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Exene Cervenka
By Steffie NelsonPhoto By Jenny Lens
I’m sorry I made you do this; it’s gonna be horrible,” says Exene Cervenka, sitting in a booth at Denny’s in Santa Monica with a cup of coffee and a slice of peanut-butter pie. It’s just after 3 pm, and the punk-rock legend by night, schoolteacher and librarian by day, is apologizing in advance for the traffic I’ll be stuck in on the way home. She is not a fan of 2006 Los Angeles; for one thing, “Everybody’s so famous now.” Exene admits to being a person who always prefers the past over the present, “no matter what it is or when it was,” but it’s not hard to imagine that the city which inspired the name of X’s 1980 debut album was just a little bit better, somehow.
“You have no idea,” she says, shaking her head. “Everything was so much more elegant and oldworld and historically Hollywood. It was just like a fantasyland of old Hollywood. And now what is it? Denny’s.”
L.A. in 1976 was a place where a fresh-out-of- Florida girl with 80 bucks in the pocket of her Salvation Army housedress could find a job and a place to live at Beyond Baroque, a boho bookstore in Venice with a thriving literary scene. Soon, the girl who had shed the name Christine to become Exene had a boyfriend named John Doe (who later became her husband), and with him she fronted X, one of the most revered bands on the Sunset Strip scene—and still considered one of the best L.A. bands of all time.
Though X shared their politics and love of The Jam and The Ramones with fellow scenesters like the Germs and Black Flag, their sound was also deeply rooted in American musical traditions. Unlike the kids with pierced noses wearing garbage bags, X mashed country, rockabilly, blues, and early American rock ‘n’ roll with streamof- consciousness poetry, and delivered it all at lightning speed. Listening to Los Angeles and Wild Gift today (both produced by The Doors’ keyboard player Ray Manzarek), the band’s precision playing and the contained chaos of Exene and John Doe’s off-key harmonies still exhilarates.
“It was very inspiring,” Exene says of those days. “I remember that feeling of creating something completely out-there and new, and that’s fucking amazing as an artist. That’s what you’re supposed to do. We didn’t have any radio or music industry interest, so here’s a bunch of kids just screwing around with art and music, doing whatever comes into their mind, being totally left alone. By the time popularity happened, we’d been left alone for so long that we created this thing totally without influence. People asked, ‘How do you know to do that?’ Well, because I put those two things together and it sounded good to me.”
Exene created her iconic thrift-store vamp look the same way, working with whatever she found in dollar bins that caught her fancy. She would accent a dress from the ‘20s or ‘40s with diaper pins and flashy rhinestones, and pair the look with ankle socks and frumpy shoes. Her dark, bleach-streaked hair was the West Coast flipside of Debbie Harry’s black-tipped, platinum-blond ‘do. Ironically, for a girl whose fashion philosophy boiled down to “cover up as much as you can, because if you don’t, men will look at you,” Exene was also something of a punk pinup. “Yeah, but what was I wearing?” She smiles and laughs. “Good for me. That’s what I say to that.”
For women who found nothing to identify with in the soft-rockin’ ‘70s, punk opened up a new world. “It was the first time women were really in a position like that, to be onstage and be themselves,” says Exene. “You had girl groups and the Runaways and the girls from Fleetwood Mac, but you didn’t really have scary, upfront women like that, so I think people were real fascinated by that.”
Of Madonna, whom many say lifted Exene’s look during her “Lucky Star” days, the singer has few kind words. “I think she threw a big rock in the path of where women were going,” she says bluntly. “That’s where we’ve been: we’ve been concubines and slaves and whores and kept under the veil, figuratively and literally, and unless you remember a time when there were freedom marches and women didn’t have abortions or birth control, throwing your sexuality around means a lot.
“Anyway, Madonna didn’t steal my look; she stole my sister’s,” says Exene, referring to her older sister, Mirielle, a jewelry designer who lived in New York City. During a 1980 visit to L.A., while en route to the Whisky A Go-Go nightclub to see X, Mirielle was hit by a car that ran a red light, and killed instantly. “It just happened, like a weird phantasm,” says Exene, who still got onstage that night, and remains inspired by her sister on a daily basis. “She would have done really great things, so I always feel like I have to do twice as much: half for her and half for me.”
The author of five books of poetry to date, Exene still records and tours with the Knitters and the Original Sinners in addition to X, although she makes more money as a schoolteacher than a rock star (shocking, but true). She also plays benefit shows whenever possible, for causes ranging from Rock For Choice to Rock The Vote to the West Memphis Three. In 2005, Exene Cervenka the visual artist was honored with a retrospective of her collages and multi-dimensional journals at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and at a gallery in New York City, which she says is “just a dream come true. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time.”
Now 50, Exene still looks much like the young woman who half chanted, half taunted, “We’re desperate! Get used to it!” with her teased hair, poison-green eye shadow, and stacks of bakeliteand- crystal bangles. Today, however, she’s the mother of an 18-year-old son from her second marriage, to Viggo Mortensen (yes, that Viggo Mortensen), and is onto husband number three, Jason Edge, who plays guitar in her band the Original Sinners. “It took me three times, that’s all I can say,” she shrugs. “I have a white-picket-fence idea of life.” Granted, there are aliens flying over that white picket fence (she’s a believer), and a tour bus is parked in the driveway.
Even after 30 years, Exene plans to continue to tour with X. “I love those songs,” she says, “and I feel really sad that one day I won’t be able to do it because one of us will be gone.” They may be happily married to others, but John Doe, whose daughter was born in the same hospital on the same day as Exene’s son, remains her soulmate. “He’s definitely tied to me,” she nods. “I’ll see him again in another way.”