X emerged from the LA punk scene of the late ’70s with a sound that drew heavily on American roots music. Credit: Kirsty Benjamin

The music industry is at an interesting juncture where plenty of bands that have been around for decades are embarking on farewell tours.

Add X to that category.

The storied Southern California punk band is not only releasing Smoke & Fiction, its ninth and likely final studio album, but it’s also embarking on its last tour, which stops Saturday, Oct. 19, at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre. Jimbo Mathus will open.

But ask founding member and vocalist Exene Cervenka, and the idea of a farewell tour is less about ending on a specific date and more about slowly retreating from being a rock band on the road.

“The final tour means we’ll play until we can’t play anymore,” she said in an early July interview. “That might be 2025 or that might be 2026 — I have no idea. The thing is that we’re booked until the end of 2025, and then we’re booked until the end of May 2026. Everybody does these farewell tours that last for years — Elton John, Cher, The Go-Go’s. Everybody does these farewell tours, and what it means is we’re getting older and it’s getting harder. People think we’re going to play five more shows and then we’re done. We have never ever stopped touring. We play all the time. Plus, you can’t retire from music, you can only quit.”

The decision for X to pack it in comes at a curious and rather productive juncture of a band that’s been active since 1977, when Cervenka, vocalist-bassist John Doe, guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake came together. In 2020, the band released its eighth studio album, the Rob Schnapf-produced Alphabetland, the group’s first studio effort since 1993’s Hey Zeus! But before the group had a chance to hit the road, the pandemic hit. And while X may have avoided the recording studio up to that point, the band had consistently been on the road.

For the quartet, not recording was a matter of economics, especially given the changing state of the music industry.

“We didn’t think we were going to make Alphabetland,” Cervenka explained. “I’d been badgering them to make a studio album for 15 years, and everyone always said no. And that’s because we’d lose money because we didn’t own our records and Spotify doesn’t pay anything. It would just be free on the Internet, so why bother to spend $50,000 making a record just to give it away? But then we got possession of our old records and hooked up with Fat Possum [Records]. We have the licensing and own everything, so it made it that we could do this now. Then we did Live in Latin America, and it proved to them that we could make a record and people would buy it.”

For Cervenka, hooking up with Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Booker T. Jones) to produce both Alphabetland and Smoke & Fiction proved to be a wise move for X. Not only was it easier for this second go-round, but Schnapf proved to be the first consistent hand behind the boards since X’s early days working with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who oversaw the band’s first four seminal albums.

“We did both albums at the same studios,” Cervenka said. “It was a little easier because Alphabetland was just us trying to put stuff together, and we were doing some old songs and just trying to see if we could even do a record. I knew we could. But, yeah, we know how to do this. We went into Sunset Sound, recorded for four days and got everything we needed. We were ahead of schedule, went over to Rob’s with all our stuff and never had to settle, because we sang and played it until it was right. It was easy. It reminded me a lot of the early days with Ray Manzarek, because Rob is a lot like him in that he’s super positive, super intelligent, super creative and artistic. And while he has really great suggestions, he doesn’t change the band or the sound. He just wants me to sing like me the best I can.”

With a passel of new songs to draw from, X will dip into a deep song canon that’s led to trimmed-back set lists due to aging fan demographics.

“We’re going to play different old songs different nights because we have two new albums, really, so we can’t play only the old songs,” Cervenka said. “We’ll play six or seven songs from the last two records — this one and the one before. In the old days, we’d get two or three encores, because kids wanted more. Now our audience is older and they kind of want to go home. We put on a great show. We play for an hour and 15 minutes and we’ll do an encore. But if there’s something people want to hear, we hope we’ll play it, but we can’t always. We’ll give it our best, as always, to play a great show. I enjoy that time on stage more than anything. The stuff around it is a little harder than it used to be, but I don’t really care. You get dressed up and sing. What more do you want out of life?”

$39-$70, 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19, Empire Theatre, 226 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 226-5700, majesticempire.com.

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This article appears in Oct 16-29, 2024.