Wild Gift

X

album cover

The Most Delirious X-Plosion of West Coast Punk

Wild Gift time-machines fifty years of rebel music into one mighty squall. Recorded quickly in 1981 as the follow-up to X's incendiary (and unexpectedly successful) debut Los Angeles, its songs have the twitchy blues-guitar arpeggios of Chuck Berry and the death-ray stare of underfed New York punks. At the same time, the tunes carry hints of '50s girl-group innocence and traces of the woozy raunch of the Doors. (The album was produced by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.) Sometimes the music sounds like primal anarchy. Sometimes it veers closer to rec-hall rockabilly.

With this full-tilt tumult, X linked the insurgent sensibility of punk to a more varied musical attack, and in the process avoided the posturing that reduced many acts to safety-pinwearing cartoons. In all of punk, for example, there's never been an admission quite like "We're Desperate," or an end-of-the-love-affair ode like the wry, knowing "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch." In real life, the love was still new: Wild Gift was recorded shortly after bassist and singer John Doe and singer Exene Cervenka were married. Many of the songs, notably the addictively catchy "White Girl" and the leering "The Once Over Twice," find the pair struggling to honor the commitment, mulling the risks of infidelity. As Cervenka recalls in the liner notes: "Some of the songs carried feelings both of us were having but couldn't act on because we were married."

Wild Gift didn't exactly tear up the charts. But from here, X continued to grow in unusual ways, pushing its punk-rockabilly further while developing a reputation for fiery live performances. The Doe/Cervenka marriage ended in the late '80s, and X dissolved soon after; Doe's first solo album (Meet John Doe) is a criminally neglected blast of rousing righteousness. Still, Wild Gift remains the gem, the moment when four believers living somewhere off of Santa Monica Boulevard took rusty parts from the rock and roll scrap heap, and slapped together a new American maelstrom.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1981, Slash
Key Tracks: "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch," "We're Desperate"
Catalog Choice: Los Angeles
Next Stop: The Blasters: The Blasters
Book Page: 878

Buy this Recording

Share this page:

Comments:

#1 from Anne Glick Joseph, Richmond, VA - 11/06/2008 11:34

So True!!!!! And John Doe proved he is still punk brother #1 in an acoustic show in Richmond Virginia last night!  Aging hipster doofuses rejoice!

#2 from dsl, Boston, MA - 11/26/2008 4:44

Superb choice for the list.  And you are totally on target about the criminal neglect of Meet John Doe which is another great recording and one of my all time favorites.

Post a Comment:

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Note that your comment will be reviewed by an editor before it appears on the site.


About 1,000 Recordings

Celebrate the joy, the revelation, the mystery, the fun, the sheer shivers-up-the-spine pleasure of great music.

Essential operas. Milestone rock albums. An education in the blues. The world of world. Classical from Bach to Bartók to Beethoven to Brahms. And dozens of unexpected gems, surprising discoveries, and long-lost masterpieces.

This is an online version of the list (published alphabetically in the book). The entries in the book break down genre bias and broaden every listener’s horizons—think Miles Davis to Claude Debussy to the melodic story-songs of The Decemberists. And the writing is passionate, informed, opinionated.

More about the book

site design: Juxtaprose