X's John Doe: my best and worst gigs ever

Continuing our series My Best And Worst Gigs Ever, X singer and bassist John Doe talks about two shows that stands out in his mind as being particularly memorable – and one that went tragically wrong.

“This is hard – I could think of 10 shows right now that might be our best. But I'm going to go with two as being the greatest, both for their own reasons. I kind of put them in ‘then and now’ categories. The first one goes back to 1981, after we had released the album Wild Gift. It was a pretty important time for the band. We had really established ourselves in LA and had, I think, firmly planted a flag in the ground for West Coast punk rock.

“Up to this point, everybody thought you couldn’t have punk rock in LA: ‘It’s too nice and sunny Everybody’s got a Porsche and a Mercedes and a swimming pool. What can you be bummed about?’ People didn’t realize that downtown LA was one of the scariest places in the world.

“So we released Wild Gift, we did a US tour, and we came back to LA to play the Greek Theatre – six or seven thousand seats. And we sold the place out! We sold out the Greek. To do that and not even be on a major label – we were just this scrappy punk rock band – that was pretty great.

“We were in the open air, which made the sound a little strange for us at first – we were only used to playing little clubs. And we played our hearts out, too. It wasn’t one of those gigs that played itself. We were very conscious of what we were doing the whole time, but in the end, it was exalting. Things went exactly as they should.

“More than just a great gig, though, it was kind of a benchmark moment. I actually felt as if we achieved something. We had arrived and reached some sort of higher level as a band. Maybe we all felt like that… or maybe I just did. [Laughs] I thought we had proved a point, but not in a mean way – in a very cool and meaningful way.

“And hey, even my mom was there. [Laughs] I made mom proud. That’s what we all wanna do, right?”

“The more recent ‘best’ gig would be when [guitarist] Billy [Zoom] rejoined the band. We played at the Hollywood Palladium, and the thing I remember most about it is everyone was singing along with us. This was pretty impressive because we’re not known for being a quiet band – we play pretty loud. So to hear the audience singing our songs over us, that knocked me out.

“Quite honestly, the show was at a point at which we didn’t know if we were going to continue. Elektra had just put out the compilation, Beyond And Back, so there was a lot of intensive listening and hard work, a lot of ‘Can this work?’ and ‘What are we doing?’ I probably listened to about 200 hours of live tapes, trying to pick out a few live songs. But I think it was then that we all had the realization of ‘Oh, I see why people were making such a fuss about our band – we're pretty fucking good! [Laughs] Well, I’ll be damned.’ Sometimes it takes 25 years to get perspective on things.

“So we got together with Billy for the first rehearsal, and everything just clicked. It was something like 15 years since we’d played together, but it was as if we’d never stopped. You always hear about that happening, and it happened for us in just that way. It was immediate and undeniable, and that’s why we thought, ‘Yep. That’s why we were in this band in the first place.’ And the show itself at the Palladium was incredible. It validated everything we had been thinking. The good feelings were widespread that night.”

“This was a really bad gig, but unlike a lot of other bad gig stories that you hear from people that are humorous and involve things going wrong on stage and what not, this is a tragic bad gig.

“It was 1980, and we were playing the Whisky A Go Go in LA; it was two shows on the same night. Exene’s sister was coming to the second show, and she was killed in a car crash. We found out between shows, and for some reason, because we thought that’s just what people do, we played the second show.

“At first, we didn’t know she had been killed. Somebody came in and told us there had been an accident. She was being taken to the hospital, but it didn’t look good. And then very soon after, we were told that she was dead.

“Nobody in the audience knew what had happened – Exene didn’t make any kind of announcement. But I remember the people looking at us like, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’ They could tell that something was up. I don’t know how we got through it. Exene could barely stand up, could barely sing, as you can imagine. We were all in a state of shock, in total survival mode. There was no way we could get around it.

“It was a gig we never should have played. Not because it was bad musically, but because we should have honored the situation. It was just one of those nights. The show was sold out, everybody’s there – ‘We’ve gotta play, right? Isn’t that what we do?’ And sometimes the answer is no. No, you don’t have to.”

X's current East Coast US tour starts tonight (August 18) in Atlanta. Click here for dates and tickets.