LA punks X celebrate turning 31 in style

But a funny thing happened on the way to the bank. Zoom found that he liked playing again, and the others found that they liked having him. "It had been so long, and he wasn't sure what kind of people we'd become," Cervenka says. "He didn't know if I was a junkie, or what."

"We have new management and a new booking agent," Zoom says, "so a lot of the things that used to bother me on the business side aren't there anymore. I always liked being onstage, but it was the other 23 hours of the day that were the problem."

Cervenka says the band's chemistry is better now. "Back then, we were more disconnected from each other. Everybody was doing their own thing — Billy smiling and looking at girls, D.J. playing drums like a madman, I was going off on whatever tangent I was going off on, and John was rocking out so hard. Now we're older, so there's less abandonment in your own space. I think we interact more. There's more goofing around."

It almost seems a sacrilege to say X has mellowed, especially given Cervenka's barnburning work with her current band, the Original Sinners. The siren of the Sunset Strip now lives on a farm in Wardsville, Missouri, a few miles south of Jefferson City, with her husband, Jason Edge, formerly of St. Louis surf combo the Honkeys.

"It's an odd place to end up, but it's the middle of the country, so it's nice for traveling," she says. "I travel a whole lot, I have friends all over the country, so it kind of doesn't make sense for me to be anywhere. I've got a barn with a studio in it, so we can make music, get people together to make art. There's a lot of good things about it."

Zoom, for his part, is occupied with his twenty-month-old twins and the recently released Gretsch Billy Zoom Tribute Model guitar, rebuilt from X-rays of his original '55 Gretsch Silver Jet. Unlike many such guitars, his involvement went way beyond signing the endorsement detail. "It had my input every step of the way," he says. "It's what I'm playing on tour. I still have the original, but I take this one on tour because, you know, I can go to the bathroom without it. The old one went with me everywhere. I was afraid to lose it, afraid to fly with it. This one, I can take anywhere without worrying about it."

So is a new album on the agenda? "It's always possible, but it would depend," Zoom says. "If we were going to all sit down and make it a real group effort and had enough of a budget to do it right, maybe." But at least the four people who made such intriguing, passionate rock are still together and getting along well.

"Fantastically well," Cervenka says. "Too many years have gone by. You either hate each other or you don't."