The Exene Chronicles

Chapter 7

These are the words that Lia and Ryan sing one afternoon when they sit and listen to X. Their tender voices rising, they sing loudly and off-key at a passionate treble, and for a moment, the inhibition of speaking up in class, trying out for cheerleading, or changing for gym not openly, but hidden behind a locker—dissipates.

Ryan thrashes her head from side to side, swinging her arms about wildly, pausing only to turn to Lia and say, “This album is so rad!”

Lia sits still, quiet and pensive, but she is taking it in. Her attitude is more jazz than punk. She is kick-back relaxed, serene, chill, yet concentrated on every nuance rising off the turntable. An elite lyrical connoisseur, she nods her head slowly and gives a silent nod of approval that is worth its weight in syllables.

In their initial days together, when the skies were colored by the incandescent blush of easy sunsets, the girls spent many afternoons in the record shop in San Diego where they felt grown up (though they sometimes pretended they were in the King’s Road). They made weekly pilgrimages, eager to splurge pocket money on albums by The Specials, Madness, and s*x Pistols.

With an insatiable hunger for the next new thing, they spied a unique record, the cover brandishing a broad, thick letter X shimmering in gold foil. The album’s title, Wild Gift, seemed suitably apropos; the girls were ever on a quest for the gift of new adventure. They pulled the album from the racks, intrigued: a band named succinctly after one odd, infrequently used letter of the alphabet.

On the back of the album was a photograph of four young musicians, a girl and three good-looking guys (but the one they will later discover the girl is married to is the handsomest one of all). The girl bears the look of a wild barmaid, a starlet of some perpetual nighttime, with an assurance, a confident gaze—the type of girl who would never be shamed by losing a catfight. A girl, it seemed, with many wry bons mots poised to fire off the tip of her tongue.

The girls selected the album without even asking the clerk to spin them a tune, trusting somehow that it would meet their expectation: flippant, sad, clever, and enraged sounds streaming from the throat of the intense-looking girl with a mouth frowned by a sullen defiance.

Like an infant pet, they carried the record home gingerly, anxious to see how well this new band would integrate itself into their lives. In Ryan’s living room, they switched on the stereo, reverentially sipping cans of generic black cherry soda from the Safeway, as though attending a christening of something brand-new and possibly precious.

Music seeped through the speakers and pow! The moment the disc began to spin on the turntable, it was magic; a sound fast, thrashing, melodic, ripped through the speakers like lightning, like fire. The girls listened carefully, not wanting to miss a single riff. They were instantly captivated by the girl singer Exene’s sometimes mournful, sometimes furiously invincible wail, and the surprisingly sweet harmony of her and John Doe singing together.

Many of the songs began in a flurry; the gates open on a racetrack and the horses fly! Played fast and ending abruptly with the slam of a door that gives finality to an argument, the notes standing on tiptoe. With a final crash of D.J. Bonebrake’s symbol or a shrill note of Billy Zoom’s guitar, it was over; the band had done its job, transporting the girls to a new place and finishing off each song, each one a little universe theretofore unknown—sharp and matter of fact when it was over.