Jeffrey Lee Pierce - Wildweed

In July 1996, Tom Engelshoven of Dutch music magazine Oor described Jeffrey Lee Pierce as the missing link between the Eagles and Kurt Cobain. Four months after the Gun Club frontman had passed away, the article labelled him as the true victim of what Engelshoven interpreted as "the American disease." Among the symptoms were a strong identification with violence and death and a clear notion of American society being imbued with it. Pierce's lyrics testified of his awareness of America's earliest history, a nation established at the barrel of a gun. Obsessed with an inevitable apocalyptic destiny, he took his lowlife background as an explanation for a feverish longing for decay. Sex, booze, and drugs all claimed their share in a self-destructive lifestyle, culminating in an early death at the age of 37. Wildweed was the first of two solo albums Pierce made in between his Gun Club albums. Following in the footsteps of remarkable statements like Miami and The Las Vegas Story, the material presented here isn't all that different. The violence theme practically drips from the album cover, depicting Pierce with a dreamy look and a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Standing amidst what could be the last true vestige of an unspoiled, rural America, it's a fair bet that he's ready to shoot anything even slightly disturbing, upon which he probably will utter one final howl before putting himself "to rest" as well. Plenty of those howls are scattered through Wildweed, which opens with a strong threesome of "Love and Desperation," "Sex Killer," and "Cleopatra Dreams On." In more than one way, "Love and Desperation" is the twin to The Fire of Love's "Sex Beat." Apart from the infectious driving beat, one only has to compare the lyrics of the latter ("I, I know your reasons/And I, I know your goals/We can fuck forever/But you will never get my soul") to the former ("Somebody hurts you, so you hurt me/So I hurt somebody else, who I have never seen/Who hurts somebody else, way on down the road/Who hurts somebody else who goes on home/With you") to conclude that Pierce's world is one in which love takes a wrong turn most of the time. Halfway through the album things get a little awkward when, during the nursery rhyme of "Hey Juana," Pierce starts name-checking a colleague ("Now Nick the Cave/He spent all his pay/On a bottle of gin/And a shark without a fin"). Luckily, "The Midnight Promise" makes a beautiful closing piece. Alas, the CD release of Wildweed adds some extra tracks that appeared on the Love and Desperation 12" instead of the more intriguing experiments with spoken word from the 7" bonus that came with the album or the free jazz of the title track of the Flamingo EP.

Recorded in London in 1985, this is Pierce’s most poppy and new wavey record. Craig Leon, whose production credits by this point included such classics as the first albums of both The Ramones and Suicide, does some pretty slick work. While Pierce handles all of his guitars for the first time, his studio band includes drummer Andy Anderson who just departed from The Cure and John MacKinzie who was between Wham! sessions. The highpoint is the added bonus tracks - the experimental poems and songs from the seven-inch that accompanied the original LP.

The eerie cover, picturing Pierce in black and white, staring into the distance with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, gives as much of an indication of the thematic material inside as much as the session musicians do the musical material. While the polished music could use a little grit at times, the lyrics are the opposite. While Pierce continues to sing about some of his favourite themes - murder, sex, pain, failure, debauchery, drugs, and prostitution, the murder part of the equation is accentuated.

The first song, “Love and Desperation,” displays Pierce’s significant progress as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist - containing a few of his best lines. Starting out almost as if it is might become a no-wavey Contortions type of song, “Love and Desperation” quickly moves into its pop/ska foundation. Pierce’s guitar solo, while showcasing his ability, contains no small amount of cheese. “Sex Killer” is a beat oriented 1980s pop number whose title gives away the subject matter. “Cleopatra Dreams On” is almost R.E.M.-ish but contains some of Pierce’s best Television-style guitar lines. With its walking bass, “Sensitivity” is jazzy and interesting despite the production. Just in case you were confused about Pierce singing a song about this subject, the chorus is: “Sensitivity is not in you and not in me.”

Next, the rootsy “Hey Juna” picks up the pace with another walking bass line and big ghostly production. The lyrics, sung in English, Japanese, and Spanish, phrased and themed in the style of Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” mention Baby Romi (Mori, his girlfriend at the time), Murray the Man (Mitchell, a friend from the Fur Bible and Siouxsie and the Banshees), Kid the Squid (Congo Powers, best friend and Gun Club band-mate), and Nick the Cave (I’ll let you guess this one). Asking, “is it uptown or down… yellow, black or brown… Chinatown or funkytown?”, the INXS new wave “Love Circus” declares, “we haven't seen anyone dead like you / since a war was near.” As Pierce concludes “you got a price that is not so nice / you got demise written on your mind,” one can’t help but wonder if the singer was directing these lines at himself. “Wildweed,” the punk number on the record, is the story of a man who kills his wife and children so he can no longer hurt them. Not “The Stranger,” the protagonist sets the house on fire and heads to Mexico. While the song suffers a bit from the sterile production, Pierce’s spazzy solo deserves special praise. With “The Midnight Promise,” Pierce ends the album as he began it – with a Jamaican-tinged pop song. The chorus is very Television, or even, The Las Vegas Story. In addition to perhaps the best music here, “The Midnight Promise” also contains some Pierces most interesting and perverse imagery (“your breath on the window rings the note/ you’re always coughing from the smoke and hatching children in your throat”). This one is about an East Village junkie prostitute. The only hitch is that the guitar, played a bit like Tom Verlaine, somehow comes off like a cross between late-period David Gilmour and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Pierce redeems himself at the ending as the song fades into a solo acoustic Mississippi John Hurt style instrumental part.

