Sign of the times

I LAUGHED WHEN I saw the custom-autographed guitar pick at Billy Zoom's place (www.xtheband.com/billy.html) on the X homepage (www.xtheband.com). That pick links to Zoom's separate Web site. I laughed again when I saw a link there that said "Nice Guy," which turned out to be a piece of investigative reporting; a writer named Buddy Siegal had been sent to find out whether or not Zoom was, as Siegal put it, "an asshole." The writer said no, but he didn't seem convinced.

He didn't ask me, that's for sure. I'd have told him about the time my band opened for X in Petaluma, in 1983 or '84. X was big out in rural Sonoma County, the only explanation for expensive, glossy posters with a snapshot of the band – Zoom, bassist John Doe, singer Exene Cervenka, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake. I grabbed a couple because X was then, and is now, my favorite rock band ever, and we were in Petaluma, and what did I care about Petaluma? No one I knew had ever even been there.

I'd seen X so many times over the years that it seemed like I knew them – 50 shows at least, not bad considering I lived in Oakland and they were in Los Angeles. Of course the truth is that despite what I felt, I didn't know them at all. But we shared a dressing room at the gig, and while we were killing time between sets, I sucked it up and one by one, asked them to sign a poster. It was an unseemly spectacle – a grown man going all seventh grade – and I want to thank John, D.J., and Exene who politely chose to overlook the whole affair, even when I spilled a few drops of water on Exene's shoe while rooting around on the floor looking for the pencil one of us dropped when I tried to hand it to her with the poster.

I found it and made a cursory attempt to brush water from Exene's ankle with our guitar player's yellow suede jacket. He yelped and yanked, and suddenly I was looking straight up at what should have been ceiling, except the understandably startled singer had jumped to her feet and found herself standing over me, smoothing her skirt. We handled the situation like adults, and I was thankful, given the un-adult business I was handling. There was, in a minute, three down and just Zoom to go, and when I caught his eye, he had that strange, almost cynical smile on his face – an attempt at parody, he claimed, his way of making known the contempt he felt for bloated '70s rock stars who preened onstage while performing. His lip curled into something slightly more venomous than usual, but I'd come too far to quit. He signed, and I still have the proof, hanging on my office wall.

X broke up a long time ago, but like most bands who need money, or still have something left, or both, they've reunited on and off in recent years. In most such cases, the results are terrible, but for X the opposite is true. While they don't write new material, their old songs are as brilliant today as they were 25 years ago. They offered a critique of Los Angeles that was stunning, fierce, and as finely wrought as anything by Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, Doctor Dre, Mike Davis, or Carl Franklin. The material still lives when the band are onstage – and they're capable of making it come alive for thousands of their fans. Was it a collective lack of success, band and fans, that allowed the work to survive? I don't know, but they helped me live then, and I can say the same thing today. It's as difficult today to confess my passion for a band that peaked more than 25 years ago as it was to ask them for their autograph back then. Music demands that one live in the present tense more than any form of popular culture. To understand and appreciate the past is crucial, but to privilege the past over today and tomorrow is the critical kiss of death. I could offer in my defense the fact that were I going to get stuck in the past, it would have been long before X came along. More to the point, it's their music I love, not the moment that created it. I'm far more interested in tomorrow than yesterday.

I was thinking about this while exploring Relevant History (askpang.typepad.com/relevant_history/) and Future Now (blogger.iftf.org/future/), a pair of blogs by a Stanford grad named Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Pang describes himself as a futurist and a historian and has the credentials – he has a post as research director at a Silicon Valley think tank called the Institute for the Future, and he's the author of Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions – to back up the claim. How is it his mind manages unfettered flight back and forth through time? He claims it's because he uses the same intellectual instruments to get to both places. Pang is interested in the technologies that shape and have been shaped by the world they come from. My concerns are different, but his angle of approach allows me to love X as I once did, without the fear I would be trapped by the past.