An original typed lyric manuscript of X’s song ‘Nausea’, typed by guitarist-songwriter John Doe; along with a vintage circa 1978 photograph of the band by Frank Gargani.

The lyric is typed on the back of advertising flyer from Brentano’s bookstore, where Doe worked during the group’s early days.  In his 2016 book Under the Big Black Sun, Doe writes, I had a day job working at Brentano’s bookstore at the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo…there I saw Farrah Fawcett, Helen Reddy & actually helped Gloria Swanson find nutrition books.

Doe emailed us that he used the Brentano’s flyers, because they were cheaper than buying typing paper; he thinks the lyrics on Brentano’s flyers were typed on his ‘trusty Olympia’ typewriter, which was included in the 2017 Grammy Museum exhibition X: 40 Years of Punk in Los Angeles.  Doe noted he would type out lyrics using carbon paper to make two copies at the same time, but these are the top copies rather than the carbons.

This version of ‘Nausea’ includes lyrics that don’t appear on the version recorded for X’s debut album Los Angeles.  Cut from the Los Angeles version are the lines, This time you’re sinking zero to the ground/so low brow all your friends/scratch out your name on the list/you write them back ‘so what, who cares’…all your friends scratch out/’so what, who cares’”

In Under the Big Black Sun, John Doe wrote about his early X songs,  I wanted to tell stories about this city [Los Angeles] that filled my eyes w/decay and anonymity. A place where random violence breathed in & out like the ocean.  I didn’t want to tell stories like Bob Dylan but like Bukowski (w/out the lurid sex but a suggestion of it)—minimal, unvarnished, detailed West Coast, filled w/ the kind of darkness The Doors and Love had promised…These were the first songs I wrote that were actually any good. 

Exene was a partner, co-conspirator & if not the lyricist, then the catalyst.  She would write a line like “Johnny Hit & Run Paulene,” tape it to the door & a few months later that story would come to me.  Even though she’d never written a song, Exene could write lyrics on a page, top to bottom, as if the music was already there.  All I had to do was match some music I’d been working on to the cadence of the words…

[Doors keyboardist and X producer Ray Manzarek] exalted Exene and my lyrics and compared them to Jim Morrison’s…These were songs you could hear once, probably catch the title & possibly remember the next morning.  These songs were meant to be played live, loud & sloppy.  Having an actual record that someone could put on their turntable was still off in the distance for most of us.

The New York Times noted Los Angeles is widely regarded as one of the most influential punk records of all time. Ken Tucker writing in Rolling Stone called the album a powerful, upsetting work that concludes with a confrontation of the band’s own rampaging bitterness and confusion. Los Angeles ranked at No. 16 in the Village Voice 1980 critics’ poll, and No. 286 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.  All Music wrote Los Angeles is considered by many to be one of punk’s all-time finest recordings, and with good reason.

An extraordinary X collectible, with Recordmecca’s written lifetime guarantee of authenticity.