R.I.P. Singer/songwriter and guitarist Jon Dee Graham, 1959-2026

Sadly beloved Austin singer/songwriter and guitar ace Jon Dee Graham has passed away far too soon at 67. He'll be greatly missed. 

L.A. legends X & Los Lobos cancel their upcoming tour

Sadly, Los Lobos and X have cancelled their much anticipated North American tour including their Massey Hall date Friday.

Happy Birthday John Doe!

Celebrating John Doe's birthday with a chat about donuts, a song and a shopping spree with Exene at Amoeba worth checking. 

Dust off your tuntable, it's National Vinyl Record Day!

For some of us, every day is vinyl record day. See what X's Exene & John Doe found at Amoeba Records today. 

Get a vinyl copy of X's final studio album "Smoke & Fiction" directly from Fat Possum Records right here. 

Celebrating the Fourth of July with John Doe and Dave Alvin!

Watch old pals John Doe and Dave Alvin duet on "Fourth Of July" at Fitzgerald's in Chicago back in 2014. 

Happy Birthday John Doe!

Celebrating the birthday of John Doe with a performance with his X partner Exene Cervenka for the Skyline Sessions.  

Watch the John Doe Folk Trio play a backyard show

Here's John Doe with bassist Kevin Smith (from Willie Nelson's band) and drummer Kevin Choucron (NRBQ) playing a few tunes. 

Happy Birthday Alejandro Escovedo!

Celebrating Alejandro's birthday with his stellar versions of "Put You Down" & "Sally Was A Cop" at ACL's Hall Of Fame show.

The Blasters featured in Country Music Hall of Fame's 'Western Edge' exhibit

Dave Alvin's beat-up Fender Mustang will be part of the Country Music Hall of Fame's Western Edge exhibit opening Sept. 30th. 

Writes Dave Alvin....

In the fall of 1988, after being dropped by CBS Records, I attempted to be a professional Nashville songwriter. I failed miserably.

During that odd, rough time of my life, I lived in a second floor apartment (in the dark back building barely visible behind the two well lit front ones) on 17th Ave South. My roommate was a fine jazz guitarist named Chris Page. Neither Chris nor I had any money to properly furnish the place but we did find two metal folding chairs and a metal folding card table that cost us about 20 bucks total at a local store. I slept on the living room floor on a one person air mattress. I really had nothing going on with my career but, on the bright side, I did have an acoustic guitar, a cassette player/AM-FM radio boombox, some clothes in a suitcase, an ashtray, some pens and stacks of notebooks full of questionable lyrics for half-written songs. 

I also had some intense hangovers, met some wonderful folks, met a few jerks, wrote with some excellent (if struggling same as I was) songwriters, had a few memorable experiences with a couple successful tunesmiths and, seeing how I had no car or credit cards back then, I spent a lot of time exploring the lovely streets of Nashville on foot when I wasn't scribbling verses in "the writer's room" at the Bug Music offices on 16th Ave. When no big Nashville stars cut any of the songs I'd been co-writing and the weather got too damn cold in December, I tucked my tail between my legs and limped back to California.

I'm telling you this old tale because September 30th, 2022 will be the opening night at Nashville's highly respected Country Music Hall of Fame for it's newest landmark exhibit, "Western Edge: The Roots And Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock" and I am proud beyond words to be included in it. This comprehensive exhibit covers the early 60s to the early 90s, from The Dillards, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Burrito Brothers to Emmy Lou Harris and Linda Ronstadt through to The Blasters and Knitters then on to Lone Justice, Los Lobos, Rosie Flores and finally Dwight Yoakam. 

I'm sincerely honored that my beat up old Blaster era Fender Mustang guitar will be on display in the exhibit, along with my also beat up old Blaster era leather jacket, my now fragile, lucky red bandanna that I wore on every Blasters album cover and my ragged but right, folk art guitar case that traveled the world with me during those wild years. There is also a big opening night concert at the museum that I'll be performing at which also features many legendary musicians from the exhibit like Chris Hillman (The Byrds/Burrito Brothers), Richie Furay (Buffalo Springfield/Poco),  Maria McKee, Rosie Flores, The Watkins Twins and many more. 

Yeah, I'm nervous and a touch scared to be part of this shindig. I know I'm really just a rock and rolling folk/blues guitar basher and not a "country" artist but the influence of country music on my songwriting is undeniable. I'm proud and thrilled The Blasters will be recognized by the Country Music Hall of Fame for the hard work we did and the influence we had. Of course, the down and out guy that was me in 1988, sleeping on the floor in a small Nashville apartment with little money and no prospects, would not believe for one damn second that any of this could possibly be happening. I'm positive, though, that he feels as deeply honored as I do.    – Dave Alvin

For more info, visit the Country Music Hall Of Fame site right here. 

Happy July 4th from Dave Alvin!

Here's Blasters singer/songwriter Dave Alvin performing his classic "4th of July" (below). He talks about writing it right here.  

Wherever Dave Alvin goes, you know his fancy travel hat box ain't far behind. 

Kate Clover vs. X

Check out Kate Clover's recent version of X's "Your Phone's Off The Hook" following an X performance from 1980.

Watch John Doe's video for "Destroying Angels"

"Destroying Angels" is off John Doe's new album Fables In A Foreign Land (out Friday) which you can get right here.

