Blasts From The Past

Which is the definitive Los Angeles rock band? That debate is probably doomed to be perpetually inconclusive, but in all the discussions about Beach Boys and Eagles, Byrds and Burritos, Los Lobos and Blasters, two names consistently rank near the top: the Doors and X.

Their cases will become more clear Tuesday, when Elektra Records releases anthologies from both groups--the Doors’ “Box Set” and X’s “Beyond and Back.” But the bands have more in common than a shared release date and label. X, led by singers-writers Exene Cervenka and then-husband John Doe, is widely perceived to be the Doors’ punk-era successor as rock’s chronicler of the city and its state of mind. In addition, the Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek produced X’s first two albums.

And Manzarek, 62, and Cervenka (who’s 41 and has changed her name to Cervenkova), are both that classic L.A. species: transplanted Midwesterners. With the CD collections ready to ship, the two sat in the patio of the keyboardist’s Beverly Hills home and tried to put their bands and their city into perspective.

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Question: What did the Doors and X have in common?

Manzarek: Well, what they had in common was poetry. What first attracted me to X was reading Chris Morris’ article in the Reader and reading the lyrics to “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene.” . . . This is poetry.

Cervenkova: I think the other thing that was very similar was the reason the bands came together and the scenes that they were from. . . . I don’t know that that kind of scene could exist anymore. It existed in the ‘60s, it existed in the ‘70s and I haven’t seen it since. Both bands were born out of a very similar experience.

R.M.: L.A. in ’79 was like being in ’65 on the Sunset Strip again. . . . But there was no music community in the ‘60s. The Doors never interacted with any other bands in the city.

E.C.: You might not have had an immediate community, but there was such an amazing feeling in the rest of the country for what you guys were doing and what those bands were all doing. Everyone thought that you were from a real magic land.

R.M.: You know what it was? It was all on the street, it was like everybody. It wasn’t a band thing, it was all the hippies. . . . If you were a freak, we were all in it together.

Q: Is it too obvious to describe your relationship as a passing of the torch from the Doors to X?

R.M.: That’s exactly what it was. “You guys go, run with it now. We ran with it in the ‘60s, and one of our guys didn’t make it.”

Q: Why were the Doors able to sell records while X wasn’t?

E.C.: Well, for one thing because the people that got to the radio stations and said, “Wow, there’s this new thing happening, we’re gonna play the Doors, we’re gonna play the long version”; they were still the same people spinning records in 1981, and they were like, “Don’t you take our Doors records away, we’re not playing that X music. . . . That’s not ours.”

We came out completely against the status quo, trashing everything that existed before us . . . and basically me with my big mouth made those people so angry that they didn’t want to play X. They hated punk rock. Punk rock was the enemy; punk rock was there to ruin everything they stood for.

Q: Talk about the Los Angeles that’s depicted in your music.

E.C.: To me it was about the poverty and the affluence and the weirdness of those things coming together, and the Third World-ness of it. And the history of it--Raymond Chandler and John Fante, who wrote before [Charles] Bukowski. It’s incredible when you first come here how inspiring it is. And we’re all here, still. . . . There’s something about Los Angeles, some weird appeal. I don’t know what it is.

R.M.: It’s a natural paradise here, but the underside of it is all Raymond Chandler. It’s great. It’s a great underbelly of corruption and greed and evil and lust and rot and filth and the movie business and the record business. . . .

Q: Were you consciously trying to capture those things in your music?

R.M.: For me it’s part of the environment. It’s in the air here. You don’t think about trying to capture Los Angeles. You are Los Angeles. Los Angeles has captured you.

Q: But both bands had songs with specific portrayals of the city.

E.C.: “Man on the bus screaming about the president.” That’s that thing where some crazy person is clearing the bus, and the helicopter’s flying overhead. You’re a writer and you’re writing it while it’s happening. . . . You go home and your wife is waiting and you write a song together. But you can do that in Chicago, you can do that in Minneapolis or anyplace else. But there is something Nathanael West about L.A. If you’re tuned into that it’s everywhere, and you really can’t avoid it. . . .

Q: Did X pass the torch to someone else?

E.C.: The torch is getting really heavy and it’s almost all the way burned down. I think there’s a lot of good bands and a lot of people wrote good songs and there’s a lot of great singers, but I don’t know that there has been that kind of thing since X.

It’s such a huge, gigantic, sprawling, confusing city, I don’t know that people can represent it as closely and specifically as we could back then.

I guess Los Lobos typifies certain parts of L.A. and is a great, amazing band. But I don’t know that they encompass the whole literary thing like we did. . . .

The person who’s the most interesting and the smartest is Beck. But he’s the consummate postmodernist and he’s an international artist. He’s not a Los Angeles artist just because he lives here. . . . In fact, I don’t think of hardly anyone as being an L.A. artist. Maybe the Blasters. But it just seems like a lost form or something.

Q: Do you think that’s a cultural void? Is it important to have a voice like that?

E.C.: I guess it isn’t important or we’d have one. When it’s important, someone will come.

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* The Doors will sign autographs Nov. 1 at Tower Records, 8801 Sunset Blvd., 6 p.m.