Artist as Everyman
X-man John Doe headlines Levitt Pavilion’s American Music Night Thursday
By Bliss 08/21/2008
It’s entirely fitting that John Doe is headlining this week’s American Music Night at the Levitt Pavilion. Enshrined in rock’s pantheon as the influential frontman of X, over the past two decades Doe’s musical curiosity has taken him from punk and alt-rock to country, rockabilly, folk and back to driving rock, a path subsequently traversed by numerous fans and contemporaries. Whether reuniting with X or its hillbilly offshoot the Knitters, or performing his critically praised solo material — which he’ll do Thursday at the Levitt — he taps into various roots of American music.
Many anarchic punkers of the 1970s and ’80s succumbed to their own angry excesses, but Doe made a fairly gracious transition into a dependable albeit offbeat career as a solo artist, both as a musician and as an actor. Credit for that goes to a solid Midwestern work ethic (he was born in 1954 in Decatur, Ill.) that demands you make your own luck, and a savvy knack for understanding and capturing dualities — of relationships, of art, of living a life of meaning in a less than principled world. He’s proved to be equally adept at conveying those challenges in supporting roles in films like “The Good Girl,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Wyatt Earp,” “Boogie Nights” and “Pure Gold” and TV shows such as “Law & Order” and “Roswell.” Contrary to many hormone-fueled punk anthems, integrity and compromise aren’t always locked in mortal conflict.
That’s a complex point often drowned out by the shrieks of a soundbyte-drunk pop culture, but one that’s informed the subtext of damn near every X song and performance — not to mention some of the best songs from Doe’s solo albums: “Golden State,” “Bad Bad Feeling,” “There’s a Black Horse,” “Hwy 5,” “Picture This,” “Let’s Be Mad,” “This Loving Thing,” “Too Many Goddamn Bands” and “The Meanest Man in the World.”
Doe draws a clean line between his solo work and his output with X and the Knitters — it was a justly celebrated occasion when onetime X guitarist Tony Gilkyson joined him onstage at last year’s Topanga Days festival — but he’s also usually game for whatever gets tossed his way by fans (or hecklers). Onstage, he’s a study in the “Let’s do this” school of lean, driven rocking: he strolls out, plugs in his guitar and gets right down to business. There’s a lot of meat in his songs, and he wastes no time slicing straight to their honest, road-seasoned core.
John Doe plays the Levitt Pavilion in Memorial Park at Raymond Avenue and Walnut Street, Pasadena, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Call (626) 683-3230 for details. www.theejohndoe.com, www.myspace.com/thejohndoething.
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