When you were approaching making [Smoke & Fiction], was having a big farewell and taking a final step away from the band something that was on your minds and planned from the beginning?
None of that was planned, and I don't think any of it was conscious when we were working in the studio. We were just making a record. It wasn't really like, this is our last record, guys, come on, we have to do really good. Nothing is really all that thought out in X. We just kind of do things. I think it was more suggested to us, talking to our manager and going, you know, you guys, at some point, in a year or two, you might want to think about… and we’re like, oh, yeah, we don't want to do that…But it's hard doing what we do. I hate saying that because I'm always the warrior type that’s like nothing's too hard for me. You know, I can do anything. But it is physically difficult sometimes to tour so much in the vans. But going in the studio was very similar to every other time. When we did the last record before this, Alphabetland, we did it in the same studio and with the same producer and if COVID hadn't happened, we probably would have stopped there. We never thought we'd make any more records, so this was a big deal. It's like, we did it. We made another record. Now we can say we're done. But because we couldn't tour it, it was like we’ll have to do it one more time to really feel what it's like to make a record again. We're pretty impulsive and weird. We just do things. So, you know, it’s just another record for us that we never thought we'd make.
How do you feel about it as it is now though, standing as your final record?
I don't think of it that way. I try not to. It's very sad to think of it that way. I just think, oh, we're going to go out on tour. It's going to be super fun. It's going to be a little grueling, but it's going to be so fun and people love it. I’m going to give it my all and really enjoy it while we have it. I think the last six years or so I always had this feeling that I cannot believe we're so fortunate we're still doing this. We're all still alive. This is so great. People are coming to see us and I play every show in a positive way, like it's my last show. Not like, well, this might be my last show. I have to be good. It's more like, okay, if tomorrow, for some reason, this was our last show– What was my show? How did I do? How was the audience? And sometimes it's painful or physical, and your knees hurt or whatever, but you just do it and It's so inspiring to see the people there. You have to realize they're seeing us and I'm seeing them. So my show that I'm watching is 500 to 1,000 people enjoying themselves and going crazy. You’ll see these two people and they're watching the show and they're having a really good time and then you start a song like “White Girl” and their faces just light up and they grab each other and they just look at each other and go, ‘Oh my God, they're doing it.’ And that is the show. That is the show that keeps you going. I hope that after this year, because we're touring like crazy till the end of the year, that next year, some opportunities will present themselves.
Stepping back to the process behind the new record, how has the way you write records together as a band changed over time, even since Alphabetland and going all the way back to Los Angeles?
Very little has changed. John and I, we're writers, we're poets, we're lyricists, whatever. I write a lot and I sometimes give him finished songs–here's the melody, this is the verse, this is the chorus, and there's not much to do with it. He writes the bass lines and then the band jumps in and does their parts and then when you take it to rehearsal… Billy can come up with things too, like the reason that record is called Alphabetland is because he thought that that was what I was singing in one of the lines. I was singing “alphabet wrecked,” and he thought I was singing Alphabet-land. So we were like, well, that's the name of the record! That's brilliant! There's always those moments between us. Like, we were playing a song on this new record, and we got to this certain part and we didn't quite know it yet and we all just kind of stopped playing there and weren't sure where to go and I was like, oh, that's so great. We should do that there. Let's stop there and have that little break, and then it worked. So, you have to be aware of each other's parts a little bit. Like Billy's not going to tell me to change the lyrics or what to sing or how to sing, but he comes up with lines like, oh, that's really good there, you should do that twice or something. But John and I worked the same way we've always worked. Sometimes I'll give him just mounds of lyrics and I'm like, this is as far as I can take this. I know these parts are really good, but I have this really long part. I don't know if it fits. I don't know what the chorus is. I think the thing with me and John is great because we're both singing, we both write, and we both help each other come up with the best parts lyrically or vocally that work because we know each other so well.
When you're writing lyrics– this is just something I'm curious about– I know a lot of people will have a certain space they have to be in or a certain mood. What do you do when you go to write lyrics?
None of that is applicable to me. I just write things or I don't write things and I turn them into something or I put them away, you know, I don't really think past, oh, wow, that's a good line I just came up with in my head, I'll write it down. So on this record, you know, I could just open a drawer and pull out tons of pieces of paper and go, here's 30 songs that could be songs. So there's some of the lines in there like “Winding Up the Time–that's something I wrote about 15 years ago, but I just never finished it. I didn't have anyone to work with on it. I'm a guitar player and I've written a ton of songs on guitar and played guitar on a whole bunch of records, but I'm not X. I'm not Billy and I'm not John and DJ, and they're so much better at that stuff than I am. So I'd rather just give it to John and say, here is a three-quarter finished song and he can say this, that or the other. So, it's just constant. It's a continual process. I don't have to get up in the morning and sit down and apply myself to write. But when we're working on the record, I did work a lot, you know, whenever I could just sit down, like, all right, go sit down and finish the song. You just have to be disciplined in some regard. The editing is painstaking, inspiration is like 1% of the process.
