Venerable LA punk band X returns to the Mystic Nov. 25

“We just had our best year ever. Isn’t that exciting?” X vocalist Exene Cervenka asks over the phone from her Los Angeles-area home in Orange, an area 3 miles north of Santa Ana known for preserving its historic buildings.

In a way the band X is a little like Orange, an authentic jewel found within a large metropolitan area that’s somehow managed to maintain its structure and identity through tumultous times, and become more valuable as a result. As one of the acts emerging out of the Southern California music scene during the late ’70s while bands like the Go-Go’s, Bad Religion and T.S.O.L were all the rage, X has gone through many highs and lows since forming in 1977. Yet, 41 years later, the band’s poetic lyrics, unique harmonies and cultural viewpoint still hold meaning for both new and loyal fans, who appreciate that time has been good for the band.

Despite hitting the road with legendary artists like Garbage and Blondie, X maintains a humbling appreciation for its fans, playing anywhere they can be found, including Petaluma, where they’ll perform Sunday.

“The Mystic Theatre is a great theater and Petaluma, we’ve played there several times before,” said bassist John Doe referring to X’s upcoming tour that also will take them to The Observatory in Santa Ana and The Fillmore in San Francisco.

“You play a small place, a big place, a place people have heard of and a place no one has heard of. That’s part of the deal.”

The deal for Doe also includes a stop in Oregon to teach “An Evening with John Doe” as a part of Oregon State University’s “American Strings” series, an institutional side trip that makes Doe laugh after saying the sentence out loud.

“Who would have thought that would happen?” he asks.

But it has. And to some, it might seem like a natural step for a writer who co-wrote “Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk” with Tom DeSavia with excerpts from the Go-Go’s’ Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey along with a foreword from Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong.

Becoming a punk historian wasn’t something Doe could foresee happening all those years ago when the first wave of the punk rock scene was emerging and he first moved to L.A- he simply refers to the times as moments he lived through, along with many others.

If anything, it explains why he included so many other points of view in the book.

“I didn’t want to be the authority and this way the credit or the blame is spread around a bit more,” he said.

It was an era bandmate Cervenka remembers fondly. After meeting Doe at a poetry workshop, the pair created music with guitarist Billy Zoom, whom Doe met through a classifieds ad, and then completed the line-up with drummer D.J. Bonebrake.

From there the band went on to release seven studio albums including “Los Angeles” and “Under the Big Black Sun,” the latter included in the title of Doe’s book.

Cervenka describes it as a freeing and experimental time where she felt like no one was watching.

“It was different, not as much was chronicled,” she said. “We were really uninhibited because no one was filming us, no one was recording us or blasting us on the internet. We could say or do anything we wanted.”

Nonetheless, plenty of artifacts managed to survive from the early days. Last year, the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles put together “X: Forty Years of Punk in Los Angeles,” an exhibit which featured some of X’s original instruments, handwritten lyrics, original flyers and artwork by Cervenka too.

“It’s good to have a long career … the good stuff can happen right at the end,” Cervenka said after acknowledging just how long the band has been together.

Over the years X has continued to come back to its original lineup through a divorce (Doe and Cervenka were married for five years), Zoom battling cancer twice and Cervenka being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

“But the thing is, none of that matters in life because you have no choice but to keep going. There isn’t an alternative” Cervenka said.

“We’re really survivors at this point. Not even just as a band but as individuals and it’s just because we were a blue-collar band. We worked to make a living and we liked what we were doing and we like it more as time goes on.”

Doe says these days he appreciates the simple pleasure of plugging in his bass guitar and communicating with others through music.

“In the last 10 years we just haven’t sweated the small stuff,” Doe said. “We put a lot of value on to the music that we do and we realize we mean something to people and there’s still a lot of young people that come to see us play. It’s our life.”

Going forward, the band plans to record a few new songs in the studio in December or January and perhaps, if the North Bay is lucky, the members will choose to play one or two of those songs for the crowd at the Mystic Theatre.

“There’s more to come and I’m just really incredibly grateful that people still want to see us play, and that is a fact,” Cervenka said.