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.

 

40 Year Itch : Big Star Plays Max's Kansas City

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In early December, 1973 Big Star had just finished mixing Radio City, the band's second album, when they performed for two nights at the New York City club Max's Kansas City. They played mostly to music writers on the first night. Among them was Billboard Magazine's Sam Sutherland.

Big Star at Max's Kansas City

   During the last year several young bands have emerged with a striking command of the tight, vibrant pop and rock styles that made Top 40 radio a high-energy delight in the mid '60's. Big Star seemed among the most promising, despite the disappointing reaction to their debut Ardent LP, but the lucky core of followers who heard that powerful first bow were soon dismayed by the collapse of the band and a parallel lack of general interest in the act.

    Well, weep no more. Big Star is back as a trio, and , on the strength of a hastily-scheduled two-day shot at Max's, there is some strong new material on the way. If anything, the departure of the band's second guitarist and writer has provided a new coherence to the act, which centers logically around Alex Chilton, lead guitarist and vocalist, and composer of the band's best material.

   Chilton, who first emerged as lead vocalist of the Box Tops while still in his middle teens, has evolved into a superb rocker whose reverence for the Beatles and the Byrds is balanced by his own explosive approach to straight-ahead rock 'n' roll.

   The band opened with a solo slot by Chilton, singing "The Ballad of El Goodo" and "Thirteen", two of the most evocative songs on the group's first release. Chilton's aura of fragility was perfect for those songs, one an anthem of self-realization, the second a  bittersweet but loving re-creation of true teen first love that is parenthetically a eulogy for the innocent vitality of rock in the early 60's.

  From there, Big Star shifted into electric overdrive with full force. Chilton's electric guitar taking command. Despite  some rough edges--the band hadn't played, except for a quick rehearsal, in months--the set was a triumph, covering some exciting bases with the new tunes.

  With virtually no publicity outside the industry itself, the second night crowd was lean. Hopefully , this one group that won't suffer the frustrating fate of the best critics' bands: a second LP is due in January, and, with Chilton's presence and some solid material, it would be sad indeed to see Big Star lost in the shuffle.

--Sam Sutherland, Billboard Magazine, Dec 22, 1973