Doe Knows: Marketing and Music

John Doe is playing a month of Sundays at a tiny club here this month. He’s not paying penance. The former co-leader of X, one of the most influential and critically lauded bands of the ‘80s, is simply between contracts and has found a way he hopes will generate some industry and audience reaction quickly.

Besides playing every Sunday at Club 369, he’s performing similar weekly shows at the Alligator Lounge in Los Angeles and the Casbah in San Diego. Multiple dates, he said, allow fans--and industry types--more opportunity to schedule one or more of his shows into their often-hectic schedules.

Basically, however, these weekly appearances fulfill Doe’s hard-to-quench desire to express his songs in a live setting.

“If you don’t get some sort of exorcism or pleasure or inspiration from performing, writing [songs] and every aspect of music except the business aspect, then you shouldn’t do it,” Doe, 44, said in a phone interview late last week. “I feel bad for people who don’t seem to be enjoying themselves playing.”

Doe is embarking on a new chapter in his career after last year’s disbanding of X, the combustive outfit whose first four albums are widely considered classics for their combination of dark urban imagery with galvanic punk and roots-rock sound-scapes.

But X was never able to make the jump from underground darlings to an outfit with a broader commercial following. When the group released “Hey Zeus!” in 1993 (after a six-year break from recording), the work fizzled at the cash register.

“If X had formed at another time, we might have been more successful,” Doe said. “It was just bad timing. But our main goal was not to sell a million records. It was for art, for expression.”

The group’s end was signaled when Doe and singing and songwriting partner, Exene Cervenkova (formerly Exene Cervenka and formerly Doe’s wife), began to drift apart creatively. Drummer D.J. Bonebrake commented recently that the members of X had become more interested in their outside projects than the band itself.

“The best bands are the bands where the only creative outlet they have is that band,” said Doe, who lives with his wife and three children, ages 5 to 9.

Doe has never seemed much of a one-project person. Besides the John Doe Thing, he’s busy compiling an X anthology that will include numerous demos as well as unreleased concert and studio recordings. He hopes the album will be released in the fall. He’s also putting together a human-rights benefit album that will bring together such alternative and rap artists as Sublime and KRS-One.

If that’s not enough, acting continues to play a significant part in his life too. Doe has had roles in films including “Great Balls of Fire,” “Touch” and several independently made dramas.

He finds acting not only personally fulfilling but a welcome escape from the type of artistic scrutiny he faced as a focal point of X.

“[With acting] you don’t have to put up with audience-justifying--an audience agreeing with your vision,” he said. “If you do a scene well and you feel you’ve captured your character, you can feel satisfied within yourself.”

* John Doe appears Sunday, April 20 and 27 at Club 369, 1641 Placentia Ave., Fullerton. 9 p.m. $7. (714) 572-1816.