“Someone was asking me, ‘What advice do you have for women just starting out and playing music and in a band?’ And I blurted out, ‘Don’t get married!’”

It’s an unexpected and amusing remark from Exene Cervenka, who rose to alt-rock fame in X, arguably the most important band of the Los Angeles punk scene and one of the greatest punk acts of all time. Cervenka formed X with John Doe, to whom she was married for five years, and the group just surprise-released Alphabetland, their first album with their original lineup (Doe, Cervenka, Billy Zoom, and DJ Bonebrake) since 1985.

The band decided to bump up the record’s release date up from August due to the coronavirus crisis, figuring their fans could use some upbeat music right now. And they do indeed sound as visceral and relevant as they did on their debut album, Los Angeles — which, coincidentally, came out exactly 40 years ago, on April 26, 1980. As Doe sits beside Cervenka for Yahoo Entertainment’s career-spanning interview, he can’t help but chuckle.

“Not to indict our marriage or anything, because this is 40 years later,” Cervenka continues. “Being married in a band is good and bad. When you’re a woman in a band … I think sometimes women will be more passive and deferential. … So I think for women, if you’re really serious about being in a band, you really want to have a career, and you’re writing songs and playing music and an instrument, focus on your career, because you’re only going to be able to do that for a short period of time. It’s hard for women to feel like they’re not being selfish by putting their careers ahead of everything else, but if you want to do music and you want to be a writer, you’ve got to go full-on towards it.”

Doe and Cervenka, however, had a more egalitarian partnership than Cervenka’s statement implies — and that is one of the reasons why X thrived during even the toughest of times, like the hit-and-run death of Cervenka’s older sister, which punk journalist Pleasant Gehman described as “one of the most painful moments I’ve witnessed ever, let alone in the realm of rock ’n’ roll,” just one week after Doe and Cervenka’s wedding. And it’s one of the reasons why X stayed together even after the couple’s romantic partnership ended in the mid-’80s.

The two “kindred spirits” met in the late ’70s at Beyond Baroque, a famous Venice Beach literary arts center, and Cervenka says, “John and I worked well together because we were both writers. We were both writing the songs; we were both singing the songs. It wasn’t me up front and then everybody telling me what to wear. Or it wasn’t him writing the songs and telling me how to sing. We had an equal thing.”

“Yeah. What she said,” Doe laughs. “It was a longer process than us meeting and becoming a couple. I had to prove myself.” So, how did Doe do that? “I think I proved myself by treating Exene as an equal — and that was one of the main pillars of punk rock, is that performers and audience and men and women and gay and straight were equals. The only judgment was toward the ‘straight people’ or people that didn’t get it. So you could judge them, but you didn’t judge each other.”

“Yes, the L.A. hardcore scene was male and white and violent and scary,” said Cervenka, addressing certain stereotypes about the city, “but our scene was not violent. It was not sexist. It was not racist. It was none of those. And in fact, I didn’t know until many years later if people were gay or straight. It just wasn’t an issue. We didn’t have that identity politics thing yet. Feminism, all that stuff, it wasn’t part of it. It was just people, and it was so neat; I wish it would be like that now, because now everybody’s at war with each other. And back then there was no reason to be.”

Joining forces with rockabilly-trained guitarist Zoom and drummer Bonebrake, Doe and Cervenka tapped into what Cervenka calls their “literary connection with the city: Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Raymond Chandler, the Doors.” The Doors’ Ray Manzarek produced X’s first four albums, starting with the 1980 classic Los Angeles, which Rolling Stone later ranked at No. 24 on its list of 100 Best Albums of the ’80s and at No. 286 among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The title track generated controversy, but it still got played on influential L.A. radio station KROQ and eventually made the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s list 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.