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This interview was done at First Avenue in 1995.

Krusty: I was wondering what the reasoning was that you decided to get back together and start recording again in 1993 after about five years off.

John: Short version, we wanted to. Longer version, we had other offers to do solo work, which we took advantage of. And at the end of 1990 we had kept... during '90 we kept getting requests to play. When is X going to play? Every time... I know when I played solo, 'Oh, it was a great show, blah, blah, blah, what about X?' So there was this buzz, continuous annoying mosquito around. And we decided to do it and it felt great and we continued. The reason why we didn't have a record out in 1991 or '92 was because we took our time. We didn't feel that it would be worth X's creative juice to just start where we picked up, I mean pick up where we left off. People do that all the time, but I think that's bullshit. So, I think we took about a good eight months to really figure out what we wanted to do, what kind of a band did we want to be. We did a lot of experimentation, a lot of songs that didn't make it onto the record. But that reflected in the production of that record.

K: Your sound, each album has always had a different sound. Was that something that just naturally happened or did you intend to make each one sound different?

J: Exene?

Exene: Well, I don't know. X stuff I didn't write the music on the X records, except the last one, so it would be hard for me to say. I think some songs just... see why do we sound the way we sound? Why do the songs sound the way they sound? Why do they change from song to song? Why... The big picture and the little picture of why they sound the way they sound is because that's what we think sounds right. If you write some lyrics and you think it sounds like it should be a quiet song or a slow song hopefully you know that. Not… so we, we sometimes try different ways before we settle on the way we play 'em.

K: Are there any songs... you've got nine albums out now, and seven of them are all new stuff. Are there any songs that you will not play at all any more? For any specific reason or anything?

J: For a while I had a hard time playing 'Johny Hit And Run Paulene,' because people missed the point. They thought it was actually a... I would see eighteen and nineteen year old guys with their fists in the air saying 'Right on!' So, we stopped playing that one for a while. Now it's kind of caught up a little. But, no, not really. Some songs, they don't hold up as well. Luckily, we do have a lot of material, so we can pick and choose.

K: Now, with 'Jobny Hit And Run Paulene' and deciding not to play it for that reason, do you feel that you are in any way responsible as a band as far as what the audiences get out of it? Do you feel responsible if they're getting the wrong message?

E: No! Because, if they're getting the wrong message, it's their fault. But, we certainly wouldn't want to put something out that was a wrong message to start with.

J: So, in that way, yes. We do. We're careful about... not careful, but you edit what you do. You look at it and make sure that you're... if you're representing a contrary point of view, you make sure that that's clear. Like in 'Los Angeles' when we say, 'Mexican, they gave her a lot of shit' or 'Nigger' or something like that, then it has to be clear that that's from a narrator's point of view.

E: Although, I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't get it from that song.

K: You guys just started up your own label. Does that mean you are gonna keep going, or did you do that so you could help other bands out?

E: Well, you know there's a lot of options with that and we'll wait and see. But, you know, we really don't think that far ahead. We just put out our first record and we're on tour supporting it, and it's doing pretty well. We're over the initial distribution and art problems from starting a new business and picking maybe somebody that wasn't the right person to do a certain job, and getting rid of them and getting someone else... It's hard. Sometimes you get lucky.

J: The main thing you realize though in your creative and personal life is when something is fucked up and something's wrong you gotta be honest with yourself and not be in denial about it and say 'whoa'. And if someone does a piss-poor job of printing something, you take it back to 'em. And just don't get off the phone, make their life miserable. And, so you're an asshole to that person. Big deal. They didn't hold up their end of the bargain.

K: Exene, now I know you've got some spoken word stuff out and some books. Could you tell me a little about that? How do you feel about all of that?

E: Well, I started doing readings... I guess John and I met at a writing workshop in '76 and we had both already done readings before that. And then I did a book with Lydia Lunch in the early eighties and a record with Wanda Coleman in the early eighties. And then the next book that came out was 'Just Another War' about the Gulf War. And then 'Virtual Unreality'. And then I had a single on Kill Rock Stars and then I have now, a new record called' Surface To Air Serpents' on 2.13CD which is Henry Rollins' label. So, obviously I feel pretty much like I'm, a writer first before I'm anything else. So, it's like the only thing that I really care about besides my son. I mean, like, you know if John died I would definitely be upset. But, I mean the thing is...

