ohn Doe was born in 1977 when he arrived in Los Angeles. His previous life in Tennessee, Wisconsin & Baltimore was a great & fertile time but new music and social changes led him to events that created a life in art. He graduated from Antioch College in Baltimore in 1975, worked as a roofer, aluminum siding mechanic, and ran a poetry reading series. Ms. Meyers was his landlord in the rural black community of Simpsonville , MD.
John met Exene Cervenka at the Venice poetry workshop Nov 1976 and he started working with Billy Zoom around the same time. When DJ Bonebrake joined X in mid-1977 the line up was complete. They released six studio records, five or six singles and one live record from 1978-1993. Five of X’s records have been re-issued along with two compilations. The Unheard Music documents their lives and progress as a band from 1980-83. In 2009 the film was included in the Sundance UCLA Archive of greatest films of all time. They appeared several times on American Bandstand, Solid Gold and David Letterman. As one of the last original punk rock bands standing, they continue to tour. The day that X played a free noontime concert in Fullerton, CA, they caused Orange County’s greatest high school truancy rate to date.
In 1988 John started a family and lived in the Tehachapi Mountains, near the “Grapevine” of Highway 5, which separates southern and central California. He has recorded 8 solo records w/ numerous renowned singers and players, more recently including Patty Griffin, Dan Auerbach, Aimee Mann, Don Was, Kathleen Edwards and Greg Liesz. He has appeared in over 50 films and television productions, with some of his most notable roles in Road House, Georgia, Roadside Prophets, Great Balls of Fire, Pure Country and Roswell. He continues to act these days but more sporadically as his touring schedule has become more demanding.
Other musical side projects include work with the Knitters, Jill Sobule and The Sadies. He continues to write poetry and has even taught workshops from time to time. He currently lives north of San Francisco, California.
ABOUT UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN
“We told real stories, exaggerated the facts, or just plain made them up. We commented on a world that, to us, had become unbelievably crass and stupid, a world that was just recognizing the separation between rich and poor. We had been told that the neutron bomb could be the end of us all, so The Weirdos wrote a song about it, using all the power without the destruction.”—from Chapter 18 of Under the Big Black Sun The anti-establishment, hard-edged world of L.A. punk defined the 1970s counterculture. In the middle of it all was the band X. In Under the Big Black Sun, X’s vocalist, John Doe, along with other musicians and groupies from the era, reflect on the first wave of American punk, which would influence the genre for years to come.
The 1970s were marked by a surge of youth rebellion in response to the unpopular Vietnam War and the conservative politics of the day. Drawing on rockabilly influences, punk music evolved to express the outrage of young people during that decade; punk rock was born. With it came alternative lifestyles: bands living in commune-like apartment buildings, experimenting with drugs and sex, and expanding their musical expression as more and more bands cropped up, including The Go-Go’s, Black Flag, The Zeros, and X.
In Under the Big Black Sun, which has a foreword by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, John Doe and assorted friends—with help from Tom DeSavia—tell the story of L.A. punk as it began, developed, and changed the music scene forever. Doe, Exene Cervenka of X, Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s, Mike Watt of the Minutemen, Henry Rollins of Black Flag, and more share tales of friendships, feuds, dreams, and disappointments, acquainting us with the weirdness and wonder that defined the world they created on the fringes of Hollywood society.