Just in case you don’t recognize the name, here’s a little reminder.
Exene Cervenka and John Doe formed the Los Angeles punk rock band X in 1977. In 1980 they released their first album ‘Los Angeles.’ They would become one of the most popular punk bands ever. While there have been various hiatuses, the four original band members have continued, however sporadically, to record and tour together for more than four decades.
In addition to being her partner in forming the band, Doe and Cervenka were married. It was the first of three failed marriages for Cervenka.
In addition to her work with X, Cervenka did some solo recording and was part of two other bands, the Knitters and the Original Sinners. She wrote some poetry, experimented with spoken word and produced some art.
This story, by Tom Latham in the East Bay Times (March 3, 2006), describes how Cervenka made collages out of found objects.
“Since she first started touring with Los Angeles firebrands X in the late ‘70s, Cervenka has kept one eye on the stage, one eye on the street for kooky collectibles. Whatever she stumbled across that appealed to her, she’d pick up. Any source was fair game — thrift stores, flea markets, truck stops.
“‘But mostly off the street,’ she says. ‘Gum, candy and snack wrappers. A white wooden sign stenciled with the word ‘God.’… I’ve gathered a million different things, and I still have’em,’ Cervenka says. ‘And then I put it all together and make art out of it.’
“Cervenka, who just turned 50, used to think of trash collecting as just a hobby. Until last year, that is, when the Santa Monica Museum of Art got wind of her found-art collages (plus mixed-media concepts she’d kept hidden in more than a hundred journals) and commissioned an exhibit dubbed ‘America the Beautiful.’”
In 2006, Cervenka left Los Angeles and headed for Missouri.
“…the queen of L.A. punk moved to Jefferson City in 2006 to create collage art in a large barn. She writes, and she is still making music. ‘When you live in a big city your whole adult life, it’s nice to get away,’ she explained, ‘and I didn’t grow up in a big city; I grew up in small towns.’ Cervenka now enjoys the luxuries of rural life, appreciating her limestone house and the Black Angus cows that dot her horizon.” (Columbia [Mo.] Daily Tribune, May 1, 2008)
It was an appreciation that wouldn’t last. Four years later she was back in California, this time settling in Orange County.
In 2009, Cervenka announced that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“Exene Cervenka, a founder and vocalist of the Los Angeles punk and rockabilly band X, said in a statement released Tuesday that she has multiple sclerosis. Ms. Cervenka, 53, said in the statement that she had not been feeling well for several months and that she probably had the condition for some time. She added that the diagnosis would not affect plans for an X tour or a solo record scheduled for the fall, and directed fans to Sweet Relief, a charity for uninsured musicians founded by Victoria Williams, who has also been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.” (Dave Itzkoff, New York Times, June 2, 2009)
She would later question that diagnosis.
“Fifteen years ago, I got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, can you believe that? And then another doctor said, ‘No, you don’t [have it],’ so I went with the doctor who said, ‘No you don’t.’ About six years went by and something else weird happened, so I went to this doctor who said, ‘You definitely have it and you’re going on this medication.’ I had to start giving myself shots everyday for a while, and then I ran out of money and had no insurance, and the shots are really expensive — $7,000 for three months. So I just said, ‘Well, I may have it, I may not,’ but I can’t take the medicine anymore because I cannot afford it.
“I did a picture collage for someone I didn’t know, and her friend’s brother is the head of neurology at a hospital near me. He agreed to see me for free — he’s trying to figure out what it is. It’s a very hard thing to diagnose and I’m finding, from being public with my diagnosis that many, many women are coming to me and saying the same thing happened to them. They were told they had this, that, or the other, but it’s some immune system thing that people can’t quite pin down. The systems are similar but nobody knows what it is. It’s weird. I’m just going along trying to be healthy.” (Melissa Fossum, Phoenix New Times, Dec. 6, 2011)
In January of 2009, she and John Doe were in Seattle performing at a party celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama. But Cervenka’s world views would later take on a darker tone. This came to a head in 2014 after a mass shooting near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Billboard reported this (Chris Payne, May 29, 2014):
“On Friday May 23, gunman Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded 13 others during a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., near the campus of University of California Santa Barbara. But Exene Cervenka, singer of the long-running punk band isn’t completely convinced.
