Punk Reunion

Less than two years after X officially called it quits, the legendary L.A. punk band has come back from the dead--and brought along the original lineup. When the group dusts off its early material for a sold-out Hollywood Palladium concert on Saturday, guitarist Billy Zoom and his Gretsch Silver Jet will be in place beside Exene Cervenkova, John Doe and D.J. Bonebrake for the first time since 1985.

Why take up with X again after 12 years?

“They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Zoom says flatly during an interview at a vintage diner in his home city of Orange.

Although he’s excited to be performing a few dates with X again--the Palladium show and two earlier ones in San Francisco are all that are currently booked--he doesn’t want a permanent arrangement. “I have a life now,” he says.

Zoom quit the band precisely for that reason--to get a life--but he acknowledges that he got sick of waiting for the big break that never came. After forming in 1977, X quickly won fans and critical acclaim, but its popularity on the punk scene didn’t translate to the general public.

X soldiered on after Zoom left in 1985, first with Dave Alvin and then Tony Gilkyson. The group took a hiatus in 1988, reunited (without Zoom) in ‘91, and finally disbanded in ’96.

While his former bandmates have remained visible, Zoom (whose real name is Tyson Kindell) has been living a life of quiet satisfaction away from the limelight. His Billy Zoom Music enterprise encompasses an amp-building and repair business (customers have included No Doubt and Social Distortion), as well as a music production company. After all these years, his reputation still precedes him: enigmatic, difficult. And he has no trouble living up to it.

He says he has been a born-again Christian for 20 years, and later he claims to be working on a gospel album, about which he is quite willing to say nothing. Around 50 (he won’t give his age), he looks much the same, though the perfect blond pompadour is now shot with silvery gray, and his eyes are creased by laugh lines when he smiles, which is often.

Mind you, that smile isn’t meant to put people at ease. The blue eyes are cold, watchful. In the old days, he wore it perpetually onstage like the Joker’s death-rictus grin. Today he calls it his “trademark” with a mixture of subtle pride and sinister glee. He refuses to allow a photographer to catch him without it.

In the late ‘70s, Zoom’s other trademarks--his ‘50s wildcat look and fierce rockabilly playing--distinguished X as much as Cervenkova and Doe’s off-kilter harmonies and writing set the band apart from legions of eyeball-poking L.A. punks. Forged during his stint as a sideman for Gene Vincent and in his own pre-X Billy Zoom Band, the guitarist’s icy intensity and cut-to-the-chase riffs emphasized the urgency in X’s emotionally messy songs. His playing gave the band its edge, and many fans still maintain that X lost it when Zoom left after the fifth album, “Ain’t Love Grand.”

“I think it came as sort of a shock to a lot of the fans,” says Zoom about his departure. “We hadn’t talked about it in interviews, but I’d been telling [the other band members] for a year that I was going to leave after that tour if the record didn’t take off.”

Back then, of course, there was no alternative-rock support system--and thus no marketing niche for X.

“There were a lot of things about X that weren’t done very well,” says Zoom, “but we were the first ones all the time. We were the experiment that everybody learned from.”

But even a quick glance at the liner notes of last year’s “Beyond and Back: The X Anthology” reveals that the group’s effect on punk rock wasn’t about marketing triumphs. The band’s mystique assumes Doors-like proportions, as local punk luminaries rhapsodize about the X shows they witnessed and the high energy, wild living and real-life tragedies that bonded them.

Zoom’s own reflection on that era is less flowery. “At the time it was my life; it was what I did,” he says, adding that he understood the magnitude of X while it was happening.

How?

“I stood on stage and looked at the audience. I saw it.”

That sounds unromantic and a bit glib, but Zoom’s way of putting it isn’t much different from the you-had-to-be-there recollections found in the anthology. Coming back to X now seems strange, he says, but it has reaped some unexpected--and odd--benefits.

He and Cervenkova recently filmed promo spots for “The X-Files” (the series’ creator, Chris Carter, a big X fan, has included the band’s music in the show). Zoom also picked up a guitar-strings endorsement. (He claims to have broken only two strings onstage the whole time he played with X: “One at Club 88 in 1978, and one in Riverside in ’84.”) But he seems most impressed with himself for winning an endorsement perhaps even more coveted than this reunion is for X fans: Gretsch is going to make a Billy Zoom model.

“That’s another good reason to come back,” Zoom drawls. “I think having a Gretsch endorsement is the biggest kick I ever got out of playing music. It’s like Chet Atkins and Les Paul.”

BE THERE

X plays on Saturday at the Hollywood Palladium, 6215 Sunset Blvd., 7:30 p.m. Sold out. (213) 962-7600.