John Doe is still subversive after all these years

John Doe has lived a full life. The 60-year-old singer for influential Los Angeles punk band X — which he co-founded in 1980 — is still active in the group, and he has been pushing a successful solo career for 25 years. Last May, Doe released a compilation album celebrating his solo work, The Best of John Doe: This Far. The 20-song collection is not in chronological order and does not highlight Doe’s best-known songs. Rather, Doe cherry-picked the cuts he liked and went from there, and the result is a record that serves both longtime fans and new recruits. Ahead of Doe’s Monday-night show at Knuckleheads Saloon, The Pitch called him at his San Diego home to talk punk rock and to reminisce.

The Pitch: What led you to want to create a best-of album?

Doe: A bunch of people — some friends of mine — kept saying, “Why don’t you do this?” And I try to listen to my friends. So it happened like anything, you know, because you can.

This is a collection of highlights from your entire catalog, which is diverse and deep. How did you narrow your selection?

It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. There were 90-something songs, maybe a hundred [that I started with]. As far as choosing the songs, I chose songs that got maybe a little bit of attention earlier and songs that I thought weren’t necessarily on the radar. It was everything that I thought would be a good fit.

There was maybe a touch of nostalgia in it, but some of the subject matter [of the old songs] — man, I was so glad that I wasn’t in that same place. So much stuff about being miserable, and I was like, “Thank God!” [Laughs.] I think I was thankful and relieved that we didn’t use some of the tricks of the day [in the old songs], so they didn’t sound dated. And those that did, we didn’t include — it was like they never happened. [Laughs.]

Let’s talk about X for a moment. You guys are a still-active punk band, 36 years after you came together, and I feel like that’s a big accomplishment. There are very few bands that make it that far in their careers.

[Laughs.] Yeah, and have all the original members.

Right. What have you learned over the years being in a band like that, from your band members and from yourself?

The biggest and best lesson I’ve learned is to be forgiving. A band is like a family, for better or for worse. I don’t know what your family’s like, but if you want to hold a grudge, you’re not going to last. Or it’s going to be really awkward at the Thanksgiving table or something. I think at this point, we’re actually better friends than we have been maybe ever because we accept each other.

I’ve also learned that the [old X] songs are actually still very good, and we can reinterpret them and make them fresh again. We did that on our last tour, when we played some songs semiacoustically. Sometimes the melody and the musicianship [of the X songs] can get overshadowed by the impact of a live punk-rock show, and it was nice to hear them in a different light.

I feel like there’s a lot about X that wouldn’t really be called punk by today’s standards. Genres tend to unravel and remake themselves over time. If X were to form today, in this current music climate, how do you think the band would be received? What place do you think it would have?

We would definitely not sound the same because we were definitely a product of that era, even if we didn’t sound like everybody else — that was the point of punk rock. If you look at the way that history gets rewritten or the way that things have evolved, it was sometime around ’79 or ’80 when hardcore started to really come to the scene. It really overtook the first idea of what punk rock was. If you look back to the birth of punk rock in New York — Blondie, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, all those bands — they didn’t sound like Black Flag. And once Black Flag arrived and the whole scene got ramped up, “punk rock” really came into fashion.

The point was that you could do whatever you want. And that’s why punk rock gets redefined. I like to think of punk rock in the more pure form, as being much more eclectic and DIY. Otherwise, it becomes a little more mono-culture and squashed down than we want it to be.

With some of the bands you mentioned, that music had a place when it came out. It was the zeitgeist of an era. You’ve seen the music industry change so much over the years. From where I’m sitting, I can get really disappointed in how we have so much music and so much content, and there’s a lot of it that’s not really saying anything.

Well, there’s so little focus in anything. I think it [the message] is more in the hands of everyone than one person or group being a leader — and that can be said for everything. The media is more controlled now. There are fewer outlets, fewer newspapers. Information has been kind of democratized. But I wouldn’t say the outlook [for music] is bleak. I think you have to cut through the static. You have to be able to look the other direction when someone says, “Hey, look over here.”

On the other hand, punk rock was never meant to be a political soapbox. It was just meant to say, “Don’t be a fucking drone, and make up your own mind.” And there were a few bands that did that — the Dead Kennedys, the Clash — but they were more just like, “Don’t be an idiot. Ask questions.” I think there are plenty of people nowadays that ask plenty of questions that are smart.