Exene Cervenka was born in Chicago in 1956, the second child in a family of four daughters. Her mother, Mary Healy, was the child of Irish immigrants, and her father, Lewis Cervenka, who was of Bohemian extraction. When Exene was three months old, she and her family moved to a small Illinois town where they lived until 1970, when they relocated to Florida. Exene quit school when she was sixteen, and following the death of her mother in 1974, she devoted the next two years of her life to looking after her two younger sisters. When her father remarried in 1976, she was free to hit the road and make her own life, and in August of 1976 she moved to Los Angeles. Shortly after her arrival she met musician John Doe at a poetry workshop in Venice; early in 1977 the two of them formed X, the most important L.A. band to emerge from the first generation of American punk. It’s significant that John and Exene met at a poetry workshop; their eloquent lyrics played a central role in setting them apart from the hundreds of punk bands that sprang up in the ‘70s.
I met Exene during the first year X was gigging in Los Angeles and was immediately impressed by her. She was still so young, and she’d clearly been wounded by life, but she was such a dignified girl. Scruffy and fierce, she was defiantly true to herself always, and nobody else dressed like her or behaved the way she did. Exene patented her own brand of beauty, and she was brave. I’d watch her onstage and wonder how she got the nerve to be so original, so much herself. She’s a powerful performer, and has been since the first time she walked onto a stage. This is remarkable, given that her childhood wasn’t a very fertile one in terms of fostering creativity, tenderness, or courage. She developed those qualities in herself entirely through the force of her own character and will, and that is no small thing.
X released its debut album, Los Angeles, in 1980 and during the spring of that year Exene and John were married. A week after their wedding Exene’s older sister, Muriel Cervenka, was killed in an automobile accident in L.A. This was a huge loss for Exene, but it didn’t slow her down, and over the next six years X released five more critically acclaimed albums. 1982 saw the publication of Adulterer’s Anonymous, a collaboration with Lydia Lunch that was the first of four books Exene has published, and her practice as a visual artist continued to deepen. A gifted collagist, she’s created dozens of finely detailed journals that have the exquisite density of Faberge eggs.
In 1986 Exene’s marriage to John Doe ended, and the following year she married actor Viggo Mortensen, with whom she had a son in 1988. In 1991 that marriage also ended. During the late ‘80s, Exene completed two solo albums, published her second volume of verse, Virtual Unreality, and continued to perform with X. In 1992 she collaborated with photographer Kenneth Jarecke on Just Another War, a book of images and verse concerning the 1991 war in Iraq, and in 2001 she published A Beer on Every Page. That same year she formed the Original Sinners, whose debut album was released in 2002. In August of that year she married musician Jason Edge, guitarist with the Original Sinners, and they share a cozy house in L.A. full of wonderful things; souvenirs of their lives on the road as traveling musicians, pieces of Americana and folk art, political propaganda, and funny things that caught Exene’s eye. Her house embodies one of the things I like best about her, which is how unmistakably American she is. The child of poor immigrants, Exene is a Horatio Alger figure who rose from the prairies of the Midwest.
What’s your earliest memory?
Stepping on a tack. I was coming downstairs and my grandfather was talking with my father downstairs in the kitchen. It was so early in the morning that it was still dark, and as I walked down stairs I stepped on a tack and started crying. They just told me to stop blubbering -- the people in my family were all pretty belligerent. My mother’s mother lived with us until I was in third grade, and she was a severe alcoholic who became wildly unpredictable when she drank. My mother also drank and did some self-medicating towards the end of her life, but my parents weren’t wild partiers or pill heads.
My mother was Irish and although she was born in the United States, most of her brothers and sisters were born in Ireland, and her father was in the I.R.A. Supposedly he came to the United States because he had to get out of Ireland. I don’t know what sort of crimes he committed, but he was heavy into the I.R.A. and was an extremely violent person. He and my grandmother were both raging alcoholics.
I went to the town in Ireland where my mother’s family was from, and it was listed in the guidebook as the most forlorn place in all of Ireland, which is saying a lot. It’s at the most extreme western point in Ireland, and it was shockingly bare -- you look at this place and can’t imagine how anyone could scratch out a living there. There was a stone school building, and some white houses with thatched roofs, but basically it was just rocky ground descending down to the sea. I guess that explains how my grandfather wound up in the I.R.A. He came from a line of hard people who beat their kids to keep them in line. I had a cousin in prison for murder, and most of my mother’s brothers and sisters are dead.