J: For at least a day.

E: Besides that, like if that's the only thing that, if it was taken from me, I would just as soon be a junkie then, cuz there really wouldn't be any point. I really feel that way. To me, writing is so important. And I think it's important for so many reasons besides just that I think it's what I'm supposed to do and that's what I am is a writer, but cuz of the information I feel like I'm the minister of information for the thinking people because the media is down the drain, totally, in all of it's aspects. We've been fucked.

J: I have something to say about writing. Is that just because you can put some words that may shock people on a page doesn't mean that you're a writer. You may be writing, but you have to work at it for a long time and you have to know what's inside yourself or try to use writing as a discovery to figure that out, which is where I started from. Of the whole poetry slam thing is a complete farce. It's so far away from the spirit of writing which is non-competitive. The idea that you would get prizes on audience response for reading a piece of work is outrageous. I mean, if you think of the most current writers, of writers from the Greek era, it's insane. You want to communicate. And, maybe those people are communicating something. But, it's like communicating the hot babe calendar or something. It's communicating such a low common denominator of pop culture. You have to have some discovery and some redemption, some knowledge, some learning in your writing.

K: At the risk of asking something that's been asked a million times, what do you think of the new pop / punk stuff that's...

E: You're perceptive to know that people have been asking us that. Well, you know, I think there was this punk thing that happened. It started in New York, spread very quickly in England, got around the country in places like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. It was just a great thing. It was Blondie, The Talking Heads, Devo, X, Fear, The Dickies, The Germs, The Motels, all these bands were either on the new wave side of punk or on the hard-core side of punk. But, what it really was, was a renaissance in grass-roots music. There were no clubs, no radio stations, no bars to play. There was no concept of live original music in this country until that happened. That kinda stayed around for a long time and then when Nirvana came and Pearl Jam came they kind of replaced the lagging sales in heavy metal, so that kind of music got promoted, so alternative music became the replacement of heavy metal and hard rock so that record companies and MTv and radio stations could continue to have a product to sell to advertisers so their kingdom would not fall apart. Regardless of how good that music was. Those are two different scenes, two different eras, two different sets of bands. I think Nirvana was definitely a punk band. And I think that only they can tell themselves if they're punk bands or not, but I have a really hard time with the semantics of this Green Day is a punk band thing, because to my mind, it's impossible, quantum physics.

J: And also, you can't remove music from… you can't label a piece of music without the social background that it comes from. It's a media mistake that has happened somehow because it's not, they should have found a better word for it.

E: Well, it's a clever plan by the media to completely deprive people of all the good things in life which are knowledge and beauty and literature and art and the government. Just the whole kind of dumbing of America, as I'm sure you've heard that phrase, don't give people any information, any knowledge, any background, any culture, any social context to put things in. Just let them think that it came out of a factory, it's got a logo on it, they're supposed to buy it, it's on TV, they understand it, it started yesterday, it'll end tomorrow, buy something else then.

J: It's not that grim. That's happened over and over again. It just happens to be that the people that were in the limelight in the past really had a little more to support it. If the Pretenders were popular for a couple of years, there was something behind that that supported it. I don't question the motives of bands that are very popular right now, cuz I think they're probably pretty good, but I don't know. And they also may have a support or a community where they came from, but I'm not part of that, so I can't really say. Public image is a very weird thing.

K: Is there anything else you feel I sould know about the band?

J: X is the punk rock hammer of the gods! The reason X is still around is because we were misfits and felt a need to create. It's not just a roll of the dice, 'Gee, I wonder if we can get famous and rich and push our weight around and make people jump when we say to jump?' It's to make stuff and hopefully enlighten people a little bit to see something that they normally see from a different perspective.

E: See, we started out saying that, and the media thought 'Wow, that is great. This is a band that really should be a band. They're great players and it's all these different musicians and backgrounds and this weird singing and it's really interesting and they're great.' And they started kind of exposing us to the public cuz they really believed in us. And then when we didn't become rich and famous and successful they all said, 'Oh yeah, they're back. They're trying again.' And it's like we maintained the same kind of thing and then they think that like when we came out with 'Wild Thing' it was like we just did it for fun and then it was on a movie soundtrack, but nobody ever knew it was us. It wasn't like it was a big hit. But, I don't know. I want to go sit somewhere in a dark cave for about three weeks.