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.’”
Micah Blue Smaldone
Micah Blue Smaldone
Micah Blue Smaldone has a story that in many ways mirrors my own. Growing up in the pleasant (but less-than-stimulating) atmosphere of a quiet New England town, Smaldone found his salvation in skateboarding and punk rock.... Sounds familiar!
Kennebunk, Maine, lit some kind of fire under Smaldone, and the road ever since has been long and winding, indeed. He went from being a founding member of the snappy and provocative punk group the Pinkerton Thugs, to producing a series of beguiling, mostly acoustic solo records that almost exist out of time: His phrases, both vocal and musical, are consistently poetic and graceful.
“The beauty of music-making is that there is always somewhere new to go, but it’s also important to remember that we all came from somewhere.”
After 20 years of continuous touring, Smaldone credits his approach to neither his hometown nor his current digs, where he builds excellent amplifiers under the moniker Arkham Sound in South Portland, Maine. Rather, he says, “The strongest memories are the ones where I felt that I was part of a moment that called upon everyone present. A performer is only part of the equation. Scenes, movements, even just circles of friends who are all feeling something together at a certain time, place, era, stage of life—for me that’s what gives urgency to a musical experience. I am so lucky to have felt that so many times already in my life.”
Micah has reconnected with his roots in a big way in the last couple years, forming the rock trio Wake in Fright and releasing a new eponymous album that offers a set of confident, Clash-inspired tunes that might just get you back in the pit!
Charlie Rauh
Photo by Andrew Golledge
Charlie Rauh didn’t just take the road less traveled; he cut his own very unique path. Growing up in the South, first in Huntsville, Alabama, and then Herndon, Virginia, Rauh began forming his musical personality in the gathering clouds.
“I remember the scent in the air before the intense storms we would get, and the shade of green the sky turned before a tornado. I didn’t play an instrument at this time in my life, but the atmospheric elements of the environment had a massive emotional impact on me.” Nature’s push and pull are all over Rauh’s playing, which centers around a measured, intimate, fingerpicked style that is truly his own. I still have the business card that he gave me when we first met, and the tagline still puts a smile on my face: “Charlie Rauh—Won’t Play Loud. Can’t Play Fast.”
Rauh is now an in-demand session player in his current home of New York City, and recently participated in a first-of-its-kind residency at the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine. “I was brought in based on my solo guitar work, with the directive of translating the intention of interspecies wellness through my music. The experience was completely life-changing for me, and the music I composed for solo acoustic guitar and 6-piece choir would become my album, Theoria. In addition to performing the music live, I have been presenting guest lectures on the process as well as publishing written pieces and lessons on the process I used to create it. The way I think about music has been deeply impacted by my time spent with the animals and doctors I worked with.”Rosali
Photo by Jamie Davis
I first became aware of Rosali when she released her excellent second album Trouble Anyway in 2018. This year, her ascension continues with Bite Down, her Merge Records debut. The album is full of masterful melodies, rollicking alt-country backing, and no small amount of artsy, homespun guitar goodness. Originally hailing from Michigan, Rosali considers Philadelphia to be her hometown: “I spent 12 years there—my formative adult years. The scene was cross-genre, tough—in a good way—and psychedelic. So many intelligent players, intricate and also bone-headed. I think there was a beautiful mix of approaches and appreciation for one another, at least in the early days. I think of Jack Rose and Meg Baird, Mary Lattimore, Weyes Blood. I went to a lot of noise and DIY shows in West Philly. Not to mention the energy of the city itself. Just rough and raw and very real. It toughened up this midwestern girl in an invaluable way. I owe a lot to that place.”
James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg
Photo by Joan Shelley
Of all the musicians I spoke to for this column, James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg have probably logged the most miles. Elkington grew up in the English village of Chorleywood, about an hour outside of London, while Salsburg spent his youth in Louisville, Kentucky. To date, the pair have produced three outstanding records of guitar duets (their latest, All Gist, is out now), and have also collaborated on several albums for Joan Shelley, a top-tier singer-songwriter who happens to be married to Salsburg.
Despite musical excursions in and out of London from the age of 16, Elkington’s imagination was truly captured by the Chicago scene of the early 2000s, with bands like Gastr del Sol and Tortoise being his guiding lights.
“I had got it into my head that Chicago was a musical wonderland where everyone played on each other’s records and labels really supported each other, and when I came here that turned out to be sort of true.” Indie music in Chicago is historically known for being some shade of “post”—post rock, post hardcore, etc.—but Elkington’s expansive playing takes in the past, present, and future. He can effortlessly conjure contrapuntal folk baroque, fuzzy, abstract expressionism, and pretty much everything in between! Elkington carries the musical influences of his place of origin, as well as those from his current home, with equal aplomb.
The connection that Elkington found with Nathan Salsburg is of a rare and wonderful kind. Like Elkington, Salsburg is something of a musical polymath. He came up in the vibrant punk and post-rock scene of ’80s and ’90s Louisville, where bands like Slint, Rodan, and Squirrel Bait were redefining rock for a new generation. All the while, Salsburg was absorbing the Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, and Dave Van Ronk records played by his parents. After stints in a handful of local bands and a few years in New York City, Salsburg returned to Louisville with “a desire to make music with focus, rigor, thoughtfulness, and peace of mind.” He developed a highly melodic and animated fingerpicking style that has put him at the top of his class in the world of guitar soli.
