.’ Then the very first gig, I was bending the crap out of them. So I went to .010s, except for a couple of guitars that are .011s.”
As with his best albums, High is song-oriented; thus, solos are short and economical. “Growing up, I listened to songs where the guitar was just in support of that song,” he reasons. “If the song needs a two-bar break, and then you want to hear the next vocal section, that’s what it needs. If it sounds like it needs a longer guitar section, then that’s what it needs. There’s even a track called ‘Love Is Hard’ that doesn’t have any solo. It’s the first thing I’ve ever recorded in my life where I literally don’t play one instrument. Eren Cannata co-wrote it [with Shane McAnally and Justin Tranter], and I really loved the demo with him playing all the instruments. I loved it so much I just went with his acoustic guitar. I’m that much in service of the song.”
