4th Of July

The Zoo Crew has got "4th Of July" by X spinning for the Zoo Freaks, pulled off See How We Are, the 1987 Elektra album that caught the Los Angeles band in a strange in-between season. Billy Zoom, the rockabilly gunslinger who had been there since the first notes, had stepped aside, and Dave Alvin, fresh out of the Blasters, stepped in long enough to leave a song that still hangs in the air like fireworks smoke. John Doe sings it like a man standing on the stairs of a cheap apartment, cigarette going, kids popping bottle rockets down in the street, and a woman inside who will not answer when he calls her name. It is not a parade song. It is a working-class truce, and the Zoo Freaks know the difference.

Alvin has told the story more than once, and it starts as a poem, not a hit. He was a student of poetry and literature, and a teacher had steered him toward the beauty in ordinary things. He wrote a prose piece he remembers calling 4th of July in the Dark, a few pages about a couple on the lost side of town. Two lines survived the cut and walked straight into the record: Mexican kids shooting fireworks below, and her turning out the lights and lying in the dark. He wrote a third verse, then left it on the floor. When X cut demos for Elektra, a producer, a notable musician Alvin has never named, said the song was not giving enough and needed more. Alvin thought about dragging that verse back in, then decided no. The ending is stronger if you do not know whether they stay or split. Whatever happened, I apologize. Dry your tears and walk outside. That is all the listener gets, and that is plenty.

The road to See How We Are was a crooked one. Alvin was already in X when he wrote the song, but he still wanted to hand his old band a tune they could live on. The Blasters had leaned on him for songs, and once he left, the cupboard was thin. He sat in a bowling alley with a beer, watching friends bowl badly, and the idea walked in and sat down. That poem, he realized, was a song. Nick Lowe came in to produce a Blasters session in early 1986, and the session went sideways in the best way. Lowe heard Alvin's guide vocal and decided Dave should sing it, not Phil Alvin, the older brother and the band's lead voice. Phil's version was cut later, both takes went to Warner Bros., and the label wanted nothing to do with a record sung by a man who was no longer in the group. The Blasters album never came out. Lowe, who has never claimed to be a golden throat, told Alvin something that stuck: he could not sing either, and he had somehow made a living at it. That line helped push Alvin toward a solo life, and Demon Records in London was already knocking.

Alvin played the demo for Exene Cervenka and John Doe, still high on the notion of singing it himself. Doe did not hesitate. He wanted the song, and Alvin knew Doe could carry it. That is how "4th Of July" landed on See How We Are, with Doe on the lead, Exene in the weave, Alvin on guitar and six-string bass, and Tony Gilkyson also on guitar. Benmont Tench of the Heartbreakers sat in on Hammond organ and Casiotone. Alvin left on good terms before the record hit the street, and Gilkyson took the live chair. The track was never a chart hit. Fans kept it anyway. Years later it rolled under the end credits of a Sopranos episode, "Live Free or Die," and a whole new room of people heard a punk band from Hollywood singing about a dark apartment and a holiday that does not fix anything. Doe has said the band was fortunate Alvin let them record it first, and that he still sings it now and then. The official page for X still lists See How We Are with "4th of July" sitting third, right between "You" and "In the Time It Takes," and the anthology Beyond and Back keeps a demo version in the vault.

The band that took the song had been knocking around Los Angeles for a decade by then, and the start of the story is as unlikely as the song's path. John Doe was born John Nommensen Duchac in the Midwest and raised mostly in Baltimore. He wanted music, and he did not want New York, so on Halloween of 1976 he pointed the car west, toward the Raymond Chandler city he had been reading about. Around the same stretch of months, Christene Cervenka caught a ride out of Tallahassee with a friend, landed in Los Angeles with about eighty dollars, and found work at Beyond Baroque, the literary center in Venice. She had been writing poems since she was a kid, a high school dropout who figured herself a writer, not a singer. She and Doe met in the first session of the Wednesday night poetry workshop they both walked into. There was no long stare across the room. He talked to her that night, they hung out, and he has said she was the most interesting person in the place and the one person he knew he had something in common with.

Billy Zoom, a rockabilly player who had already been around Gene Vincent, saw the Ramones after reading a review that complained they only knew three chords and played them too fast. That was exactly what he wanted. He and Doe both placed ads in the Recycler, the free classified paper, in the same week, with nearly the same wording. They answered each other. Zoom was looking for a bass player. Doe showed up. Exene, as she had started calling herself, short for the X in Christmas, came to a poetry reading in Venice, and Doe liked her poems enough to offer to sing them in the band. She told him, no offense, that if anyone was going to perform her words it would be her. Zoom has admitted he was horrified at first that John was bringing a girlfriend into the group. After the first show with her, he did not know what she had, only that it was magic. Drummers came and went until D.J. Bonebrake, out of the Eyes and a San Fernando Valley kid with jazz and classical in his hands, locked the chair. Early shows happened in a house on Van Ness and then at the Masque, the underground Hollywood room where the scene actually lived. Ray Manzarek of the Doors caught them and produced the early Slash albums, Los Angeles in 1980, Wild Gift in 1981, Under the Big Black Sun in 1982. Doe and Cervenka married in Tijuana in April 1980 and later split, and they kept singing together anyway. The name of the band is as plain as a stamp on a letter: Exene shortened to X.

That is the crew behind the record the Zoo Crew is riding. See How We Are is the sixth studio album, the one where the punk edge leans into a wider American rock sound without sanding off the ache. "4th Of July" is the Alvin song in a set mostly written by Doe and Cervenka, and it fits because X had always sung about dark love and the have-nots with a country and blues undertow. The Zoo Freaks can hear that in the way Doe leans into the apology and the way the guitars stay twangy instead of pure thrash. If you want the long trail, the band's own site at xtheband.com keeps the history, the discography, and the Wild Thing picture-disc news. The verified Facebook page still posts the old greeting, hey baby, it's the 4th of July, and the comments fill up with people who call it their song. Instagram carries the band as punk rock from L.A., and the official X account points back to the same site. Park the dial on THE ZOO and let the Crew run the rest of the side.