Singer-bassist looks back at a punk classic, and explains why he changed the lyrics to one of the band’s signature songs, decades later
They titledafter one of their most arresting songs, which described a woman who had grown to hate L.A. so much that she’d become a raving racist, homophobic anti-Semite and had to leave immediately. Doe wrote the lyrics about a friend of his who had a nervous breakdown while living in London. “She’d just gotten fed up with it,” he toldin 2017. “She had lived there for a couple of years and she became more and more racist and stereotyping people.
In more recent years, though, he says the song’s racism has made him feel uneasy and the band cut the song from their set lists for a period of time. “It’s a character-driven song,” he says now. “It’s about this person, ‘she.’ It’s, like, a signature X song, but we’ve had to change some lyrics. We used the N-word in that, and even when it was written, that use was to hold a mirror up to people and say, ‘In desperate times, really ugly things can surface from your past.
They stopped playing the song for two tours, and then their fans started asking them why they’d stopped performing what was essentially their signature tune. “It was like, ‘We just can’t figure out how to do this,'” Doe says. “We were really conflicted. Part of us was being egotistical and petulant and saying, ‘Well, I didn’t mean it that way,’ and that’s kind of bullshit because then you’re just defending yourself.
“I’d rather have a few people say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that because that’s the way it was written, man, and we understand,’ than the alternative,” Doe continues. “It’s like, we didn’t care. It’s a different time now, and I still can talk about it and I feel like words are just words. You can’t say ‘Voldemort,’ but words are just words and that’s a particularly inflammatory word, and it means more than the reference I was trying to make.
Other than the original version of “Los Angeles,” Doe considers the album to be practically perfect. “That’s actually the one record we play every song from,” Doe says. “I give Ray Manzarek a lot of credit for choosing the songs that we’ve concentrated on to make that record. We had a limit to the amount of time in the studio. We had maybe a week’s worth of basic tracks and maybe four days of overdubs and then four or five days of mixing.
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