I mean, who do you think you are, Proteyboy, passing critical judgment on a great American band and a punk legend, when by your own admission you were MIA and listening to horrid tasteless crap during the whole period!?
OK OK, did anyone else read any insult to X in my post? I LIKE X, and I have since I became aware of them - years after they appeared. Why wasn't I clued in from the gitgo? Couple of reasons, no doubt. First, punk in general didn't hit me where I lived when it appeared. Not geographically (mired as I was in the great hinterlands where punk as a live music phenomenon barely penetrated), not thematically, not politically, not as a lifestyle.
Musically, the brash rough energy and intentionally stripped-down basicness of it all did appeal to part of my taste - I had hugely enjoyed the garage rock and pre-punk of my teen years (which had started a decade before punk emerged) - but that aesthetic wasn't part of most of the music I was listening to in the late 70s and early 80s. Neither was I hanging out at the time (just married as I was, finishing grad school, starting a job and a family) with the mostly urban and suburban disaffected youth who became the backbone of the punk audience. My years of showy disaffection had come some years before.
Music either has to hit you where you live or you have to find your way in on purely aesthetic and analytical channels. How old were you, where were you in life, what were you doing when you first heard X? That makes a difference.
And STILL, I WOULD have liked X when they came out - if I had HEARD them then. But in those long-ago pre-digital, pre-internet dark ages, those of us who did not live near a musically happening urban area did rely on radio to turn us onto good new stuff. It had done a great job from the 50s through the mid-70s. But around that time, programmers started to rely on computer analysis for playlists, stations consolidated and homogenized, and new music which did not resemble what was already on the radio was all but shut out. X would no doubt have had more of an emotional impact on me if I had just HEARD them then - and absolutely if I'd been a bit younger when the band emerged.
Later, when I did hear the band, it was easy to hear the musicality, intelligence, taste, and stealthy sophistication BZ and DJ brought to the band; they broke many punk stereotypes, and pointed a direction it's unfortunate punk didn't survive long enough to take. But by the time I discovered them, I could only like the band and admire BZ's playing, without identifying with X or making them part of my musical DNA. I hope that's good enough.
Pointing out BZ's other interests, talents, and projects is not meant to dump on X. It's meant to point out that there's a lot of other aspects to BZ's talent than X, and than punk. I don't think he was in another punk band after leaving X, and his rockabilly band comes both before and after. He apparently doesn't choose X (nor any one of his other projects) to define himself musically, and without intending to diminish X's importance, I wanted to emphasize other dimensions of the man's work.
The GDP has many members who will never penetrate the texture, approach, and "attitude" of punk to really appreciate BZ's talent. Pointing out The BZ Rockabilly Band and The Ramonetures was meant to give more of us a way in to some brilliant (and unpunk) BZ music.
That's all I meant.
