Bone In The Fan

Look ma, no words in the title!

Last night I finally got to watching X’s performance at last year’s SXSW (I dvr’d it off of HDNet).  It was…odd. First up? Why, silly censorship of course.  During the song “Los Angeles” (which is one of my favorite songs, ever), the sound guy appeared to be ducking the vocals on “offensive” words.  So the lyrics went something like this:

“She started to hate every mumble and mumble, every Mexican that gave her a lot of mumble”

So unless you’re into South-of-the-border mumble, that was a big box of suck.  Oddly they didn’t duck the word “fuck” for the rest of the night.  Maybe it was coincidence, maybe context, or maybe someone at HDNet just doesn’t like Exene singing about a woman that hates niggers, and Jews, and Mexicans that give her a lot of shit. Plain Mexicans were apparently A-O.K.

But you know what was really hard?  Exene looked like an overweight hausfrau with crazy-lady lipstick.  Think Kirstie Alley in a smock, singing punk rock.  Yeah, I know.

Ah, shit. Get the shredder: I have a file-folder of fantasy images I need to dump from my brain.

Thing is, she sounded really good. I mean she had some pitch and cracking issues but what the fuck do you expect?  The only important stuff as far as I’m concerned is timing and hitting her harmonies with John Doe;  that, they had down.

“And what of Billy Zoom?” you might ask.  Well, I’d be glad to tell you about Billy Zoom: I think someone spiked his juice box with a fistful of Xanax.  Or mushrooms.  Or both.  He had an insane grin that barely changed the entire set, and he kept doing these weird smile-and-nods to people off camera.  He looked like Jerry Lee Lewis on acid. You know, if Jerry Lee Lewis played guitar like a total badass.

Is having one of the coolest guitars, ever, enough to explain that grin? Maybe.

Now, I wasn’t lucky enough to see X back when I was buying their albums so I don’t know if that’s just Billy Zoom’s stage thing – it probably is – but that didn’t make it any less weird. But grin or not, that mother-fucker can play guitar (and a sweet guitar it is) and they pretty much rocked.

I just had to avert my gaze from time to time.

X @ SXSW gets 3.5 out of 5 bones.

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