The last time I wrote about John Doe, who’s playing the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival on Sunday, he had just moved from Southern California to Fairfax. The 63-year-old singer-songwriter is the co-founder of X, one of the bands that defined the Los Angeles punk rock explosion in the 1970s. He had come here from Bakersfield, where he lived while his kids were growing up. I called him Marin’s newest rock star.
That was in 2012, and he was thrilled to be living in what he called “the cutest little hippie town.” He was amazed that, in his words at the time, “it has somehow resisted the big houses and the fancy people that have taken over Marin neighborhoods.”
When I spoke to him this week, I wanted to find out if he still felt that way, and to interview him about his new book, “Under the Big Black Sun” (Da Capo Press, $26.99), a look back at the early days of punk rock in L.A. through his eyes and the eyes of music publisher Tom DeSavia and the other musicians and groupies who helped create the weirdly wonderful scene that produced bands like X, the Germs, Black Flag and, believe it or not, Belinda Carlisle and the Go Go’s. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the foreword.
“I wanted to have the real story, the more complete story told,” he explains. “I didn’t want to be the authority, I wanted many people’s stories and many people’s truths.”
Knowing how expensive housing in Marin County has become, I was only mildly surprised when he told me he no longer lives in Fairfax, one of the last of Marin’s so-called affordable communities. He said his landlord sold the house he and his girlfriend were renting out from under them. He was just about to go on tour when they were given two months to vacate the premises. They ended up in the East Bay, and now live happily on the border of Richmond and El Cerrito.
“Unfortunately, I think Fairfax is going the way of Mill Valley,” he says matter-of-factly. “Not to put it down, but there’s less room for artists, less room for bohemians. I keep threatening to make a T-shirt that says, ‘Artists — making communities cool since 1851, or whenever Walt Whitman started being a weirdo.”
Bohemian movement
In “Under the Big Black Sun,” Doe writes about graduating from Antioch College in Baltimore and working briefly as a roofer before moving to L.A. in 1976, lured by the decaying film noir “place of dreams” that Nathanael West and Charles Bukowski wrote about. He arrived just as the early punk bands were blowing the doors off clubs like the Masque, Club 88 and the Hong Kong Cafe.
“We had a sense that this was a bohemian movement,” he recalls. “We were gonna change things. We were saying, ‘Hey, this corporate rock kinda sucks. The main thing was collaboration and community. It was the beginning of a much bigger indie, DIY movement that still exists today.”
Not long after settling into a two-bedroom house in Venice, a beach town still known for its hipster sketchiness, he met Exene Cervenka, now his former wife, at the Venice Poetry Workshop. In 1977, they co-founded X with Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebrake. Although I was living in Marin then, having left L.A. in 1972, I proudly wore a black X T-shirt that I got as schwag from Slash Records, their label.
Incredibly, X still has all its original members and is gearing up for a holiday season run of shows on the West Coast.
“2017 is our 40th anniversary,” Doe says with a tinge of disbelief. “Everybody’s well. I think we’re happier and healthier now than we’ve ever been.”
Fusing Ramones-like fury with rockabilly, classic rock and smart-alecky youthful sarcasm, X called its first album, appropriately enough, “Los Angeles.” The band went on to release five more studio records, including 1981’s “Wild Gift,” named record of the year by Rolling Stone, the L.A. Times and the New York Times. They were famously featured in the Penelope Spheeris documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization.”
A rude awakening
Once they had achieved a measure of mainstream success, along with their Slash label mates the Blasters and Los Lobos, Doe and the other members of X found themselves being replaced by a second wave of hard-core punk and heavy metal bands they no longer recognized or related to.
“It was a rude awakening when Exene and I couldn’t go to a Circle Jerks show or a Fear show because everyone thought we were rock stars because we signed with Slash Records,” he remembers. “The scene evolved. At the time I was pissed. I was like, ‘How dare you come in and screw up this beautiful dream we built?’ But I can see it more philosophically now.”
Over the years, Doe has written music for TV and movies and has acted in some 50 films and TV shows, including playing A.P. Carter, patriarch of the Carter family, in the Lifetime TV movie “Ring of Fire.”
“I went from almost-hero roles to playing a cop or a dad, and now I might be finally aging into the ‘Sam’ roles, like Sam Elliott and Sam Shepard,” he says with a snicker.
Over the decades he’s recorded eight solo albums with guests like Patty Griffin, Dan Auerbach and Aimee Mann. American Songwriter calls him “one of the most distinctive and passionate voices to emerge from any American punk band.” The Boston Globe says his new album, “The Westerner,” recorded in Tucson, Arizona, is “the most striking music of his career.”
After living through the L.A. punk movement, and now putting together a book about it, Doe knows how ephemeral music scenes are, how suddenly they can change. So he doesn’t take what happened to him in Fairfax too personally. Not being a jam band kind of musician, he never really fit into the Marin scene anyway.
“What I think about the Marin or Fairfax scene is immaterial,” he says evenly. “It’s commendable and amazing that Fairfax has two or three music venues that have music almost every night. Whether I like it or connect with it doesn’t matter. It’s pretty fantastic, and they should take care of that because not everybody’s got it.”
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If you go
What: John Doe Rock ‘n’ Roll Band
Where: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
When: 1:20 p.m. Sunday
Admission: Free
Information: hardlystrictlybluegrass.com
Also: John Doe, Cookout Concert Series, 5 p.m. Oct. 23, Hopmonk Tavern, Vintage Oaks, Novato. $20 to $41.
