X: Los Angeles [FAT POSSUM]

Why you'll love it

Fat Possum's reissue is remastered and comes with a download code. Los Angeles placed at No. 24 on Rolling Stone's 1989 list of the best albums of the 1980s, and its title track is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.

This edition

• Remastered
• Download card included

About the album

Punk records weren't usually produced by a Doors keyboardist, but then X were never a usual punk band. Ray Manzarek saw them in the Hollywood clubs, took the producer's chair for their Slash Records debut, and added organ to a handful of songs. John Doe and Exene Cervenka sang in ragged, close harmony, Billy Zoom played rockabilly guitar with a grin, and D.J. Bonebrake drove it all at speed.

"Your Phone's Off the Hook, But You're Not" opens in a sprint, "Johnny Hit and Run Paulene" and "Sex and Dying in High Society" sketch the city's seedier corners, and "Nausea" turned up in the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. Manzarek's organ drifts through "The Unheard Music" and the closing "The World's a Mess; It's in My Kiss," and they cover the Doors' "Soul Kitchen" with the man himself in the room. Doe and Cervenka wrote everything else.

The title track later played out the series finale of The Shield, and Bret Easton Ellis name-checks it at the close of Less Than Zero. Rarely has a city been described so unflatteringly and then thanked so warmly by everyone who bought the record.

Also at Kops: more X on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Fat Possum (cat# FP-1695-1), a reissue of the 1980 album.