There are a number of good songs and good ideas here. I think my problem is primarily the production. But for those who like the eighties pop and new wave sounds, I would recommend this. This of course is also a must for rabid Gun Club enthusiasts.

Patricia (Pat) Morrison - Reflect On This

The Morticia of the punk and goth scene, Patricia Morrison, offers up this 'one and done' solo offering and what a delightful treat it is. Despite not sounding like anything she'd been involved with prior (and why should it?) she presents herself as an assured, accomplished frontwoman in her own right, with well over a decade in the industry under her belt. Neither the punk fury of the Bags or the Gun Club is present, nor the gothic bombast of her time in The Sisters Of Mercy, this has a plaintive, stripped-down twist on post-punk-cum-hard rock. Recorded in 1994, the '80s were over and Patricia looked ahead to re-imagine herself in an almost '90s singer/songwriter context. Why she didn't follow-up with anything else is beyond me because this is proof the woman was gifted.

I’ve played this non-stop while ripping the CD. It's infectious as hell and doesn't deserve its obscurity.

The Gun Club - Death Party (Expanded) EP

Gun Club's Death Party EP was issued in 1983 between the mixing and mastering disaster that was Miami, the band's second album, and the nearly sublime Las Vegas Story. The Death Party dates from Pierce’s 1983 sojourn in New York with a pick-up edition of Gun Club featuring a new and extremely short-lived line-up that included guitarist Jim Duckworth (Panther Burns), drummer Dee Pop (Bush Tetras), a friend of his on bass named Jimmy Joe Uliana, and Pierce's then girlfriend Linda "Texacala" Jones on backing vocals. The five tracks could have been outtakes from Miami, powerful, dark rock of disillusionment, drug abuse, and warped sexuality. The playing here is somewhat pedestrian though certainly able. The pathos on the Gun Club's best records is missing here, but the quality of the song writing makes up for it some. Certainly fans will want this.
In 2004, Sympathy for the Record Industry reissued the EP on compact disc with seven bonus tracks from a live performance on Radio Geneva. What's notable about it is Pierce's between-song banter, which is entertaining, snotty, and obviously intoxicated, and he plays piano on every tune. This gig is also the first recorded performance of bassist Patricia Morrison (aka Pat Bag from the L.A. punk quartet the Bags) with the band. (She would remain for years before leaving to join the Sisters of Mercy.) The material from the radio gig contains three tunes from Death Party, covers of "Run Through the Jungle" the old roots rock nugget "Heebie Jeebies," and Lewis Allan's "Strange Fruit," as well as a scorching rendition of "Fire of Love."

The Gun Club - Fire Of Love

The Gun Club's debut is the watermark for all post-punk roots music. This features the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce's swamped-out brand of roiling rock, swaggerific hell-bound blues, and gothic country. With Pierce's wailing twinned with Ward Dotson's lonesome slide guitar and spine-shaking riffs, the solid yet off-the-rails rhythm section of bassist Rob Ritter and drummer Terry Graham, the Gun Club burst out of L.A. in the early '80s with a bone to pick and a mountain to move (and they accomplished both on their debut album). With awesome, stripped to the frame production by the Flesh Eaters' Chris D. and Tito Larriva of the Plugz, Fire Of Love blew away all expectations  and with good reason. Nobody had heard music like this before or since. Pierce's songs were rooted in his land of Texas. On "Sex Beat," a razor-sharp country one-two shuffle becomes a howling wind as Pierce's wasted; half-sung half-howled vocals relate a tale of voodoo, sex, dope, and death. The song choogles like a freight train coming undone in a twister. Here Black Flag, the Sex Pistols, Son House, and the coughing, hacking rambling ghost of Hank Williams all converge in a reckless mass of seething energy and nearly evil intent. As if the opener weren't enough of a jolt, the Gun Club follow this with a careening version of Son House's "Preachin’ the Blues," full of staccato phrasing and blazing slide. But it isn't until the anthemic, opiate-addled country of "She's Like Heroin to Me" and the truly frightening punk-blues of "Ghost On The Highway" that the listener comes to grip with the awesome terror that is the Gun Club. The songs become rock & roll ciphers, erasing themselves as soon as they speak, heading off into the whirlwind of a storm that is so big, so black, and so awful one cannot meditate on anything but its power. Fire Of Love may be just what the doctor ordered, but to cure or kill is anybody's guess.

