X's Wild Gift is 1981's best album... not that enough people noticed

X: We're Desperate

On May 4, 1981 X released Wild Gift, one of the very best albums of the year. Produced, like the debut, by Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, the album paints an updated picture of Los Angeles, ten years after L.A. Woman. 

The album may sound cleaner than the debut, but it's no less ferocious. 

"The music hasn't changed," said John Doe in an interview with Billboard, for an article curiously titled "L.A. Group X Refutes Charges It's Sold Out". "We're not going 'ooh ooh' like Christopher Cross. All the songs we couldn't put on the first album we put on this one."

In Los Angeles, X were considered superstars. But they weren't getting any airplay on commercial FM stations. It's a subject X would address in the 1983 song "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts":

I hear the radio, it's finally gonna play new music /You know the British invasion/ But what about the Minutemen, Flesheaters, DOA, Big Boys, and Black Flag/Will the last American bands to get played on the radio/ Please bring the flag, please bring the flag".

Slash's Mark Williams , in a 1981 letter to Billboard, made a similar point:

Even local big boys like KLOS-FM and KMET-FM refuse to program a record like our latest release, Wild Gift, by a local band, X, lauded by some as "the best band in America", who sell out the prestigious Greek Theatre and over 60,000 copies of  their first LP, Los Angeles...We've wasted a lot of hard-earned money promoting records to commercial stations that do little more than laugh at us."

"We are caught on a weird situation," Doe says in the Billboard article. "Selling out means you've changed your music to advance your financial situation. We haven't sold out because we're not on a major label. Secondly, we haven't made any damn money. Selling out means you're on AM and are buddies with Dick Clark or whomever".

Wild Gift topped many year end critics lists, finishing second in the 1981 Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll behind The Clash's Sandinista!, which came out in 1980. 

Meanwhile in the UK, Ralph Traitor of Sounds wrote:

 "X keeps the promise of punk, use the devices of pop and exploit the inexhaustible legacy of the Fifties and Sixties to frame their soup kitchen romances and accelerated sleepwalks through a battle zone of teenage confusion. It's the Ramones crashing head on with the Doors and Gene Vincent clawing at each other to hang onto the rear fender and get things  under control."

X would sign with Elektra Records and release their third album, another great one called Under The Big Black Sun, that would also get ignored by commercial radio.