PHOTO: Leslie Michele Derrough
By Leslie Michele Derrough, Glide Magazine
Billy Zoom is in his shed. Chances are, though, his shed is a lot cooler than my shed or your shed.I’m picturing a room with lots of cool guitar gadgets, perhaps a TV and a comfy chair, away from the bustle of a household that includes teenaged twins. With coronavirus out there in the world, Zoom is probably a lot more normal nowadays, more like you and I, than the punk rock legend from X that is usually out on the road playing in sweaty clubs to happy fans. “I’m trying to get caught up,” Zoom told me about his pandemic activities. “You can’t go anywhere. I have this to-do list that I was up to the end of 2014 when the pandemic started so I’ve just been going down that list. I think I’m up to about 2017 at this point. Our governor shut us down again this week but I’m pretty socially distant to begin with so it’s not that hard on me. I go back and forth between the house and my studio, that’s about it.”
X, the perennial punk band that exploded out of Los Angeles in the late seventies, is not usually one to sit at home. They love and feed off of the excitement of the live music. They always have. With the exception of drummer DJ Bonebrake, the other members of X – John Doe, Exene Cervenka and Zoom – are all Midwesterners who made their way to the sun and scene of California, where they launched into their brand of punk after Zoom put out an ad looking for other musicians to play music with a different twist. “I give Billy Zoom most of the credit for including rockabilly in punk rock music,”Doe explained during a 2017 interview with Glide. “The Cramps did it to a degree but with the kind of guitar playing that Billy had or does, nobody else did that at that time. And I think he did it because that’s what he knew. Like for the intro to ‘Johnny Hit & Run Pauline,’ which is a takeoff on Chuck Berry’s ‘Promised Land’ intro, I think he just did it on a whim.”
“In LA, the live music scene was kind of dead. We thought, with a number of other misfits, that we’d kind of try to revive it,” Doe continued about the roots of X. “I think we wanted the simplicity and the speed and we didn’t want the seriousness; we wanted a little more melody and more fun and freedom.” Forty-plus years later, X is still an electrifying experience onstage. Earlier this year, X released an album of new material titled Alphabetland and last week it saw it’s debut on vinyl. Called a “jolt of energy” by Spin Magazine, the album indeed is thrilling. Like typical X, it at times feels like it could go spinning off its axis like a thrill ride but inevitably hangs on to the rails and the listener finishes up with the adrenaline pumping for all the right reasons. Kicking off with the title track and ending with a Jazz-time piano spoken word, Alphabetland is proof that X ain’t rusty.
[What follows are excerpts I found interesting in the interview.]
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You are known for bringing that rockabilly/fifties sound into X but when you started X, you were looking to do something different yet keeping elements of the rockabilly.
I had sort of an epiphany the first time I saw the Ramones live. I just thought, you know, I could do that but mix in a little bit of this and come up with something different but it would all fit, you know. That’s sort of what started it, putting an ad in the paper for a bass player and drummer and I think the ad said something like, “Eddie Cochran meets the Ramones.” A lot of that is just me trying to sound like the Ramones and that’s as close as I could get. I wasn’t trying to copy the Ramones, cause they had already done that; I was trying to build on their foundation. I really liked them. They were really an important band. The Ramones music to me had a big retro content. It sounded like sixties rock and pop but simplified, stripped down and kind of on steroids, you know. And I liked that and thought, you know, it wouldn’t be that hard to fit the rockabilly stuff in with that.
Why did you like Johnny Ramone so much?
I thought Johnny was a great player. I liked Johnny and he was a good friend. I liked hanging out with him. There was an interview, an article I think, I can’t remember which guitar magazine it was, but the interviewer said something derogatory about Johnny Ramone during the interview and I kind of got on his case and said, “You know, I think he’s a great player, I’ve seen him a bunch of times and I’ve never seen him make a mistake. He’s got a great concept and he sticks to it. I don’t know if he can play solos or not and I don’t know if he can play Jazz or classical or not. I don’t care. That’s not part of what he’s doing. He’s doing what he does perfectly. And I don’t know anybody who could do it better.” And that ended up in the interview and then the next time we played New York, we got to our hotel and there was a note at the desk from Johnny Ramone inviting me to dinner and to hang out, which I did and we were friends from then on.
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What did you think of Elvis?
My mother really liked him and she bought all his singles. I thought he was interesting. I was pretty young when he broke nationally; it was like 1956 and I would have been about eight years old. I do remember playing guitar and wiggling my legs and doing an Elvis impersonation when I was eight. I don’t think I really got it but I heard the records a lot and it sort of stuck in my subconscious.
Was it Elvis or Scotty Moore, his guitar player?
I don’t think I was that impressed with Scotty until later. But Jerry Lee Lewis was the one that really flipped me out when I saw him on TV, cause my mother didn’t like him cause he was wild. They wouldn’t let Elvis get that wild on TV. He had to tone it down when he did Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen and Dorsey Brothers and stuff. But Jerry Lee went crazy when he was on Steve Allen and of course Steve Allen hated rock & roll. When Jerry Lee stood up and kicked his piano bench backwards and went sliding across the stage, Steve Allen grabbed it and slid it back so it came flying back out and you couldn’t see Steve Allen cause he was off-camera. I still like Jerry Lee a lot.
What about Little Richard?
I loved Little Richard. I always tried to play tenor sax like Little Richard sang. He kind of sang like a really cool saxophone. But I also play guitar and try to imagine that I’m playing Jerry Lee’s piano parts, you know.
Were you into the blues at all growing up?
