X’s John Doe on the band’s timeless music, ahead of its show at Knuckleheads Friday

John Doe has been many things in his life: writer, actor, poet. But he’s likely best known for X, the long-running SoCal punk band in which he sings with Exene Cervenka, and plays bass alongside guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer DJ Bonebrake. The quartet celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and despite the decades that have passed since “We’re Desperate” and “Los Angeles,” the anger and frustration in those and other classics are still frighteningly relevant.

I spoke with Doe in advance of X’s upcoming show at Knuckleheads.

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The Pitch: It seems that among my friends, everyone is really excited about the 40th anniversary tour, but also surprised that X has been a band for 40 years.

John Doe: [chuckles] You’re tellin’ me.

Does the history of the band really come to the forefront when you do an anniversary tour such as this?

For sure. It’s something that sinks in over a little bit of time. You don’t really think about it, and then, once it’s upon you, you have a reaction kind of like what you had: “Holy shit! Really?” Which is good, because then, you don’t feel as if it’s been a grind. And then, you have the opportunity to start thinking, “What can we do that’s special? What can we do that’s different to honor it?”

So, we have this tour, we have an exhibit going up at the Grammy Museum in L.A., and we’re doing a bit of a different set than we’ve been working on for the last couple of years — that’s pretty much what we can do, you know? [laughs]

What I really appreciate about X is that the band seems to exist simultaneously as part of the punk movement, but also apart from it, due to the band’s wholehearted embrace of roots music. It’s not liberty spikes and leather jackets.

Punk rock never necessarily was. It’s maybe come to be defined by that, but it never really was just that. If you think of the roots of punk rock music, it’s all very eclectic. Blondie is not like the Ramones is not like the Talking Heads, and we’re not like the Germs. Even the Germs aren’t like Fear.

Our embracing of roots music, I think, comes from our age and our upbringing. Everybody listened to that kind of music. You just couldn’t help it — it was always kind of on the radio. We drew a line at one point, saying, “We are part of the future. We join the line that’s being drawn to be part of the future, and not of the past.” We embraced the idea of being part of a punk-rock band, but on the other hand, the Germs always called us fucking hippies because we played slow songs.

Nowadays, some misinformed punk-rock bands might say, “Nah, nah, nah — they’re not punk rock,” but they say that about the Ramones, and you can’t be any more punk rock than the Ramones.

The combination of those two aspects — an embrace of roots music but also looking to the future — is what really makes the music of X rather timeless. Like a Chuck Berry song, it just sounds like youth.

I appreciate that. Chuck Berry was one of our heroes, and he took T-Bone Walker and Jimmy Reed and just ramped it up a little bit more, in the same way that the Stray Cats or the Blasters did their version of that. We did our version of just upping the ante, upping the speed, upping the volume.

As far as being timeless, I think that’s just in the recording or the basic approach to the music. We never mentioned Reagan in our political songs. [chuckles] And Ray Manzarek helped us with that as well, because that was one of the things that the Doors did. The Doors just recorded like a blues band — and they were, kind of — but they were different. That helps with the timeless element.

When you toured with the Sadies on the Country Club record a few years back, part of the set included a version of X’s “The New World,” and it totally fit as a classic country number.

A song that has meaning can be reinterpreted many ways. You can play it with a full band, or you can play it with an acoustic guitar. Even it’s some unlikely kind of jammy song, you can still play it on a solo instrument and it feels. I just heard Bobby Womack do an acoustic version of “Across 110th Street,” and it was awesome. It was just two acoustic guitars, and it was so funky. You couldn’t imagine that song being on two acoustic guitars, because it’s just so big.

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Every time I play “The New World,” I thank Exene for writing the words and not mentioning Reagan, as well as having the point of view in the story coming from a bum. The whole story starts from the point of view of a bum who just wants to get into a bar at six in the morning, because that’s when the dive bars open, and it’s like, “What the hell?”

He’s totally out of the loop and doesn’t know what’s going on: “The bars weren’t open this morning. It was better before they voted for what’s his name.” He doesn’t even know who it is, but it translates, because there were some far liberals who thought Obama was just a big compromiser, and then there’s some far-right sympathizers who think Donald Trump is too weak.

John Doe plays a free lunchtime concert at Vinyl Renaissance on Friday, May 5, while X plays Knuckleheads that night with opener Skating Polly. Details on the Vinyl Renaissance performance are here, and you can find more information on the Knuckleheads show here.