But if one guitar is great, can’t two be greater? Enter Elkington, and a wonderful partnership was born. Not since John Renbourn and Stefan Grossman have two players cooked up such a heady brew of English and American folk-guitar concepts, and the transcribers of the future will surely be scratching their heads trying to untangle Elkington and Salsburg’s playful, harmonically dense lines.
Whether we realize it or not, the places we are from, the places where we are, and the places that we’re going play a huge role in the music we make. We can even look at our individual journeys like we might look at the structure of a song. Is your hometown the intro, the overture, or is it actually the theme that runs through the whole piece? Is your song carefully composed, or are there a few extended improvised sections? How different will the ending be from the beginning? To paraphrase author Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Wherever we go, there we are.”
![Knocked Loose Rig Rundown [2024]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/rig-rundown-knocked-loose-2024.jpg?id=52195176&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
If hell had a guitar tone, it’d be what Knocked Loose’s Isaac Hale and Nicko Calderon conjure up from their Ibanez 7-string beasts. The band’s mission since day one has been to pummel listeners with the most extreme form of hardcore music. Over the past decade they’ve throttled through all limits, making each breakdown, each riff, each scream, and each performance outdone by the next. A more recent (and seemingly) conflicting goal has been to infect the mainstream with their brutality. Their brand-new third album, You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To, paired them with pop producer Drew Fulk (Kevin Gates, NLE Choppa, Disturbed, Lil Wayne), and over the last two years, they’ve played Coachella and Bonnaroo, partnered with hip-hop duo $uicideboy$ for a sold-out tour, and were announced as direct support for Slipknot’s 25th anniversary tour. Both of the band’s goals are being accomplished, as their sound has never been more punishing orpopular.
Before Knocked Loose’s sold-out show at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works, guitarists Isaac Hale and Nick Calderon invited PG’s Perry Bean onstage for a fresh conversation about their updated mercenary squad. During our time with the Hale and Calderon, we learn about their custom 7-string Ibanez doom brooms, Hale explains moving on from tube amps and pedalboards to Quad Cortex units and MIDI switching, and Calderon details finding his place in the band and adjusting to an extra low-B string.
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Isaac's Iceman
When we spoke with the Oldham County, Kentucky, crew five years ago, cofounding guitarist Isaac Hale was using an Ibanez RGDIX7MPB. He’s still in the Ibanez family and strictly uses 7-string instruments, but he’s gravitated to the iconic Iceman shape for his pit-provoking duties. This white custom configuration features a lighter nyatoh body, DiMarzio Fusion Edge 7 ceramic humbuckers, a single master volume knob, and a smaller neck profile. If all goes well, he uses this guitar onstage all night. He uses a custom set of D’Addario NYXL strings with the current low-B string a thick .070 gauge.
Nicko's No.1
Before joining Knocked Loose in 2020, guitarist Nicko Calderon had never played a 7-string guitar. (“It was a huge learning curve for me,” he says.) Like Isaac, if all goes as planned, Nicko will only play the above Ibanez Prestige AZ24047 all set. One of the requests Nicko had for Ibanez was to keep it simple with a single Seymour Duncan Nazgul Bridge 7-string humbucker and a lone volume knob. He goes with a D’Addario NYXL (.011–.064) 7-string set.
Beautiful Backups
If things go sideways, both Isaac and Nicko have safety nets: Hale has a custom-painted Ibanez Iron Label Iceman ICTB721, and Calderon goes with another single-pickup Ibanez Prestige AZ24047.
Less Is More
Both guitarists have downsized to the Neural DSP Quad Cortex, and they have a pair of mirrored setups for both on and offstage. Hale and Calderon are both modeling 5150 III heads, but Calderon is going with the EL34 flavoring for a slightly different sonic distinction. Core sounds are built off the 5150 IIIs and other ingredients sprinkled in throughout the set include some slight chorus, heavily modulated “evil chorus” with an added semitone above the base sound, and an Electro-Harmonix (in the rack) that provides a layered octave sound for pure chaos. The EHX Freeze pedal onstage is put in place so they can hold a note and tune underneath it. They roam the stage untethered thanks to the Shure GLXD16+ digital wireless guitar pedal system.
Bring the Pain
The two Quad Cortex units work with Seymour Duncan PowerStage 200 amps to hit Orange PPC412-C cabs onstage that are loaded with Celestion Vintage 30 speakers.
Shop Knocked Loose's Rig
Ibanez Iron Label Iceman ICTB721
Ibanez Prestige AZ24047 Electric Guitar
Seymour Duncan Nazgul High Output Bridge 7-string Humbucker Pickup
Neural DSP Quad Cortex
Electro-Harmonix Freeze
Seymour Duncan PowerStage 200
Orange PPC412-C - 240-watt 4x12" Straight Cabinet
Celestion Vintage 30 Speakers
Shure GLXD16+ Digital Wireless Guitar Pedal System
Radial ProDI 1-Channel Passive Instrument Direct Box
D'Addario NYXL1164 NYXL Nickel Wound Electric Guitar Strings -.011-.064 Regular Light, 7-String