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.
Billy Zoom isn’t particularly sentimental about the impending final chapter of X. Along with day-one bandmates John Doe, Exene Cervenka, and D. J. Bonebrake, the 76-year-old guitarist for the legendary Los Angeles punk band is preparing for one last, long trip out with the group, celebrating their ninth and final album, Smoke and Fiction. And after 47 years in the band, Zoom has earned the right to speak plainly. “This is our retirement fund,” he says of X’s upcoming international tour, which will reach into 2025.
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.’”
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- X Rig Rundown: John Doe and Billy Zoom's Sonic Secrets ›
Naturally, every recording Eddie Van Halen ever played on has been pored over by legions of guitar players of all styles. It might seem funny, then, to consider EVH solos that might require more attention. But your 100 Guitarists hosts have their picks of solos that they feel merit a little discussion. Some of these are deep cuts—get ready for some instrumental bonus tracks and Van Halen III mentions—and some are among the biggest radio hits of their time. Just because their hits, though, doesn’t mean we don’t have more to add to the conversation.
We can’t cover everything EVH—Jason has already tried while producing the Runnin’ With the Dweezil podcast. But we cover as much as we can in our longest episode yet. And in the second installment of our current listening segment, we’re talking about new-ish music from Oz Noy and Bill Orcutt.
Tinkering with theSDE-3 Dual Digital Delay suggested a similar, possibly enduring appeal. As an evolution of the Roland SDE-3000rack unit from the 1980s, it’s a texture machine, bubbling with subtle-to-odd triangle LFO modulations and enhanced dual-delay patterns that make tone mazes from dopey-simple melodies. And with the capacity to use it with two amps in stereo or in panning capacity, it can be much more dimensional. But while the SDE-3 will become indispensable to some for its most complex echo textures, its basic voice possesses warmth that lends personality in pedestrian applications too.
Tapping Into the Source
Some interest in the original SDE-3000 is in its association with Eddie Van Halen, who ran two of them in a wet-dry-wet configuration, using different delay rates and modulation to thicken and lend dimension to solos. But while EVH’s de facto endorsement prompted reissues of the effect as far back as the ’90s, part of the appeal was down to the 3000’s intrinsic elegance and simplicity.
In fact, the original rack unit’s features don’t differ much from what you would find on modern, inexpensive stompbox echoes. But the SDE-3000’s simplicity and reliable predictability made it conducive to fast workflow in the studio. Critically, it also avoided the lo-fi and sterility shortcomings that plagued some lesser rivals—an attribute designer Yoshi Ikegami chalks up to analog components elsewhere in the circuit and a fortuitous clock imprecision that lends organic essence to the repeats.
Evolved Echo Animal
Though the SDE-3 traces a line back to the SDE-3000 in sound and function, it is a very evolved riff on a theme. I don’t have an original SDE-3000 on hand for comparison, but it’s easy to hear how the SDE-3 bridges a gap between analog haze and more clinical, surgical digital sounds in the way that made the original famous. Thanks to the hi-cut control, the SDE-3’s voice can be shaped to enhance the angular aspect of the echoes, or blunt sharp edges. There’s also a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats. That also means you can take advantage of the polyrhythmic effects that are arguably its greatest asset.
“There’s a lot of leeway to toy with varied EQ settings without sacrificing the ample definition in the repeats.”
The SDE-3’s offset control, which generates these polyrhythmic echoes, is its heart. The most practical and familiar echos, like quarter, eighth, and dotted-eighth patterns, are easy to access in the second half of the offset knobs range. In the first half of the knob’s throw, however, the offset delays often clang about at less-regular intervals, producing complex polyrhythms that are also cool multipliers of the modulation and EQ effects. For example, when emphasizing top end in repeats, using aggressive effects mixes and pitch-wobble modulation generates eerie ghost notes that swim through and around patterns, adding rhythmic interest and texture without derailing the drive behind a groove. Even at modest settings, these are great alternatives to more staid, regular subdivision patterns. Many of the coolest sounds tend toward the foggy reverb spectrum. Removing high end, piling on feedback, and adding the woozy, drunken drift from modulation creates fascinating backdrops for slow, sparse chord melodies. Faster modulations throb and swirl like old BBC Radiophonic Workshop sci-fi sound designs.
By themselves, the modulations have their own broad appeal. Chorus tones are rarely the archetypal Roland Jazz Chorus or CE type—tending to be a bit darker and mistier. But they do a nice job suggesting that texture without lapsing into caricature. There are also really cool rotary-speaker-like textures and vibrato sounds that offer alternatives to go-to industry standards.
The Verdict
The SDE-3’s many available sounds and textures would be appealing at $219—even without the stereo and panning connectivity options, a useful hold function, and expression pedal control that opens up additional options. The panning capabilities, in particular, sparked all kinds of thoughts about studio applications. Mastering the SDE-3 takes just a little study—certain polyrhythms can be dramatically reshaped by the interactivity of other controls and you need to take care to achieve identical results twice. But this is a pedal that, by virtue of its relative simplicity and richness and breadth of sounds, exceeds the utility of some similarly priced rivals, all while opening up possibilities well outside the simple echo realm
Reader: T. Moody
Hometown: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Guitar: The Green Snake
Reader T. Moody turned this Yamaha Pacifica body into a reptilian rocker.
I have always loved the reverse headstock, simply because nothing says 1987 (the best year in the history of the world) like a reverse headstock. The pickups are both Seymour Duncan—an SH-1N in the neck position and TB-4 in the bridge, both in a very cool lime green color. Right when these pickups got listed, the Buy It Now button once again lit up like the Fourth of July. I am a loyal disciple of Sperzel locking tuners and think Bob Sperzel was a pure genius, so I knew those were going on this project even before I started on it. I also knew that I wanted a Vega-Trem; those units are absolutely amazing.
When the body arrived, I thought it would be cool to do some kind of burst around the yellow so I went with a neon green. It turned out better than I imagined. Next up was the shaping and cutting of the pickguard. I had this crocodile-type, faux-leather material that I glued on the pickguard and then shaped to my liking. I wanted just a single volume control and no tone knob, because, like King Edward (Van Halen) once said, “Your volume is your tone.”
T. Moody
I then shaped and glued the faux-leather material in the cavity. The tuning knobs, volume knob, pickguard, screws, and selector switch were also painted in the lemon-lime paint scheme. I put everything together, installed the pickups, strung it up, set it up, plugged it in, and I was blown away. I think this is the best-playing and -sounding guitar I have ever tried.
The only thing missing was the center piece and strap. The latter was easy because DiMarzio makes their ClipLock in neon green. The center piece was more difficult because originally, I was thinking that some kind of gator-style decoration would be cool. In the end, I went with a green snake, because crocodiles ain’t too flexible—and they’re way too big to fit in a pickup cavity!
The Green Snake’s back is just as striking as the front.
