HIP LOS ANGELES PUNK: X'S "HUNGRY WOLF"

Earlier today, for whatever odd reason, I found myself standing with my feet spread something like four or five feet apart, like a swordsman. Immediately, I flashed on Billy Zoom, guitar player for the Los Angeles punk band X. In their video for the song "Hungry Wolf," Zoom stood the same way, grinding out his gnarly guitar sounds, while bandmates John Doe and Exene Cervenka wailed their haunting vocals. I've never really known X that well, but what I've heard over the years I've always liked.

From Wikipedia:

X is a noted punk rock band, formed in Los Angeles in 1977. While they achieved only limited mainstream success, they were widely considered one of the most accessible and tuneful of Los Angeles' many punk bands. Their landmark 1980 record Los Angeles resonated so loudly with the artisans of the city it is named after, that the band received an Official Certificate of Recognition from the City of Los Angeles in acknowledgment of their important contributions to Los Angeles music and culture.

And

Much of X's early material had a rockabilly edge. Doe and Cervenka co-wrote most of the group's songs, and their slightly off-kilter harmony vocals remain perhaps the group's most distinctive element. Their lyrics tended to be straight-out poetry, and comparisons to Charles Bukowski and Raymond Chandler were made from the start.

Click here for the rest.

"Hungry Wolf" was probably their biggest hit, in heavy rotation on MTV back in the early years, which is how I know it in the first place. Their bass player and male lead singer, Doe, sounded and looked a great deal like Jim Morrison, and the fact that Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek was producing their records led to speculation among my teenaged friends that he might just be the Lizard King himself, back from Africa after faking his death ten years earlier, in 1972--of course, that wasn't true, but it was definitely fun to think about. Their female vocalist, Exene Cervenka, had a marvelous Yoko Ono quality to her singing, and her quirky, punky good looks fed strongly into my hormone fed fourteen-year-old libido.

But listen to me writing in the past tense: X is still together, touring sporadically, still writing songs. Maybe I should try to get into them, buy some of their records. Maybe see them if they ever head through Louisiana.

Anyway, here's a Youtube clip of the video for "Hungry Wolf." Better check it out soon; MTV's owner, Viacom, just issued Youtube a terse demand: remove our clips now. I think this X video was recorded straight off what was once a pretty good cable channel. Who knows if it'll be there tomorrow?



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