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.’”
Nerves and X aside, this guy earned his stripes playing with legendary acts like Gene Vincent, Etta James, and Big Joe Turner—and in certain circles, he’s considered among the greatest players of all time. But some may not know that he spends the rest of his time tinkering with tubes in his workshop.
Billy Zoom holds his signature Gretsch Custom Shop Tribute Silver Jet model, which was part of a limited run that is now totally sold out. “Mike McCready from Pearl Jam got the last one,” Zoom says. Nearby are his special stereo model Silver Jet with TV Jones pickups, as well as a stereo amp he built. Photo by John Gilhooley
Most people know you as a guitar hero.
How did you get into building and modifying
amps?
I started getting into ham radio when I was
much younger. In 1958 I started building
kits and working with radio transmitters. I
was also playing guitar, but I had an acoustic.
In about ’62 I switched to electric and
had to have an amplifier. I started to realize
it was the same kind of stuff. The inside of
an amp made sense to me because I already
knew the radio stuff. I became the local
amp repair guy, and then in the late ’60s I
went to a vocational school for two years to
learn electronics. Basically it was training
to be a color TV technician, but it was a
really good background. It was only the last
semester that was television intense. I went
in knowing I was going to apply the skills
to working with sound. I usually kept the
poor teacher after class for an hour or two
every time, badgering him with questions
and bringing in amps.
And then you opened your first shop
in 1970?
Yeah, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard
and Vista Street in Hollywood. I do a fair
amount of general repair work to anything
with tubes, plus guitars, studio gear, and
then modifications and building my products.
I do it all. It’s kind of a mix.
And you’ve been in business ever since?
Pretty much, except for the years like ’88,
’85, when X was touring constantly and I
moved my shop to my house but was still
working in between tours.
X has been touring regularly again since
’98, right?
Yeah.
How do you go about balancing your
business with touring?
With great difficulty. I’m not here enough.
We’ve been really busy touring this year.
I also moved my shop to a bigger facility
between tours.
How does it feel leaving your business to
go on tour?
I hate going out. I get nervous about traveling
at the beginning of every tour. “What
did I forget? What didn’t I bring? What am
I gonna need that I’m not gonna have?”
That sort of thing. I have two of everything
and one stays packed. Once we’ve played a
show and I know I didn’t forget anything,
or I know what I forgot, then I’m okay.
How have your designs changed over the
past 40 years?
Well, like everyone I started out in the early
’70s just copying. The first amps I built for
sale were based on Fender 4x10 Bassmans,
and gradually I just started developing my
own circuits. Now I’m not copying anything.
What products are you currently offering?
The only thing in production right now is
the Little Kahuna, which is a reverberation
and tremolo unit that’s all tube. I still do
custom amps—one-offs and stuff. I can
really only put one thing in production
at a time. So I’ll do a run of a hundred of
something and then do a run of a hundred
of something else. I manage to make
enough to at least always have a couple of
amps in stock and some packed and ready
to go.
The Kahuna came out in 2009?
Kind of. We did the NAMM show in 2009
and showed it. I got started actually building
them at the beginning of 2010, but
then I had cancer surgery so I think I only
got 10 of them shipped before the surgery.
It was out of circulation for a few months
before I came back. Most of them have
been built since late 2010.
How many have you done?
Serial numbers are up to about 70.
And how did you come up with the design?
Well there was a Big Kahuna that was fancier.
It was too much trouble; I only made
a couple of those. But that’s why it’s called
the Little Kahuna. One day I got a sales flyer
from a tube supplier and they had reissued
6BM8s. I thought, “Gee, that’d make a good
reverb,” and I started tinkering with that and
the tremolo. There wasn’t anything like it on
the market. There were some cheesy tremolo
pedals and some bad reverb units, but there
wasn’t a good one in a single box.
Are you making them by yourself?
I have a company that’s making the raw
cabinets for the Kahunas now, but other
than that it’s all me, and I still have to finish
the cabinets myself.
Zoom builds all of his amps by hand in his California workshop. Here he’s shown drilling holes in an amp chassis.
Do you use one when you play?
Yeah, not with X though—X just plays loud.
The room is my reverberation. When I play
rockabilly I use it, and when I do studio
work I always bring it. They’re small, they’re
light, they’re built like a tank—very durable.
Tell us about some of your clients.
I did all of Brian Setzer’s stuff for 18 years
until he moved to Minneapolis. And the guys
from the Black Crowes shoot me stuff. I’ve
worked with No Doubt, Jim Lauderdale,
Blind Lemon, Mike Ness, and I used to [build
stuff for] Dennis Danell when he was in Social
Distortion. I’ve done stuff for Jackson Browne,
Richard Gere, Bruce Willis, all kinds of people.
