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Under the Big Black Sun

Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk
By John Doe (with Tom DeSavia)
[Da Capo Press]

Rock memoirs are a dime a dozen these days. It’s as if everyone who was ever in a band or was even part of a music scene has seen fit to regale us with their retrospective musings about their golden youth –when rock ’n’ roll was real and, aargh, “the kids” were finally gonna speak truth to power with their music, man.

A funny thing happens to ardent rock ’n’ roll fans once they go beyond the dreaded 30 year mark. It seems that the generation they belonged to in their late teens and early 20s, no matter which generation it happened to be, was THE generation where rock culture reached its apex. And the kids today, well, they just don’t get it. (I’ll admit, this “kids today, well, they just don’t get it” thing has become my mantra and raison de etree as I careen at an ever-accelerating pace through middle-age toward [I hope] the disempowerment of my “golden years,” the catheter era, and, then, sure and certain death. Youth is wasted on the young. Life sucks, then you die. Blah, blah blah.)

Sorry, but rock ’n’ roll is pretty much over. Or, at least, it is no longer the music/culture of the now. All we can do is wallow in the sounds of our past, yearn for another remastered edition of our favorite album (with an extra disc of “exclusive, unedited demos” recorded on a broken jam box in 1843) and long for the reunion of <name your favorite, obscure and “influential” band of yore>. Don’t worry, it’s coming. Like I said, life sucks and then you die.

Still, I was especially stoked to hear that X’s John Doe was releasing a memoir. X was important, period. X was at the vanguard of the fabled Los Angeles scene as punk morphed into hardcore.

X was much more highly evolved than the usual punk band of L.A., circa 1980. Their music was an amalgam of American styles (punk, rockabilly, blues and the California psychedelia of The Doors and Jefferson Airplane, more or less) that stretched far beyond the faster-and-louder-than-you parameters of hardcore, but could still rip your face off in a precise-yet-subtle way.

And then there was those lyrics. X mixed the L.A. noir outlook of Bukowski, Fante and Chandler, with a heaping dose of bad-vibes poetic sensibilities nicked from Rimbaud, Dante and the like. Songs like “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” were (and still are) downright scary and more hardcore than hardcore.

Any rock memoir, at its core (sorry), is a story of relationships. And John Doe had a tumultuous relationship with his soulmate, collaborator and (sorry) X-wife, Exene Cervenka. This is the stuff of legend that inquiring minds want to know about.

So I had high expectations for Doe’s Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk. And, sadly, these high expectations were all but for naught.

This brings us to the burning question: why is Doe credited as being the author of this book? And why is it titled after an X song? Sorry, but Under the Big Black Sun is a just another raggedly cobbled-together compendium of (I hope) hastily written, fanzine quality ramblings about the L.A. punk scene of yore. Only 38 of the book’s 277 pages (that’s 13.7 percent, geeks) are actually written by Doe himself. The book isn’t really about X, nor is it Doe’s memoir per se. Instead, we get snippets from all the usual suspects such as Jane Wiedlin, Pleasant Gehman, Mike Watt, Jack Grisham, Dave Alvin and Henry fucking Rollins, fer chrissakes. (Now, don’t get me wrong. Rollins has become something of a cultural piñata, a microcosmic Bon Jovi of punk who is [unfairly] the butt of every hipster’s joke. Still, Henry might be just a wee bit overexposed.) All of this has been done before.

What’s most baffling about Under the Big Black Sun is the poor quality of much of its writing. John Doe and Mike Watt are the main offenders. Doe can’t be bothered to spell out long words like “with” (he uses “w/”) and “and” (he uses &) in his text. Watt can’t even be bothered to capitalize the first word of a sentence. Yeah, this is about punk rock – not philosophy or theory or literary studies. But Doe and Watt are smart guys. And, after all, this is a freakin’ book. Ostensibly, people will refer to this tome for years to come. I mean, well, shit.

All this kvetching aside, there are still some good bits in the book. It’s an entertaining read, albeit an incomplete and utterly disposable one. Under the Big Black Sun has more emphasis on L.A.’s kinder, gentler, queer-friendly proto hardcore era, as opposed to the jackbooted hardcore jock-ism of capital-H Hardcore that has already been historicized umpteen times in other, better books. It’s nice, for example, to read the reminiscences of the Flesh Eaters’ Chris D and The Zeros’ Robert Lopez (aka El Vez) who haven’t received nearly as much column space in prior L.A. punk histories.

But what I wanted (and what I thought I would get) from Under the Big Black Sun just isn’t there. Well, not really. What we have here is a shabby little digest of textual rough sketches about L.A. punk with John Doe’s picture on the cover, that’s all. Doe’s story is certainly a story well worth telling, and I sincerely hope to read it someday – provided he can muster the strength to spell out “with,” that is. But Under the Big Black Sun is not that story. This isn’t horrible. But it’s not that great, either. A caveat emptor is certainly in order.