My mother was only sixteen and my father was forty when they met. My father’s still alive -- he’s 91 now. My mother’s parents were living in Chicago and they ran a tavern where my father was a regular. He saw my mother there and they wound up getting married. My mother was seventeen when she married, and eighteen when she had my sister, Muriel. I was born a year and a half later, in 1956. They were sharing a basement apartment with another couple at the time, then a few months after I was born, we moved to a house my father built in a small Illinois town called Mokena that was just springing up out of the wheat fields and farm lands. The area is now part of an extended suburban network, but back then it had a population of 1,000 people, and it was in the prairie. The fields there had gone to seed because they hadn’t been cultivated in years, but there were still rotting old wooden fence posts with rusting wire, and wild grass growing everywhere. You could see farms in the distance. It was the beginning of the suburbs.
I was the second child in a family of four girls, and when I was in third grade my first younger sister was born, then my second younger sister came when I was thirteen. They’re really different from me and I don’t have much contact with my family. I don’t know what they think about what I do. My sisters and my father are close, but I’ve never felt like I could penetrate that little group and I finally just gave up. It’s that weird family dynamic. You know how families often have one kid that just doesn’t seem to belong?
When I was growing up my father was always off working as a carpenter, and my mother was a cocktail waitress until I was six. My mother was an emotionally tortured, introverted agoraphobic, and we never went anywhere. We never took a vacation except for one time when I was really little, and we went to a hillbilly place in the Ozarks where you could go on boats and go square dancing. There were no movie theaters in the town where we lived, so I went to the movies twice when I was growing up. I didn’t know it at the time because we always had food, but we were really poor and my father did lots of trading to help us get by. He’d build an addition onto somebody’s house in exchange for new tires for our car, or somebody would fix our plumbing and he’d go lay a floor in exchange.
In Illinois I attended a private Catholic school where I got a good education, then when I was fourteen my family moved to Florida so my father could get seasonal work doing carpentry, and I switched to a public school. It was still the era of segregation, and I’d never been around people of color. My mother had an unnaturally phobic reaction to black people -- I have no idea why, but she was literally terrified of black people -- and we were living in a county that was a bastion of segregation. There were race riots all the time, and it was horrifying. The white kids and the black kids hated each other for no reason other than that they’d grown up being tutored to hate each other for the same stupid reasons people have their little factional disputes today. I was regarded as a freak because I’d just moved down from Illinois and I was already wearing thrift store clothes. In Florida, people would stop in the streets or in the hallways at school and stare at me.
How do you explain that unlike most kids, you didn’t want to look like everybody else?
Because there absolutely no way for me to do that. There was a big price to pay if you wanted to look different back then, though, and I don’t know what gave me the courage to do it because I really hated the abuse I got. If you looked different you could practically get lynched. But by the time I got to Florida I was already so into that look that there was no turning back. Finding some beautiful, unique old thing for a nickel, as opposed to trying to get on the train into Joliet to look for the latest, cutest thing, and then shop-lifting it -- which is what I spent most of my early teenage years doing, because I had no other way to get stuff -- it was a freedom thing. I just decided I could wear a beaded gown from the ‘20s if I wanted to.
What were you like when you were fourteen?
For most of my childhood I was pretty good, in a Catholic school sense, and I went to church seven days a week, partly because there was absolutely nothing else to do. There were only three television stations and two radio stations available in our area, there was no movie theater, and no place to go dance. We didn’t go swimming or to the beach or hiking or to Chicago or to museums or shopping. We didn’t have any books. I didn’t hunger for anything though, because I didn’t know there were other things. I played on the volleyball team and played a few games, but I didn’t do very well at that because my temper was kind of bad. I listened to the radio, then when I was 14 I became interested in boys, and had a serious boyfriend from the time I was 15 until I was 18.
When you were attending church regularly did you feel that God was a real presence in your life?