John Doe previews new album with "Never Coming Back" video

"Never Coming Back" is off John Doe's new album Fables In A Foreign Land out May 20th via Fat Possum. 

Happy Birthday John Doe

Raising a glass to X's John Doe and remembering Dallas Good with their performance at Toronto's Sonic Boom on April 30. 2009. 

X sez "Goodbye Year, Goodbye"

"Goodbye Year, Goodbye" is off X's Alphabetland album released in April. Check out the animated clip below.  

Reunited X quietly drops Alphabetland, first new album in decades!

Check X's update of "Delta 88 Nightmare" off their long-awaited new album Alphabetland – produced by Rob Schnapf – available right here.

John Doe & Dave Alvin rejoin The Flesh Eaters for new album due in January

The Flesh Eaters' forthcoming album I Used To Be Pretty is due January 18 from Yep Roc – the first single is a cover of The Sonics' "Cinderella."

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — One of Los Angeles punk rock’s most widely admired yet little-heard bands makes a striking return to records on January 18, as Yep Roc Records issues I Used to Be Pretty an all-new collection by The Flesh Eaters.

On the release, founding vocalist and songwriter Chris Desjardins — better known as Chris D. — is backed by the legendary “all-star” edition of the band, originally heard on the 1981 set A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die: Dave Alvin (guitar) and Bill Bateman (drums) of The Blasters; John Doe (bass) and D.J. Bonebrake (marimba and percussion) of X; and Steve Berlin (saxophones) of The Plugz (and later The Blasters and Los Lobos). The album was produced collectively by the band members.

On five of the album’s 11 tracks, this super-powered unit is joined by Julie Christensen, Desjardins’ vocal partner in both The Flesh Eaters’ successor band Divine Horsemen and latter-day editions of the original group. The singers were married during the ’80s.

Release of I Used to Be Pretty, which will be issued in single-CD and double-LP configurations, will be followed by a series of U.S. tour dates — the very first shows, save for a lone U.K. appearance, to take this hitherto elusive group outside the West Coast.

The Flesh Eaters were among the groundbreaking bands that emerged from the original Hollywood punk club The Masque in 1977. Chris D. — poet, novelist, actor, screenwriter, director, and film programmer — developed a stormy, lyrically intense style that drew on such varied sources as symbolist poetry, violent American pulp novels, and films running the gamut from classic European cinema to samurai, horror, spaghetti Western, and noir genre movies. He was also active on the local scene as a writer for the L.A. punkzine Slash and an A&R man and producer for the magazine’s offshoot record label.

The band’s first records employed various ad hoc assemblies of local punk musicians. For its second album, the howling, swampy, hoodoo-infused A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die — produced by Chris D. and released on Slash’s subsidiary imprint Ruby Records — the singer recruited a band then unrivaled for musical firepower. The potent lineup played only a handful of unforgettable local shows before its members’ commitments to their own bands sundered the group.

However, the Minute to Pray Flesh Eaters’ reputation abided for decades, and in 2006 the lineup reunited for an appearance at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in the U.K. and a few West Coast appearances. Two more brief regroupings followed in 2015 and 2018.

Desjardins says of the latter series of eight dates, “When we were doing the shows, I said, ‘You guys, we are so tight right now, we have got to go in the studio and document this and do an album. We do it within a couple of months after the live shows, by the end of April. That should give everyone a window where we can all get together.’”

I Used to Be Pretty is bookended by a pair of dramatic new songs. Desjardins says of “Black Temptation,” the ferocious leadoff track, “I wanted to do that song for the Miss Muerte album in 2004, but we didn’t have time to work the music up. I actually published the lyrics in my book A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die in 2009, and I never thought I was going to get to record it.”

“Ghost Cave Lament,” the sprawling 13-minute song that closes the album, was developed by Desjardins and Alvin before the recording sessions. This incantatory epic’s musical setting was inspired by “Moritas Moras,” an extended piece by flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata.

Desjardins says the finished track reminds him of work by another notable L.A. band: “After we listened to it a few times when it was done, it struck me really forcefully like ‘The End’ or ‘When the Music’s Over’ by The Doors. It had that kind of feel that those longer Doors songs had. That had not been our intention at all, but those latent influences came out.”

Six tracks on I Used to Be Pretty offer forceful reinterpretations of previously released Flesh Eaters songs. “Pony Dress” was first heard on the compilation Tooth and Nail (1979), released on Chris D.’s Upsetter Records; “My Life to Live” and “The Wedding Dice” appeared on Forever Came Today (1982); “Youngest Profession” originated on Dragstrip Riot (1991); “House Amid the Thickets” debuted on Ashes of Time (1999); and “Miss Muerte” was the title track of the most recent Flesh Eaters album. (History repeats itself in a couple of instances: Doe and Bonebrake played on the original “Pony Dress,” while Berlin appeared on the earlier “The Wedding Dice.”)

“The album certainly is a summation,” Desjardins says. “It incorporates some older material that this lineup never played on.”

Check out the video for The Flesh Eaters' cover of "Cinderella" by The Sonics (below).

Happy Birthday John Doe!

Happy Birthday John Doe!

Watch John perform a few X songs with Mike McCready after an Acoustic Guitar session.

Watch John Doe's new video for Get On Board

John Doe's The Westerner co-produced by Howe Gelb is out April 29 on Cool Rock Records.

JD also has a new book on the LA punk scene.