John Doe seems to be coming to terms with being an aging rock star. Not that, in his mid-forties, the frontman of X — the most important punk band to come out of Los Angeles — is anything like a dinosaur of rock. But in an hour-long mostly acoustic set at this blue-collar tavern in rural Oregon, Doe freely mixed X songs from the Seventies and Eighties with tunes from his three solo CDs of the Nineties and some unreleased material.
“Playing new songs is all well and good, except when you’re in the audience,” he said about 10 minutes into his performance. “I’ve been in the audience when they play songs I don’t know, and I thought, ‘well, this is fucked.’ So, I’ve relented and I play some X songs.”
With that he launched into a country two-step take on “Painting the Town Blue” from X’s 1983 album More Fun in the New World. That opened the floodgates and the crowd started calling out song titles, and Doe ended up doing a “request minute” with snippets of “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline,” “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts,” and two or three others from X’s first two albums, Los Angeles and Wild Gift. He also sprinkled the set with “Poor Girl,” “Burning House of Love,” “White Girl,” “Hothouse,” and “The Have Nots.” The crowd sang along on all of them, but particularly the last, an anthem to the working class that might as well have been written with this setting in mind.
Punk started out as blue-collar music, and X was always at heart a working-class band, among the first to meld punk and that quintessential redneck genre, rockabilly. But Doe and X’s co-anchor, his former wife Exene Cervenka, met in a poetry workshop, and the band also paid homage to that most LA of LA bands, The Doors. It could be argued that these tangled roots accounted for X’s effectiveness and popularity with such disparate audiences, from street kids to elitist avant-garde poets.
But on this night Doe was all common-man charm. Dressed in what looked like a thrift store shirt and off-brand jeans, Doe hung out in the tavern during the opening sets — listening, applauding, sipping a beer, and talking to whoever came over with a few words. He took the stage mere moments after the second opening act finished, launching into “Highway 5,” followed by “Willamette.” The latter is about a man with a “will work for food” sign, set on the banks of the Willamette River, which flows almost within a stone’s throw of this tavern’s front door. A confluence of art and life, if you will.
All of Doe’s post-X songs worked very well in this solo acoustic setting; in my opinion, better than their recorded versions, which have tended to be overproduced for my taste. These included “Tragedy by Definition,” “Love Knows,” “Safety,” and “Kissing” from 1995’s Kissingsohard and “The Unhappy Song” from the 1998 EP For the Rest of Us.
Among the unreleased songs was one about a car wreck involving a drunken driver — a retelling of the old Roy Acuff weepy “The Wreck on the Highway,” but told from the point of view of the injured and possibly dying driver. Another was a love song from a typical John Doe point of view, with the refrain, “If you’re always right, what the hell am I?”
The supportive crowd drank up everything Doe served, but it was the X songs that won the night. Nearly everybody sang along, some with fists pumping the air, on the lines “Dawn comes soon enough for the working class/It keeps getting sooner or later,” from “The Have Nots.” As the clock crept from Thursday night into Friday morning, Doe closed with a second encore, choosing the countrified “Someone Like You,” from the punk group’s side project, The Knitters. Several days later, this solo acoustic version, somehow tender and biting at the same time, is still running through my mind.
Independence, Oregon – August 19, 1999