As soon as I reached what I guess you’d call the age of reason all of that just evaporated for me, and I went from being a total believer to doubting every word of it. It was the ‘60s and a spirit of liberation was in the air, so I just shook all of that off. There was something about that time that made for individuals. Regardless of whether you were a woman, a man, a kid, religious or not, there was this sense of “I don’t have to do this anymore, it’s just bullshit.”
That was one of many things that changed for me when we moved to Florida. After we’d been there two years I quit school, got an apartment by myself, and got a job at Webb City, which was “the world’s most unusual drug store.” It was owned by this guy Doc Webb, and Webb City had everything -- mile-high ice cream cones, a shoe shine stand and barbershop, groceries, toys, a talking mermaid exhibit, lingerie -- it was amazing.
While I was working there my mother died of lung cancer, and after she died I had to give up my job and my apartment and move with my family to San Antonio, which was a small town in central Florida with a population of 300. My older sister Muriel made it clear she wasn’t going to help raise my younger sisters so it was assumed I’d do it, but my father resented me for taking my mother’s place. It was a nightmare, and was the hardest period of my life. That went on for a year and half, and then my father married this woman who was a good mother to my sisters, and I have a lot of gratitude and respect for her. At that point I moved to Tallahassee by myself.
How did your mother’s death affect you?
It was just devastating, although she was really absent in a lot of ways. In my childhood memories, she’s usually not in the picture. I think Muriel got the first baby treatment -- the “you’re cute, you’re pretty, oh look, she’s laughing” -- then when I came along it was like, “oh look, there’s another one.” I’ve always felt like I was completely on my own, but I did love my mother a lot. Just before she died she got involved in politics, and it was interesting that she went through this cathartic period at the end of her life. She’d always been a chronic depressive who had no exterior life at all, but during the last few years of her life she suddenly started doing volunteer work for the Democratic Party and painting. Then she got sick and died.
How many times have you been in love?
I don’t know because I don’t know what the definition of that is. Have I imagined I’d met the perfect person and together we were gonna fill all those holes? Yes, millions of times. There are people I’ve never even met who I imagined would be that person. But you have to fill those holes yourself with other parts of yourself, and I believe it’s possible to do that. You really have to work at it though, physically, emotionally and mentally. And some days you just have to say to yourself, “look, you live in a house that you own, and that’s enough right there, so shut up and stop worrying.”
So, it’s total fiction, this notion that there’s someone out there for each of us who’s a perfect fit and can heal those deepest wounds?
Yes, it’s total fiction and I think most people know that. Anecdotal evidence suggests that if you tell a roomful of people to select the people they feel most comfortable with, all the alcoholics will congregate, and all the other specific personality types with their specific problems will gravitate towards each other. The weird thing is that the traits you find most attractive in a person eventually become the things that tear you apart, because those are the things you’re trying to fix in your mother, your father or yourself. And once you realize you can’t fix those traits that drew you to this person, those traits become intolerable. People fall in love with alcoholics over and over again, and then can’t accept that the person won’t stop drinking.
What made you move to Los Angeles in 1976?
My sister’s ex-boyfriend called and said he was moving to L.A. and he wanted to know if I knew anybody who might want a ride there because he needed someone to share gas. So I sold my car for $300, paid my back rent, which was $150, and left.
What was your first day in L.A. like?
I’d gotten a ride from Florida to Concord, California, and I took a bus from there to a Greyhound station that no longer exists in Santa Monica. It was pouring rain and there was thunder and lightning, all of which seemed normal to me, having just arrived from Florida. Of course, it was years before I saw weather like that in L.A. again. It was real early in the morning, and I got to my friend Faye’s apartment in Ocean Park, and there were two girls she’d just met from Texas living there with her and her boyfriend in this one-room studio apartment. It was an idyllic little spot, and she’d gone to a thrift store and bought a kid’s bed with a wagon wheel for a headboard, and I slept on that bed in the kitchen. It felt good to be out of the car because it was a long drive from Florida in a Pinto.
How long did it take for the city to feel like home?
I make it a point to feel like I’m home as quickly as possible whenever I arrive anywhere, even if it’s a motel room. You embrace the concept of “this is my place, I’m lucky to be here, and isn’t this a strange place to be?”
How has L.A. changed over the years you’ve been here?
