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I saw X at The Showbox on Monday night, and they sounded freaking fantastic. If you’d closed your eyes so as not to see how the band members have aged since they started out, you’d swear you had been transported to Los Angeles circa 1981 – complete with mosh pit. Not quite as crazy as the pits of the eighties that were well documented in The Unheard Music, but that’s understandable – their fan base has aged along with the band.

John and Exene sounded as great as they ever have – Like broken glass and gasoline.

Billy Zoom is sixty but he doesn’t look a day over 45.

DJ Bonebrake still makes crazy faces while he hits the drums really hard.

John looks his age, but he sings great. His voice is one of the greatest rock ‘n roll voices ever. At Monday’s show he must have sweat out about 2 gallons of water. I’ve never seen a guy sweat so much. It was pouring off him. When he shook his head, sweat went flying in all directions.

Billy never broke a sweat. Exene was cool… D.J. was lookin’ a little heated, but not like John.

They played most all of the greats, “Los Angeles, “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” “We’re Desperate,” “Adult Books,” “Soul Kitchen,” “In this House that I Call Home,” and “White Girl.”

For the second encore, John and Exene came out and did an acoustic version “See How We Are” that was very refreshing after getting bombarded for two hours of electric X turned up to eleven.

For those of you who missed this 31-year anniversary tour, the next best thing is to watch the videos on their website from their SXSW performance.

The videos are not of the everyday low-res YouTube variety. CRACKLE is more like YouTube on steroids. Check it out. You can switch to HD, and if you click on the rectangular box by the volume control, the video goes full screen.

X represents punk rock’s sensational past, and CRACKLE represents the future of internet video.

Cofounder of X,

is 60 years old today.

Honor this man today by listening to Los Angeles, Wild Gift, Under the Big Black Sun, and More Fun in the New World.

And be sure to catch X live on their “13-31″ Anniversary Tour beginning in March.

A 1998 OC Weekly Billy Zoom interview can be found here, and in it you’ll discover just why he is so statuesque on stage:

Another thing Zoom brought to the table was his detached, ultracool image-the spread-legged stance, the expressionless face, the silver Gretsch guitar and silver leather jacket, the bleached-white pompadour. Zoom always looked, well, different from the rest of the band. His body language seemed to say, “I’m here, but I’m not really a part of this.”

“A lot of what I did in X was making fun of ’70s music,” says Zoom with a laugh.  “I remember watching the Doobie Brothers on this Christmas rock concert. The songs were already boring and pretentious to begin with, and then they did this one where the whole band stopped and the guitar player took this solo-wheedly-wheedly-wheedly-playing lots of notes and making all these faces and shaking his hair. And he wasn’t even doing anything. There were a lot of notes, but it was a real easy riff, you know? I noticed that all of these rock groups were always making these faces, trying to make it look hard but not really playing anything. So as a joke, I would play something difficult and just smile and not look at the guitar and act like it was nothing. To me, that was funny. In the beginning, most of the audience got it, but after a while, people looked at it and thought, ‘Well, he isn’t doing anything hard, or he wouldn’t look like he was.’”

Treat yourself to this Knitters video today.

Listen to X today.
LOUD

4th of July (D. Alvin)

She gives me her cheek
when I want her lips
but I don’t have the strength to go
On the lost side of town
in a dark apartment
we gave up trying so long ago

On the stairs I smoke a
cigarette alone
Mexican kids are shootin’
fireworks below
Hey baby, it’s the Fourth of July
Hey baby, it’s the Fourth of July

What ever happened I
apologize
so dry your tears and baby
walk outside, it’s the Fourth of July

On the stairs I smoke a
cigarette alone
Mexican kids are shootin’
fireworks below
Hey baby, it’s the Fourth of July
Hey baby, Baby take a walk outside