Hidden Flick: X and Why

The L.A. quartet may not have been the best punk band, or the only band that mattered. Hell, they may not have been the most important band in L.A. But there was something—and very much still is—about X’s ability to combine a Johnny Cash/June Carter Cash duet vocal style with a hard Ramones edge rooted in a killer rockabilly sound.

Directed by W.T. Morgan, starring John Doe, Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom, and D.J. Bonebrake and culled from about a half decade’s worth of footage and music, the film is both a grand introduction and a solid testament to the humble power and glory of X. This was a band that shat on modern radio, trends, long term posturing, short term sell outs, and just got on with it—they created music that was filled with an energy which was seamlessly married to poetic lyrics that had never quite been heard before or since.

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One is forced to think about music’s place in the universe and why, incredibly, one truly needs to forget all of the philosophical adventures and “What does it all mean?” ignorant posturing, and just get on with ROCK…is this a great film? Well, no. Is the music great? Well, yes. Would a musician flag this film as one of their favorites? Hmmm…dunno. But I do know what Jerry Garcia’s favorite film was, and he was probably hated by the punks quite a bit, while not realizing that Captain Trips was one of the greatest punks of all.

(excerpt from Lipstick Traces, by Greil Marcus, and a Literary Halloween Costume hidden inside a delay loop: It was in fact a desperate search, in a utopia that contained its own contradiction, product of a wish that at once went beyond art and found itself returned to it: “When freedom is practiced in a closed circle,” [Guy-Ernest] Debord wrote in 1959, looking back on the LI [Lettrist International] in his film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time), “it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself.”—end Literary Halloween Costume of this edition)

The Saragossa Manuscript was Garcia’s favorite film and, after just a few scenes, the viewer can see the connection. The guitarist, who edited and directed The Grateful Dead Movie in the late 1970s, had also wanted to film Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. Alas, Garcia’s cinematic aspirations appeared to fade as he slipped further down his own devilish and druggy path into oblivion—a tragedy so profound that the writer, Ken Kesey commented after Garcia’s funeral that he was upset that people only thought of the Dead icon as a guitarist and not the great artist he was in so many other arenas.

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As one travels through time and space and let’s X pull the layers of the hidden onion back, one remembers the secret underneath: It is all about THE SONG. There is a spirit about this band that cannot be questioned. There is a reason that the Doors’ keyboardist and resident philosopher, Ray Manzarek produced the quartet. And there is a reason why one writes about such a film like X: The Unheard Music in such vague and abstract terms. One takes on the skin of the chameleon like so many times before, and sheds everything old. There it is—the nut of it all. The pursuit of enlightenment yields ultra long periods of prologue and epilogue in one’s life, and the middle, the spine, the meat of the story of one’s life can often feel almost trapped in time and space, isolated from the history, the back story of the life led which resonates, and then drifts away, LOST, replaced by another…everything new is just a random portrait nearby. And on the passage of a few through a rather brief moment in time, it is up to you to find that hidden gem, that lost chord, that chameleon searching for a new language…

– Randy Ray