The main change is that it’s become much more crowded. I’m a tolerant person, but I must admit I do have an immigrant problem. It’s not with any specific race -- I just feel the whole world has been mismanaged as far as where people are and where they’re going, and just how wrong everything is. I just get mad at the amount of people there are. The architecture and historical aspect of the city have also been almost completely wiped out due to the uncontrolled growth of the Reagan years. Mike Woo and all those people just ruined L.A.
What was the first punk rock you heard?
The Ramones, Patti Smith’s Horses, the Velvet Underground, Iggy, the New York Dolls -- I heard all that stuff around the same time while I was living in Florida. It’s all mixed up in my mind how punk rock started, but I think the Ramones were the purest launching point into punk.
How did punk affect you as an ideology?
We all know that when you’re younger your politics are more idealistic, and I was way more idealistic twenty years ago. I was insanely idealistic up until very recently, actually, but I’ve come to realize that there can be an element of false hope in idealism. Some parts of the punk rock mentality don’t mean much to me anymore, but other parts of it were valuable, and I still believe in those things.
Was there a moment when you gave yourself permission to be a singer?
I always wrestled with my legitimacy as a singer because of the way the press wrote about my singing, and the way women have traditionally sung. Generally speaking, women are considered singers if they have incredibly great voices. Men, on the other hand, are considered singers if they have a story to tell. I think I was able to sing because punk rock made that do-it-yourself thing acceptable, and you didn’t have to be a great player or singer to be in a band. Punk valued substance over form, and that was a new thing. The Beatles, Elvis, and Brenda Lee were all great singers -- it wasn’t as if any of the people in rock ’n’ roll couldn’t sing. But with punk, what you had to say was more important than having a polished voice. I was young, everyone around me was doing interesting things, and revolution was in the air. Because I grew up during the ‘60s I grasped what was going on, and I saw there was an opportunity to be a poet -- and a different kind of poet from the ones I saw. I had respect for those poets -- my favorite poet is Anna Akhmatova -- but I wasn’t an academic, I didn’t want to become stuck in the small world of poets, and I didn’t fit into any literary scene. So, when John Doe wanted to use my words for songs I said yes.
During the early years of X, did you feel you were working out the anger you felt over the difficulty of your childhood in your performances?
I didn’t know I’d had a difficult childhood, but I definitely hated society and everyone in it, and there was never a second that I wasn’t just incredulous at how wrong everything was. Yeah, I was pretty much mad about everything.
Was John Doe a crucial person for you in terms of valuing your sensibility?
He definitely was, but I was also determined not to let go of my stuff. I didn’t want this guy I hardly knew to make songs out of my words and have that be the end of it.
Did he encourage you to sing?
The whole band did because they believed the dynamic between the two voices was going to work eventually. John’s voice was almost too good for the kind of music we were playing and the times we were living in, and the music needed this crazy, chaotic element to make it stand out. But all of this is an intellectual reflection on something that happened without a lot of thought -- which isn’t to suggest we didn’t work incredibly hard. X rehearsed three times a week, and John and I worked every day writing songs, and practicing endless rounds of choruses of songs. I hated him for it and didn’t want to rehearse after dinner every night, but we were trying to get to the point that the notes and melody were so second nature that we didn’t have to think about them when we were performing. We could just go.
You and John married in 1980: did you enjoy being married?
It’s hard to be married when you’re young because you’re so romantic and idealistic. There are good things about being married to someone you’re in a band with, because you travel together and you’re working towards a goal, but 23 is a little young to be married. That was the choice I made, so I don’t regret it.
When you fell into the L.A. punk community of the ‘70s did you feel as though you’d finally found your tribe?
I really did feel a kinship with those people, at least as much as I’m capable of. I’m pretty much an outsider, so it’s always hard for me to feel like I belong, and the people in that scene were so disparate. It was like every kind of person. But there were wonderful moments. You could hardly know a person, then one night you’d spend several incredibly meaningful hours with that person, and for the next two years you’d just say hi when you saw them. Drugs and alcohol had a lot to do with the social climate then, but that community was also full of people who were seeking out incredible moments.
Can you mark the point when the spirit you’re describing began to dissipate?