“Over the past several days, Cervenka has taken to Twitter to share numerous conspiracy theories involving the tragedy, writing, ‘added a video to a YouTube playlist… Santa Barbara Shooting Staged For Gun Control.’ In another, she wrote, ‘So sick of these hoaxes.’
“The 58-year old’s Twitter page is covered with various bits of anti-establishment paranoia, White House conspiracies, UFO stories and the like.”
Mary Elizabeth Williams, a senior writer at Salon, was pretty blunt is her assessment (May 29, 2014):
“There are few letdowns in life quite like the one that comes when you realize one of your heroes is a total crackpot. And for a whole lot of music fans just like me, the mounting evidence that (a) legendary punk goddess has gone off the rails is a real blow.
“In recent months, Exene Cervenka — author, artist and, most notably, frontwoman of X — has taken to using social media as a means of expressing her support for various truther theories. Just two months ago, Dangerous Minds called her the worst thing you can call another human being: ‘the new Alex Jones.’
“So when Cervenka links to a video that calls Richard Martinez, whose son was gunned down by Elliot Rodger on Friday, an ‘actor,’ she is spreading hurt. She is using her fame and her platform to bring a savage amount of additional grief on people who’ve lost their children. It’s unconscionable that she’s making this a public spectacle. But then, that’s what truthers do. They harass and belittle already vulnerable people and make already terrible events exponentially worse. And Exene Cervenka is no longer a punk hero. She’s just a punk.”
Better that she turn her attention back to music. In 2020, the full band released its first album in 30 years. Rolling Stone had this to say (Kory Grow, May 12, 2020):
“After a nearly 30-year gap between records, Los Angeles’ punk laureates X have dared to make a new album.
“Alphabetland, the band’s eighth album overall and first with virtuoso rockabilly guitarist Billy Zoom since 1985’s Ain’t Love Grand!, is a rare animal among comeback records — it both feels like a continuance of the band’s classic Eighties sound and it’s actually good.
“The only head scratcher is the album’s closing cut, ‘All the Time in the World,’ a jazzy, spoken-word track with Cervenka’s bummer verses about dying and atmospheric guitar courtesy of the Doors’ Robby Krieger; it’s a novelty you won’t want to hear more than once.”
Yet another record would be forthcoming last year in addition to a tour which they claim will be their last.
Daniel Kohn reviewed the album in the LA Times (July 30, 2024):
“The best thing that can be said about ‘Smoke & Fiction,’ which clocks in under 30 minutes, is that it has all of the traits of a late-era X album: the heavy punk mixed with elements of roots rock, contemplative lyrics and roaring riffs.”
In the Boston online magazine The Arts Fuse (Sept. 23, 2024), Paul Robicheau offers a look at Cervenka on this supposedly final tour.
“A signpost declares ‘The end is near’ in branding for X’s current tour, which the band warns will be their last — like the solid new Smoke & Fiction, billed as the final album that X will make. That’s not an unreasonable expectation given the punk-rock quartet’s age.
“X isn’t staggering to the finish line either way. The band’s bracing Sunday show at Tupelo Music Hall (allegedly X’s first-ever New Hampshire gig) displayed the group’s versatility, vitality and heart though a tight, engaged 80-minute show.
“The diminutive Cervenka, in embroidered jacket (including the symbols X, 77 and ?, and minidress that pictured dogs playing cards) remained the central wild card. She faded in and out of the spotlight at the mic, an impish enigma crossing and waving her arms, interlocking her fingers and mussing her hair. And she appeared to be having fun in the band’s cover of ‘Breathless,’ playing up her phrases in a moaning Elvis inflection with sighs around the chorus.”
Shows have continued to be booked this year, the last listing being in August.
(Note on sources. No links are provided for stories from the New York Times and Rolling Stone since these stories are behind a paywall. Other newspaper stories cited without a link were accessed through newspapers.com.)
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Whatever Happened To?
off the leash 
Ugh!
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