“Why are these songs not taught in schools?” So asked Jack White in 2008, citing “Sex Beat”, “She’s Like Heroin to Me” and “For the Love of Ivy”. Careful examination of them, as much of this fiery 1981 debut which pioneered post-punk roots music, may provide a self-evident answer why impressionable tots may not want to be exposed to sex, drugs and promises of a third element added after the first two: death. But it all sounds like (semi-?) Grown-up fun, 11 tracks that wallop on this reissue as exciting, entertaining and evil as ever.

Jeffery Lee Pierce’s howling vocals, backed by Ward Dotson’s slide and lead guitar, and two recruits from Los Angeles punks the Bags, Rob Ritter on bass and Terry Graham on drums, fire this album up. Produced half by Chris D. of the Flesh Eaters and half by Tito Larriva of the Plugz, it carries a ramshackle feel that the original vinyl with hiss and crackle and a very low budget conveyed vividly.

This reissue heightens the impact of the raw sound. While on its Ruby Records vinyl original, what after all is a punk-era indie LP, may not satisfy purists. Pierce’s poetry, as in “we sit together drunk like our fathers used to be”, survives his slurred phrasing and the band’s clunky playing. His cover of “Preachin’ the Blues” combines Robert Johnson’s and Son House’s lyrics, showing an intelligent rendering of this classic blues song, updated with Dotson’s ringing slides up and down the frets, and a skittering drum roll from Graham, before Pierce enters, growling.

Following a rockabilly “Sex Beat”, these two track signal the band’s intentions: The Gun Club wanted to be taken seriously, by its punk-blues fusion. Pierce could be light-hearted, but he also could hone his voice and guitar into a threat, making sex seem less a release than a sentence imposed on his intended partner, or target. “We can fuck forever/but you will never get my soul”, the object of his affections is assured in “Sex”. At the end of “Preachin’”, he yowls with similar glee, sure that his calling, one that gets him off the hook of having to do real work for a living, is now attained.

Larriva’s plaintive violin backs “Promise Me” with a slower pace, droning as the fiddle’s few notes sustain under the slide guitar; the band’s use of dynamics on this album merits acclaim. Sequenced well, it mixes tracks from Larriva’s and Chris D’s productions, adding variety in tone and volume. Therefore, “She’s Like Heroin to Me” showcases Pierce’s knack for boastful blues swagger and surprising snips of poetry as when his earnest voice and unsteady pace make him more rather than less believable. “I know my special rider / I can feel her in the dark.” He presents himself as both superhero and everyman, as capable of transport on whatever kind of horse he may summon at night.

“For the Love of Ivy” wobbles as the rhythm section pounds out the basic patterns, while Pierce opens with, “You look just like an Elvis from hell.” The song meanders despite its relative brevity, but it too conveys the sense of a band exploring new ground musically as it figures out its innovations. Pierce’s boasts continue, and akin to an antagonist in a Quentin Tarantino flick, I find them less disturbing. Pierce may be seen as a precursor of complex racial appropriation, or not. It may be for shock value, or it may be drug-fuelled and drink-sodden macho posing. After all, both the blues and punk shared this lyrical and musical stance. The Gun Club figured this out first.
You can hear him hiss “shh” as the song concludes, a feature of the remaster. “Fire Spirit” closes what was side one with a mid-tempo “Fire Spirit”. This allows the band to regain its place in a manner anticipating Pierce and a changing line-up in later years, when the band lost its early edge even as it attained a better grasp of alt-rock standards.

A chugging guitar introduces “Ghost on the Highway” with another rockabilly song to start a side of the vinyl original. “It is not an art statement / to drown a few passionate men”, is likely not a sentiment to be found on either punk or blues records preceding it, I reckon. The offbeat nature of Pierce’s lyric, declamatory and allusive, offer a twist on either genre, and they embed themselves in the songs beneath their busy or lazy melodies. He ends with a moan, and the listener shares his loss.

Side two settles in more. “Jack on Fire” takes the slow burn approach. Again, Pierce adopts a series of claims as he confronts his lover-to-be: “Me and you a temporary debut.” “Some Creole boys were lying dead.” “I used his blood to paint my costume.” “You will make love to me tonight.” “It will be understood that I am bad.” “For every day is Judgment Day to me.” It’s all meant in jest, surely. Or maybe not. For like a skilled front man, Pierce keeps us guessing his next move. It draws us in deep.

