The Prodigal Punk

By Scott Martelle / Lettering by Joelle Storet

 

Photographs by David McClister / Ryan Olbrysh / Michael Hyatt / Steve Granitz

Published April 2010

A few minutes before midnight on a Thursday, Exene Cervenka is slicing through the sparse crowd to the stage at Costa Mesa's Detroit Bar. Cervenka, a member of the legendary Los Angeles punk band X, was supposed to begin her set at 11p.m. or maybe it was 10-time can be fluid in rock 'n roll. But the crowd doesn't seem to mind. Another hour, another beer.

At first, no one recognizes the short woman in the calf-length black dress. But as the 54-year-old Cervenka nears the bright lights, a few in the audience begin to applaud, their support seeming to propel her up the step to the knee-high stage. She slips under the strap of an acoustic guitar, and turns and smiles out over the room. Her bright-red lipstick and red boots make Cervenka look, momentarily, like a dark candle burning at both ends. Somebody at the bar shouts, “We love you, Exene!” and a few fans clap and hoot in agreement.

There was a time, Cervenka believes, that if she had shown up with X at an Orange County club like this, the reception would have been very different. To paraphrase a movie title: There would have been blood. Orange County punks and Los Angeles punks were something like counterculture matter and antimatter, and the hard-core O.C. crews had no use for the roots/folk-influenced X.

“I really couldn’t come to Orange County because it was too violent down here,” Cervenka said a few days before the show. “The Orange County punks were the hard-core kids and they hated Hollywood and they hated the Hollywood bands. … It was not OK for me to be around those kids. They didn’t like me and they didn’t want me in their scene.”

It’s true, says longtime O.C. punk guitarist Rikk Agnew, who in those days was drifting among the Adolescents, Christian Death, and other hard-core bands. It was a personality clash fueled by the O.C. punkers’ sense that they were snubbed whenever they showed up at L.A. venues such as the Masque. “It was mainly artists, society rejects and misfits, and the artsy-type people scene in Hollywood,” says Agnew, who now plays with CD1334, an offshoot of Christian Death, and with The Furnace Punx. “The violence was chaotic, misdirected, and without control. ... It seemed normal to us.”

But that’s in the distant past. Like, a generation ago. In fact, it was 30 years ago this month that X’s first album, “Los Angeles,” helped propel the band from the L.A. underground into the national spotlight with a mix of punk attitude and roots rock. X wasn’t part of the fire-breathing, blood-drawing world of hard-core that was erupting around it. Like The Clash, X’s music has energy and lyrical integrity. Its songs have structure, and melodic hooks, but are rooted in folk traditions. Tattoos, yes. Spitting glass, no.

“There was a sort of drained-energy quality to her singing,” says. C.P. Smith, who wrote about some of those early X shows as a rock critic for The Orange County Register. “There was this emotional fatigue that came through that miraculously invested these songs with a lot of intensity.”

In a genre that gave release to a generation of energy, Cervenka served as a solitary anchor. No histrionics. No stage diving or leaning into the crowd with the microphone for a shout-along. “She wouldn’t move on stage very much,” Smith says. “She was somewhat slight, and very punked-out, looks-wise, with the makeup and the hair and a lot of eyeliner. … She was enigmatic, but a force of nature.”

Robert Hilburn, the longtime rock critic for the Los Angeles Times who watched the rise of X, says Cervenka “was at the heart of one of Los Angeles’ most inspiring music scenes” and who, like punk icon Patti Smith on the East Coast, “showed she could hold her own with the men. ... She brought both a fierce passion and poetic sensitivity to her songs and music that has stood as a model for decades. She’s not just one of the greatest female rockers, but one of the greatest musical figures, period.”