I feel like your music– it is punk, but it kind of sits on the outskirts of the actual sound that many people think of as being punk. I don't know if this was mentioned to you, but I host a show here at WNYU called The Decline of Western Civilization– seeing the way X is in juxtaposition with a band like Black Flag in that film, there's obviously a big difference between the music. How did you come to find your sound and then find yourselves within that scene?
We weren't ever really within that scene. The Decline of Western Civilization was Penelope's Spheeris’ vision of what was going on at that time. She asked every single band to be in that movie. Don't think she didn't. Some people just thought, well, I don't want to be in that stupid movie. Some people just thought, yeah, I don't care, it's probably never going to come out and we're just going to get ripped off and let's not do it. The bands that were in it were the ones that said, yeah, let's do it, we're going to take this chance. So that's why those bands are in it and The Plugz are not. That scene was happening concurrently. The hardcore scene was happening, but it wasn't the punk scene of LA or East LA or the beach cities that we were part of. So when people think of punk rock, their heads sometimes automatically go to Black Flag. I always say, you know, there was this whole other thing that had been happening for four years before The Decline came out. They had nothing to do with that. Not that I didn't love the Circle Jerks, but their audience was very violent towards us and I couldn't go see them after a certain point. I couldn't go to Orange County, for instance, because I was Exene from X and the girls wanted to kill me. I couldn't go and see all those bands like I wanted to. So we kind of split up. Because of the audiences, we just couldn't be one kind of thing. You'll see flyers, I have all these flyers–you see these things like Black Flag, The Flesh Eaters and The Weirdos all together, it's so neat. We could do that at a certain point. Then it became harder to do. And then the original punk scene became fragmented. A lot of people in the original punk scene were doing it because it was just this amazing moment in their lives and they put a band together and did some amazing stuff. Then sometimes people died or they broke up or whatever and a lot of people didn't want to do the work of touring and playing and booking shows. The hardcore bands had this incredible work ethic, they would just get in the van and play anywhere, play a house, play for $4, play to kids and they just did it and did it and did it. But a lot of the original punk bands didn't have that kind of underground support.
If you were to go back, what do you think should have been included in the film that wasn't there?
I think that was her vision and I do respect that. It's not my proudest moment. I'm glad we were in it, you know, overall. It was one person's view of what circus freaks we were, and so it codified that mentality and it made it a little harder for us to be legitimized in the public sphere. But we always got great reviews and great press and we did all the television shows and stuff. We were somewhere in the middle between where The Go-Go's and Black Flag are. Not cute enough, not safe enough, too weird, too cerebral, too scary and threatening, too much about personal freedom and not enough about following along and being cool and everybody looking the same. We were in a weird area. But that was Penelope's vision and she did something that millions of people value.
Speaking on that sort of combination of sounds you guys were doing at the time that was very different– How did The Knitters come to be and what inspired and drew you to that more country-folky sound?
When John and I met and we started practicing just in his apartment singing together because I had lyrics and I couldn't sing at all. I had no idea what to do. I was intimidated because he was such a great singer and he had more musical knowledge than I had. So we would practice by doing a Hank Williams song. Because it was like, well, we're working on these four X songs that we're writing together and I just don't want to play. I don't want to sing that over and over again anymore, John. I just do not want to sing Your Phone’s Off The Hook anymore. I don't know what to sing on it. It's making me angry and frustrated and stop telling me what to do. He goes, okay, let's do Your Cheatin' Heart or let's do this other old fucking country song. We'll harmonize and figure it out. So we were doing that before we even met Dave Alvin and Phil Alvin. In the early 80s, there were a lot of benefits. There were benefits for everything. All kinds of stuff to help people all over the world and locally and people's health and medical bills and stuff. So everybody was being asked to do benefits constantly. If you played a benefit and 400 people came, well, then you couldn't play The Whiskey the next day because you just played to those 400 people that are not going to book you. So Billy and Phil didn't want to do benefits all the time because they wanted to be able to make a living and not be known, because once you start doing that, you're stuck. You got to keep doing it. Then everybody calls you and you can't say no because you don't want to say no to people. You want to help people. So one night, John and I got asked to do a benefit. I'm pretty sure it was for dentures for Jimmy or some darn thing. Probably drugs for Jimmy, but you know, whatever. And we were at, I'm pretty sure it was Club 88, but it might have been The Music Machine, but I'm pretty sure it was Club 88. Dave was there and so John asked him if he would do these songs with us, a couple of songs. Then the person came back and said, so how do you guys want to be introduced? We just looked at each other like, oh, I don't know, and Dave said, how about The Knitters? You know, like The Weavers, because The Weavers are a famous country band with men and women who sang, you know, wobbly songs and stuff, you know, kind of like the socialist kind of thing. We thought that was hilarious so we said, yeah, we're The Knitters. So then we became The Knitters. Then we realized that now we had a way to play benefits without hurting our other draws. So we started being known as a benefit band. Then at some point we were like, you know, one of these days we should keep the money we make and we became more of a serious band and we made a record. And you know, Frank, the folk singer, was putting together acoustic shows at The Whiskey– I think it was Johanna Went the performance artist and Circle Jerks acoustic. So everybody was doing poetry and acoustic music and folk music and performance art and hardcore punk and melodic punk and just every kind of music was all mixed up. But I think The Knitters were important because there were other bands doing that to an extent, but I think the depth of The Knitters, the musical knowledge, and the respect we had for that old music kind of transcended it being just a one off thing and just something fun to do. I'm very happy that we did all that, I think it was important.