I was in Hollywood for 25 years.
I didn’t know Bruce Willis played guitar.
Bruce Willis had a band, he played harmonica,
and they used to tour around
Hollywood all the time. He had a bunch of
Fender tweed amps I used to fix, and I fixed
one of his harmonica mics.
Would you say the majority of your clients
are prominent musicians or do you
get amateur players as well?
Since I moved to Orange County I get a
mix. I still get people from all over the country—all over the world now—but it’s a mix.
So you work one-on-one with every client?
Yes.
How do you work with them to come
up with something that you can both be
proud of?
Well, sometimes they know what they want,
and sometimes they just want something. I
talk to them about what style they play and
who they like, what sound they like, what
records they like, where they play, and what
kind of situation they’re going to use it in.
And how long does it usually take to
complete one project?
To do a one-off? Probably 4 to 8 weeks—it
depends how complicated it is. Usually it
depends on how complicated the cabinetry
is, that takes the most time. The Cowboy
amp prototype I did for Gretsch took a lot
of time because of the wraparound grille
and all the asymmetrical parts.
And how did you get hooked up with
Gretsch in the first place? Was it just
because you played one of their guitars?
Yeah, well, because I was so strongly identified
with that one model, the Silver Jet, which
was a really unique guitar. They reissued them
so they don’t seem that unusual anymore,
but back in the ’70s and ’80s mine was the
only one people had ever seen and they
assumed that it was custom. The actual guitar
became sort of an icon. When Fender got
involved with Gretsch, [product manager] Joe
Carducci called me up and we started working
on the Billy Zoom tribute model.
When did you first start working on it?
I think 2007 was when they finally
started doing it seriously. I went out to the
Custom Shop a few times, and we took my
old ’55 Gretsch to a Kaiser Medical Center
to have it X-rayed and stuff, and they stuck
little mirrors up inside of it and measured
things, and then they made a couple prototypes.
They sent me a prototype, then they
made a couple changes to it, and put it
into production.
So do you use one of the new ones or do
you use your original?
I tour usually with the first prototype.
I actually kind of like it. As I go to South
America and Europe, when I have to fly,
I usually take the standard production
model. The prototype is a one-off.
I don’t like to take one-of-a-kind things
on airplanes.
Then why was the original prototype
changed if you like it enough to tour
with it?
They over-relic’d the top on the first one.
The real ones don’t ever show wear on top.
I think they must have gotten that coating
from NASA.
Zoom uses this Tektronix Model 570 to match tubes and compare modern valves to their original specs. “It’s an extremely rare piece,” he says. “Mine came from an electronics school in Minnesota.”
Are you still using the amp you made for
yourself in the ’80s?
Yep. Same amp since ’84. Never a problem.
I changed the tubes once in 2005. My plan
was to make an amp that didn’t break on
tour. It has two 4x12 cabinets and I’ve got
two output sections. I’ve got four 6L6s in
it and you switch back and forth, so in the
event that one ever fails you just switch to
the other output section.
How do you start a project like that?
I started it the way I start every project. I
sit down with a piece of graph paper and
a pencil, and I just kind of stare off into
space and start thinking about circuits.
Then I play with it until it looks right,
and then I go to the shop and I build
what I drew.
What are you doing right now?
Right now I’m looking at a prototype I
made for Gretsch that so far hasn’t made
it into production. It’s a Cowboy amp.
I took the essence of the cowboy-style
amp [that was popular in] the ’50s and
early ’60s and put it on a modern amp.
It’s got the tooled leather binding and
wraparound grille with the steer head on
it and has the reverb and tremolo circuits
from the Kahuna built into it. It’s got
a modified Baxendale EQ and a single
12—it’s 20 watts.
There’s another one that I designed for Gretsch which has active EQ with just a volume control and a single tone control, but the tone control is a two-legged LC circuit, so when you turn the knob, it moves the boost frequency up or down, which gives it a fantastic range of tonal quality. It’s 18 watts with a single 12. And then I’ve got a little 4-watt studio amp, it’s really good for recording. It has gain, master, treble, and bass controls. It’s been very popular with session musicians and studio owners. I can also add a secondary design called a multiwatt to any tube amp—there’s a switch on the back that will vary the actual wattage. I came up with that about 25 years ago. I’ve done probably hundreds of them—it’s a very popular mod.
Have you noticed any trends lately in
terms of what amps players are using?
A lot of people just want something
small that they can play at home—something
they can play in the living room
without deafening everybody.
Are you still innovating with different
mods?
Oh yeah. I’m just building on a new
one now. It’s nothing fancy, just a mod a
guy’s been asking for.
What was he looking for?