X began hooking up with bands from other cities after we started touring, so we got a perpetual party going on around the country and it was still fun for us, even if things weren’t happening in L.A. But I’d say that original group of people began moving apart around the time grunge started in the early ‘80s, and places like Raji’s began booking bands. I never stopped meeting people and having fun, but after the hardcore scene kicked in I couldn’t go to certain shows anymore, or play with certain bands. That didn’t ruin our existence though, because our career took off around that time.
How did you feel when people started relating to you as a hero?
I wasn’t aware of that until recently. In fact, initially there was some resentment of me from punk girls, especially hardcore girls. I’ve always felt more a peer than a hero to people. The people who came to see us when we toured America were usually around the same age as us and it was like, “hey, we’re your age, we’re doing it, you’ve got a band too, lets go have a drink.” A few years ago people started telling me they were in love with me when they were 12 or something, but I had no idea young kids were into X, and never thought of myself as the person on the poster on someone’s bedroom wall.
What do you think you represented to those boys who had a crush on you?
The dark side of the superhero woman, somebody who was the opposite of the girl next door and was wild. And I was wild when I was in my 20s and 30s -- I had to be to overcome my fears. I had to be super-fierce, and it was almost like being a superhero. Talk about mild mannered, paranoid and scared. Then I’d walk out onstage with all my gear and just roar.
In retrospect, did the original punk community disappoint you?
No. What do you expect from a bunch of kids? It was a wonderful group of people who had an amazing youth. But then, everybody’s youth is a nice experience, even if they’re in college or something.
How much of that music holds up for you today?
All of it. F-Word, the Weirdos, the Zeros, all that stuff stands up -- for what it is, of course. It stands up the way Love or the Doors or Laura Nyro stand up for me.
What’s the most widely held misconception about the early punk scene?
That it was violent. The violence began in a different part of the state, with different bands and a different group of people, in an entirely different era.
Can you pinpoint the places in time where punk rock began and ended?
It hasn’t ended, but neither has the beatnik era or the hippie movement. Punk didn’t die then come back, it just kept evolving and changing.
How do you feel about the inaccuracies that are invariably built into history? There’s been a good deal of misinformation published about the L.A. punk scene, and it’s regarded as fact by many people.
Reality is subjective, and that says it all. It’s relatively easy to illustrate the discrepancies between fact and fiction in fields like math and science, but that’s not the case when it comes to life and art. People who kept diaries are the best sources of information about the past, because they wrote things down as they happened, and their memories aren’t distorting things. The human memory does tend to distort things, plus, I don’t know how sane people are to begin with. Some people knowingly lie about their own past in an attempt to make it seem more dramatic, and in doing that they inadvertently reshape the pasts of others. You know -- the parties were wilder, they were friends with people they barely knew -- this is how rumors get started, and eventually they’re treated as fact. All because one person decided something might look good on their biography. Artists are notorious for misrepresenting themselves to get more attention and seem more phenomenal, artistic and eccentric.
That suggests that most people feel that who they are isn’t enough.
They wouldn’t be onstage if they didn’t feel that way. An element of narcissism is required for a person to get onstage or in front of a camera, and narcissists are incapable of seeing the world through anyone’s eyes but their own. Consequently, their sense of reality is often radically different from that of the people around them.
How did losing your sister change you?
Because of the people she knew in New York, I think the projects I would’ve ended up doing would’ve been more eclectic, and I probably would’ve spent more time on experimental writing and visual art. I’m not a painter -- I’m a drawer, an illustrator and a collage person, and I like taking things that don’t go together and putting them next to each other. But that’s just a guess. Initially, her death made me a much more heavy-hearted person. It was really hard, but I don’t think it altered the path of X. I found refuge in touring, being with the band and with my little gang of friends.
How did getting money change your life?
When you’re 21 you don’t need money. What is there to buy? It wasn’t like there was fashion or anything, and there was one color of red lipstick. Maybe you’d go hunt down some Mary Quant. But it wasn’t a consumer society like it is now. We drank and ate and went to movies, tried to keep our cars running and paid our rent, and got everything we owned in thrift stores. It was the post-hippie days of three people sharing a house that cost $300 a month. Things didn’t cost a lot, but the world has changed since then, and ever since the Reagan era America’s been subjected to an ever-increasing fleecing of the public. Contrary to what some people seem to think, X never made money.
How did becoming a mother change you?