True to its title, “Black Train” trundles on, as Graham’s drums begin. Ritter’s bass was always the least-prominent instrument on this rather primitive recording, and the reissue while it sharpens the soundstage and allows Pierce’s voice a better place at the centre, apart from the music, doesn’t sufficiently boost the lower registers here. The record usually feels tinny, if as a lo-fi homage to past masters.

The bass pops up more amidst the swampy feel and grinding, bayou critter percussion from Graham, echoing in the quieter “Cool Drink of Water”. It sounds the most improved, sonically, on this reissue. This covers another Johnson, Tommy, in the most languid track. “I wanted water / she gave me gasoline”, is quite a couplet, too. It does take its time, as a blues song may, but it’s a needed respite.

“Goodbye Johnny” closes with a farewell, gliding away on slide guitars again. They alternate with slashing ones, and Ritter’s bass rumbles along. It serves as a fitting reminder of both a sawed-off, hard-bitten punk sensibility and a bluesy, drawn-out compulsion to sink deeper into cloudy depths.

The Las Vegas Story

The third album by The Gun Club, The Las Vegas Story, was released in June 1984. A lot of different dates are mentioned, of which June 15th and 25th seem the most legit, but I haven’t found any confirmation on both. The month of June is definitely correct. The band’s sound had become more melodic and had moved away a little from its punk roots, resulting in a kind of alternative rock. The album was dedicated to Debbie Harry “for her love, help and encouragement”.

After the intro in The Las Vegas Story the album starts off with the fantastic drum beat to Walking With the Beast. Feedback and divine singing immediately sets the tone and level for the rest of the album. And, the band keeps it up. The great Eternally Is Here is followed by A Stranger In Our Town, the unsettling story about a (necrophiliac?) serial killer: “There’s a stranger in our town / pulls out a punks spinal cord / piss and blood on the sidewalk of hearts”. The best The Gun Club ever recorded, My Dreams, closes the first side of the vinyl album. The beautiful music almost detonates with the paranoid lyrics, “You can’t take my dreams / You can’t take my dreams / You can’t take and steal from this body…”. The anger, sorrow and fear come together in the last sentence that keeps on being repeated until the end of the song: “They were supposed to be MY DREAMS”. Beautiful!

Time for side two then. Two covers that smoothly transition from one into the other. The short instrumental The Master Plan turns into My Man Is Gone Now, originally a part of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. The Gun Club turns it into a heart wrenching blues: impressive! Bad America is about what the title suggests. America is bad and is to blame for all that is wrong with the world and Pierce’s life. Moonlight Motel is sung from the viewpoint of a prostitute: “Low rates and color T.V. / Money on the bed, left there for me and / One of these days I’ll kill you while you sleep…”. Even more seamy side on the album’s closing Give Up The Sun: “Oh, don’t you leave me here / There’s ghosts and rooms of pain / There’s a storm out on the sea tonight / And bodies filled with pain / Palm wind across the sea tonight / Black with whirling pain / Alone against the docks tonight / Nobody knows my name”.

In short, an album filled with anger, sorrow, loneliness, desperation, pain and hopelessness. Happy? No. Beautiful? Yes, and then some!

Miami

The sophomore record by the Gun Club bore the curse of having to follow a monolith of their own making. Fire of Love sold extremely well for an independent; it was a favourite of virtually every critic who heard it in 1981. Miami showcased a different lineup as well. Ward Dotson replaced Congo Powers (temporarily, at least) on guitar, and there were a ton of guest performances, including Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. Stein produced the album. Off the bat the disc suffers from a thin mix. Going for a rougher sound, Stein left the instruments at one level and boosted Pierce's vocal. There is plenty of guitar here, screaming and moping like a drunken orphan from the Texas flatlands, but next to its predecessor it sounds drier and reedier. Ultimately it hardly matters. Going for a higher, more desolate sound, frontman and slide player Jeffrey Lee Pierce and his band were literally on fire. The songs here, from "Carry Home," "Like Calling Up Thunder," "Devil in the Woods," "Watermelon Man," "Bad Indian," and "Texas Serenade," among others, centred themselves on a mutant form of country music that met the post-punk ethos in the desert, fought and bloodied each other, and decided to stay together. This is hardcore snake-charming music (as in water moccasins not cobras), evil, smoky, brash, and libidinally uttered. Their spooky version of an already creepy tune by Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Run Through the Jungle" runs the gamut from sexual nightmare to voodoo ritual gone awry. Finally, Pierce and company pull out all the roots and reveal them for what they are: "John Hardy," is a squalling punk-blues, with the heart of the country in cardiac arrest. Dotson proved to be a fine replacement for Congo Powers, in that his style was pure Telecaster country (à la James Burton) revved by the Rolling Stones and Johnny Thunders. Miami was given a rough go when it was issued for its production. But in the bird's-eye view of history its songs stack up, track for track, with Fire of Love and continue to echo well into this long good night.