That record is also very important to me, and it's just fun within your catalog of music to hear the different sides of your sound.
Well, what's funny is when we did Poor Little Critter On The Road, we didn't do anything for like 25 years or something and then we put out The Modern Sounds of The Knitters–because we have a sense of humor. It's like, we're going to bring things up to date. Now it's the 60s and we're making records, you know, it's like such a silly thing to do. We played a knitter show recently and it was just fantastic. So I hope that next year, if we're not doing X at that point, that The Knitters can go out and do some shows. That would be really fun.
I will also hope for that because that would be awesome… Something else I wanted to ask about was when you were starting, being someone who is female presenting and a woman within punk and music generally, how did you find your footing? How did you enter that space?
So here's what I tell women that interview me, especially if it's about women in music because we're both women and we're talking about what the experience is. If you look at 1976 to 1986, let's say, through the 2024 lens, you're not looking at it right. Nobody cared what we were. We didn't know if we were gay, straight or other. We didn't care if we were women, men, Black, White, Asian, Mexican, whatever. We were just a bunch of kids having fun and doing creative stuff. There were a lot of older people and super young people, but there was never any kind of pressure to be sexy or pressure to be “I'm a woman and I'm making it,” everybody just did whatever they thought they were good at. Like Pleasant Gehman, she was in some bands like the Screamin' Sirens and she had a fanzine called the Bother Me and she was so important to that scene. It was so important that she was part of it. Other women that were in that scene, it was just so important we were all there doing it together. But it wasn't because they were women and it wasn't that they felt like “I want to be in a band too and the men are taking over.” You know, it wasn't like that. We didn't have identity politics. We had individualism. And I'll take individualism over a collective any day. I never wanted to belong to a group. And that's why I think punk was so different and important because it was so much about the individual.
When all of this is over, when this tour is over, what are you looking forward to about taking a step back, and what will you look back most fondly on about your time in the band?
When we go to places like Indianapolis to play a show and you're driving, you're on the highways, you're touring all over the country, you'd be off here in a hotel outside of town because you can't go into the cities anymore because they're too dangerous and everybody's going to steal your van and stuff. So you're staying like 20 minutes away from the city and then you drive in the van and you go to the venue and you do soundcheck and you stay there and you stay in the dressing room and you eat some, you know, crackers and vegetables and then you play and then you get back in the van. You go back to the hotel. Then you drive the same way to another town. I want to get out of the van and go to that town that I've never been to and see what is weird and cool about this little town somewhere. I have a vacation plan wedged in between shows to go to Indiana with my friend and we're just going to go to all these really neat little weird towns and do all this thrift shopping and tea shopping and eating pie and just being with a map and driving around. That's what I want to do because I love this country and I’ve always traveled around since I was pretty young and I just want to experience that again. So I'm excited about just going places and doing things and doing road trips and being home more and having a garden in the summer and not having to worry about who's going to watch the dog and who's going to stay at my house and who's going to get my mail– because I live alone. It's not like my wife is here and she's going to take care of everything. I have a lot of stuff to deal with when I tour that's ever-changing and not always reliable. You know, that's hard. But life is hard in general. What I would miss most about it is I just love playing the shows, I think we all do. But the stuff we do around it is hard, the packing and unpacking, climbing up and down the stairs in and out of the van, the crappy hotels, the eating crackers for dinner kind of stuff is hard. But that show that I see every night, that I would pay to see, which is the 500 to 1000 people looking at us having a wonderful night. I see the interactions between people in the audience of when we're starting a song, I'm looking out and all of a sudden people they just light up like, oh, they're playing my favorite song, you know, you see people maybe not having a good time or you see people crying because they're like, oh, that song makes me cry and people dancing and it's just wonderful to see that because that's what I've always loved about playing. I loved it at The Masque. I loved to be on stage at The Masque, that six-inch stage when there were 30 people jumping up and down and then we finished and I was the one jumping up and down to The Weirdos playing or somebody else and it's just an integrated experience. I also know that when people look at me they see themselves. So if I'm having the greatest time of my life, so are they. If I'm up there and I don't want to be there, well, they don't want to be there. So I think I'd miss that I'd miss that interaction but you know I still go to shows and I still love going to see bands so that experience is still something I'll have. So it's not so much like I want to be on stage because I want people to scream and yell and applaud for me and I'm so great. It's more like I feel that I'm part of the whole situation. We're all in it together. I do value that. I've been doing it since I was 20, so I will miss it quite a bit if we stop all together but I can't imagine I would because I still do poetry readings and I'll still do The Knitters or John and I still open for like Psychedelic Furs doing our acoustic thing, so I'm still going to get that.