Having a baby is without a doubt the best and the worst thing you can go through in life. It’s a physical upheaval from the time of conception to the end of breastfeeding and it’s a constant challenge. You don’t care about that, though, when the hormonal stuff takes over -- the only thing you care about is you and your kid. This is hormonal stuff, ancient, protective stuff, and it’s like “get out of my way, I have a baby inside of me.” You’re so profoundly in a state of awe of the human body, and the mind goes from one extreme to another in ways you can’t conceive of unless you’ve experienced it. The miracle of conception and birth is beyond any other experience, and the idea that your baby could die at any second if you screw up is beyond any fear you could have. And, the love you feel for that baby is beyond any love you could feel for another person. The agony of day-to-day parenting can be so intense that some days you just want to kill yourself because, although you can walk away from anything else in life, you can’t walk away from a crying baby or a child going through a difficult phase.
My son Henry is the best thing that ever happened to me and he’s the thing in my life I’m most proud of. I never wanted to be a mother until I got pregnant with Henry. I met his father in New York in 1987 when we did a movie together called Salvation, and shortly after that we got married and had Henry. When he was six months old we moved to Sandpoint, Idaho, which is a small town in the extreme north of the state. I didn’t want my kid to go to a public school in Hollywood and wanted him to grow up in a healthy environment, and Viggo was very into that too, so we moved to Idaho in 1988. Part of the time there was tough because we were very poor. Viggo’s acting career was just getting started, and I had an infant. I did both of my solo records while I was living in Idaho, then moved back to L.A. in 1991.
Where would you like to live?
I’d like to live in any small or medium-sized town somewhere in the South or the Midwest where these issues don’t exist, and if you brought them up you’d be told that anybody who thinks that way is stupid. I love small town America, and the small towns are still there. The Wal-Mart is on the edge of town, and there’s still a hardware store downtown. It’s unfortunate that Wal-Mart put a lot of people out of business, but people can’t afford to buy things that aren’t made in China anymore, and that’s just the way it is. They can’t afford hand-made things made in America by guys in cover-alls, so that just doesn’t exist anymore.
What aspect of your personality has created the most problems for you in life?
The part of my personality that turns negative. I’ll sometimes be walking down the street and I’ll see someone laugh and I’ll think “what the hell are you laughing at? What’s so funny?! God, people are sick.”
What’s the most significant historic event that’s occurred over the course of your life?
This is an imprecise answer, but I’d have to say the ‘60s. Whatever that thing was, that incredibly all-encompassing political, musical, artistic, soul-altering vibe, it was unbelievable. It wasn’t a single event, like somebody being shot or a war erupting. It was a worldwide upheaval that triggered a spontaneous change in the spiritual life of the world, and we’re still experiencing repercussions from it. You can see it in things like holistic medicine, and the fact that people feel they have the right to question their own lives and to change them, to quit their job or move their family to an island. I was in a small town during the ‘60s, and I became aware of it through Life magazine, FM radio, and television, and I could see the effects of it in every single person I encountered when I stepped outside that small town. It filtered into our town, too, and made people question the war that was going on. It was in the air in a way nothing else probably ever will be. Punk was a direct result of it too, and was simultaneously a positive and a negative reaction against it.
Not everyone was galvanized into action by the ‘60s. What gave you the courage to strike out and invent a new life for yourself?
I don’t really know. I just made decisions as they came to me. I’d think of something and I’d do it -- and in retrospect, I realize I did lots of stupid things that could’ve killed me. I can’t believe I’m still alive, really. You never do know what’s going to happen next, and I question every day why I’m here. But if you stop for one second and think about all the good things you’ve seen and experienced, and the people you’ve known, life makes a little sense. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been directed in my life, which is weird, because I have no clue why I feel that way. Maybe everybody feels that. But when I make decisions, I always feel as if someone else is actually making the choice, and I’m just there going along with it.
What does it mean to you to play X’s music now?
Unless I’m tired I still like the songs emotionally, and I still like playing them. It makes me really, really happy to play.
Have your goals changed as a creative person? Do you want to accomplish different things with your work now than you did 20 years ago?
Not really. I still want to create something that’s such a perfect expression of what I felt that whoever comes across it will feel the exact same emotion and intensity, get it completely, and say “yeah, me too.”
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