Not when I was growing up. I didn’t really hear much of it. A little bit of Jimmy Reed but I wasn’t really exposed to it that much where I was. I got a lot of country & western and a lot of soul R&B, which I still love and I love playing that kind of stuff, the Stax stuff and Muscle Shoals and those guys are my idols.
And the Rockabilly?
Oh yeah, of course. I really liked it but when I was a kid it was really hard to get those records. In fact, by the time I knew who Johnny Burnette was, you couldn’t buy his records in the US. When I was doing session work for Rollin’ Rock Ron Weiser, I did a recording session with either Jackie Cochran or Mac Curtis or one of those guys, but my pay was a Johnny Burnette Rock N Roll Trio album that Ron had brought back from Europe, cause you couldn’t buy them over here.
You couldn’t buy Gene Vincent records either. When I was playing with Gene Vincent, we tried and tried to get Gene Vincent records to listen to, cause I kind of remembered “Be-Bop-A-Lula” but then the other ones, I vaguely remembered them and I didn’t remember the guitar part.
Why were his records not in America?
They were out of production, they were gone. Once the record was off the charts, it was over in the US. Of course in England and Europe and Japan, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran were huge stars. Over here, they were just one-hit wonders. Once “Summertime Blues” and “Be-Bop-A-Lula” were over, you couldn’t get the records anymore. Or Little Richard. I remember at Tower Records I couldn’t buy a Chuck Berry record except for “My Ding A Ling.” I actually got thrown out of Tower Records. I got eighty-sixed from there for getting in an argument with the manager because he told me I had bad taste in music because I didn’t want the stuff that he was selling. I didn’t want Elton John. I wanted Chuck Berry and Little Richard. They had Elvis Presley from Blue Hawaii on but nothing before that. My mother’s records were all 78’s and they’d been broken by the time I was nine or ten, you know.
Have you been to Graceland?
We played Graceland. They have gigs there. There’s like a soundstage across the road from Graceland and they have shows there and when you’re onstage you’ve got that big Elvis spelled out in red lightbulbs that was his backdrop when he did his comeback special. We got our own little private tour of Graceland. They took us over and showed us things that people don’t usually get to see. They still wouldn’t let us go upstairs but they did let us see a lot of the stuff.
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Were you on the lookout [in Europe] for guitars as well?
I wanted a Gretsch 6120 and I used to carry a picture of Eddie Cochran in my wallet and I’d go in the hock shop and say, “Ever seen one of these?” and I did that for years and then finally one showed up at Elliott’s Hock Shop on Santa Monica Boulevard and he wanted $250 for it and I had to put it on layaway and pay him like $25 a week.
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What do you remember about playing at Farm Aid in 1985?
It was pouring rain, coming in at about a forty-five-degree angle and everything around us was covered in plastic. I didn’t want to get my guitar wet. Brian Setzer was on right before us and he played some kind of heavy metal solid body guitar, cause he had to stand up at the front of the stage and he got soaked and he didn’t want to get his Gretsch wet. So instead of his Gretsch, he played some kind of solid body heavy metal looking guitar. But it was 9:00 in the morning. There’s a really good live recording of “Burning House Of Love” on YouTube, though.
How do you play a 9:00 show?
If you’re still awake from the gig the night before you can. We played the night before in Houston then got on the bus and drove all night and went straight to the Farm Aid in Illinois. So it was basically driving all night to play for free in the pouring rain to benefit the same farmers that used to point shotguns at me and throw beer cans at me. That’s the way I saw it at the time.
Are you still sitting and playing during shows?
I’m still sitting. Who knows what I’ll do next time we play since it’s going to be a while. My knees are okay, it’s just at my age and weight I feel kind of silly standing like Billy Zoom. And it’s easier to play sitting down. I’m trying to age gracefully, you know.
I feel silly standing up there trying to look cool cause I’m just this old white guy.
You are cool
That’s what I keep trying to tell my kids but they’re not buying it. My son and daughter just turned fourteen. My son saw me play once, my daughter has seen me play twice. The second time I asked my son if he wanted to go, he said, “I’ve seen you once, that’s good.”
You know, we’re all excited about the new album and I brought a CD home of it right after we mixed it and they all came in to listen to it and my daughter looked at me and said, “Is this old music?” And I said, “No, we just finished it.” “Sounds old.” “What you want? A drum machine and an auto-tune?This is what we do.” And they left. However, my son can fix the computer and he can fix my cell phone. While I’m reading the instructions, he just goes in and does it. I don’t know how he knows. I grew up always being good with tech stuff. Now, I can read the instructions and I can figure it out but I can’t do intuitively like they can. They just know which button to push.
Is there something you still want to do?
If I could do what I wanted I’d be in a twelve car garage with a car collection and be tinkering with those. But I do have a couple of Austin Healeys. I like English cars a lot, English sportscars.
Do you feel like you have accomplished what you originally wanted to do as a guitar player?
No, but I don’t know if anybody ever does.
Read entire interview HERE
X, the perennial punk band that exploded out of Los Angeles in the late seventies, is not usually one to sit at home. They love and feed off of the excitement of the live music. They always have. With the exception of drummer DJ Bonebrake, the other members of X – John Doe, Exene Cervenka and Zoom – are all Midwesterners who made their way to the sun and scene of California, where they launched into their brand of punk after Zoom put out an ad looking for other musicians to play music with a different twist. “I give Billy Zoom most of the credit for including rockabilly in punk rock music,”Doe explained during a 2017 interview with Glide. “The Cramps did it to a degree but with the kind of guitar playing that Billy had or does, nobody else did that at that time. And I think he did it because that’s what he knew. Like for the intro to ‘Johnny Hit & Run Pauline,’ which is a takeoff on Chuck Berry’s ‘Promised Land’ intro, I think he just did it on a whim.”