I don’t think he knew, so I just made
something I thought he’d like. My goal was to make it sound full and punchy without
having to put any holes in it because
it’s a mid-’60s Bandmaster. I didn’t want
to do anything that couldn’t be removed
completely in about 20 minutes. I wanted
to make an extra gain stage without making
any holes.
What’s special about your designs?
They sound fantastic. They’re almost
unbreakable. One of the ways I like to
challenge myself is using fewer parts than
anybody else uses and making something
that works better. It’s all my own design,
they all have unique circuits, they’re not
really like anything else. They all have
their own unique sounds, and they’re all
different.
How has West Coast culture influenced
your career and ambitions?
I’ve been out here since the ’60s. I don’t
really know what it’s like to live anywhere
else. I like the West Coast. We’ve got mountains and oceans, winding roads
for sports cars, and anything I want I can
get—I can buy, or have it made, within six
blocks of my shop. My shop is kind of like
having my own amusement park. I’ve got
everything I like. My electronics shop has an
amazing assortment of esoteric test gear. I’ve
got two Tektronix tube curve tracers, and
all kinds of laboratory instrumentation, and
then in the back I have a full metal shop so
I can do machining or sheet metal work,
and next to that I have a full wood shop so
I can build cabinets in the back. I also have
a restoration shop, and on the other side of
the wall I have a state-of-the-art recording
studio and a tracking room there. Of course,
it’s all soundproof—it’s a good place to try
out things. If someone wants to try out an
amp, they can go in there and they won’t
bother anybody. I probably wouldn’t leave if
I didn’t have kids.
How old are your kids?
I have 6-year-old twins. A boy and a girl.
Are they going to be musicians?
Gosh, I hope not. I would hope I raised
them better than that. Sometimes they take
instruments from the studio that they want
to play with, but they’re just getting to the
point where they won’t break it faster than I
can tell them not to.
But you have a repair shop.
Yes. I’m still doing repair when I can.
This year it’s been hard for people to
catch me since I’ve been out touring so
much. I closed for a couple months to
move the shop into a bigger unit. It was
just this big, empty, dirty space and we
had to tear a couple walls down, clean the
whole place out, paint it, and do a couple
of walls … so I’ve been kind of hard to
catch. Hopefully I’ll be able to do more
this year.
How do people generally hear about
your business?
I think word of mouth. I’ve been doing it
for so long on the West Coast that pretty
much everyone knows who I am—plus
I’m the guy from X. I’m often out on tour,
which is the only problem, as far as them
getting hold of me.
So does being Billy Zoom help or hinder
your business in the end?
I’m not sure it does either. I was doing it a
long time before there was X. And, then I
was Billy Zoom, but I don’t think it carried
much weight. It’s worked out well for me.
Many people have called you an icon.
How do you relate to that?
I think it’s great. They could call me a lot
worse things. I’ll accept it.
What’s on the immediate horizon for
your amp shop?
I’m still kind of putting things away from
after the move. I’ll be around more in the
coming year than I have been. People can
come into the shop. In the tracking room
of my studio I usually have the Cowboy,
the blue one, the little 4-watt one, and my
X amp, and my old Bassman head has a
bunch of my mods on it so people can try
it and see what I can do.
In the Shop with Mr. Zoom
The time that Billy Zoom puts into handwiring designs he says are “almost unbreakable” is what requires him to make gear in limited-production runs. As he works on custom builds and repairs in his shop, Zoom keeps his original amps with signature mods (including the wattage-varying “multiwatt” mod he came up with 25 years ago) on hand to show customers what he can do. Here’s a look at three of his main creations.
Little Kahuna
The Little Kahuna is an all-tube,
high-end reverb and tremolo
housed in one unit. These
tone machines use one 6BM8
tube and two 12AX7s, with
dual footswitching for silent
movement between effects.
The cabinets are dovetailed
7-ply Baltic birch covered in
heavy NubTex that’s available
in blonde, black, brown, or
tweed. This is Zoom’s only current
model in serial-numbered
production, with the number
made around 70.
Cowboy Amp
Zoom’s 20-watt Cowboy amp
was built originally as a prototype
for Gretsch. He plans to
start production of this amp
and his “Little Blue Killer” (see
below) later this year, starting
with runs of 50 amps per
model. This design has the essence
of cowboy-style amps
from the ’50s and early ’60s,
including tooled-leather binding,
wraparound grille, and a
steer-head logo. It also has
the reverb and tremolo circuits
from the Little Kahuna, as well
as a modified Baxendale EQ.
The Little Blue Killer
This 18-watt amp (also
designed for Gretsch) uses
EL84 power tubes and has
just a volume control and a
single, active tone control.
“When you turn the knob, it
moves the boost frequency
up or down, which gives it a
fantastic range,” Zoom says.
Photos by John Gilhooley