Gun Club - The Blues of the Gun

Sooner or later, the historians of popular music will decide to put this drawer in order too, and maybe give it a more fitting label. Up to now it has been called, indiscriminately, blues-punk, voodoo rock, punk-a-billy, garage or post-punk, but these are all loose-knit definitions, under which anything and everything has been lumped together. No one has yet dared to gather the names of Cramps, Pussy Galore, Birthday Party, Beasts of Bourbon, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Scientists, Swell Maps, Barracudas, Gun Club and Gallon Drunk into a coalition spanning both oceans in the name of a shared goal: renewing the tenets of the American musical tradition through the lesson of punk.

Early Sparks in Los Angeles (1978-1982)

1977 had come and gone, and it had changed the rules: anyone pretending otherwise sounded ridiculous or came across as reactionary. Jeffrey Lee Pierce understood this, and at just seventeen converted from his faith as a glam and progressive rock listener to run the Blondie Fan Club in his hometown of Los Angeles. And just as post-punk England was starting to look at dub rhythms as a good engine for rebuilding, young Pierce ventured into Jamaican territory, falling under the spell of reggae and its shamans. Back in the US, he went looking for a musical equivalent with the same archaic allure and stumbled upon tapes of delta blues and its urban offshoots, taught himself to bash it out on guitar, and ended up in a rockabilly band, Pleasant Gehman's Cyclones. His meeting with Brian Tristan would shift his focus from six strings to the microphone and help rename the band - now without its original vocalist - Creeping Rituals. That name, though, smacked too much of "gothic-decadent" for the taste of Keith Morris, singer of the Circle Jerks and, at the time, Pierce's roommate: it was he who suggested the band's definitive name, Gun Club. Along with the name, the lineup was also reshuffled, bringing in a new rhythm section borrowed from The Bags.

"Back then Jeffrey gave us a tape with the songs he wanted to influence the band. The tape had all kinds of different stuff on it, like Bo Diddley and Marvin Rainwater, Marty Robbins' murder ballads, early Little Richard and some blues material (...) We did our homework, listened to those recordings and started playing them back. (...) Oh yeah, I remember Bob Dylan was on that tape too... the cover of 'Tombstone Blues' was one of the first Gun Club covers, you can still hear traces of it all over the first album." It's Tristan - who would soon go on to play guitar for the Cramps under the stage name Kid Congo Powers - who recalls just how deliberate the early Gun Club's influences were. By the time he'd been replaced by one Ward Dotson (who had also already auditioned for the Cramps), the band went into the studio and came out just two days later: it's 1981, and Fire Of Love is released. It comes out on Slash Records, the label named after a local fanzine for which Pierce had written a couple of columns (on the theme of "rock's origins").

The final tracklist of Fire Of Love gathers several of their earliest compositions: the Dylan cover mentioned above is missing, but the revised and corrected version of "Preaching The Blues" would be enough on its own to sum up the band's stylistic signature. The calligraphic flourishes of Eric Clapton and the gigantist fantasies of Jimmy Page on the same themes are light years away. On that track Jeffrey Lee is Robert Johnson, with no filter: the same taut guitars, the same voice from beyond the grave - it feels like hearing an Alan Lomax field recording resurface in the middle of the electric age.

All of Fire Of Love, for that matter, presents itself according to the rules of the most classic "blues record": there's the hymn to booze and the one to sex, the song about drugs and the one about the road... The experiment of spinning the twelve-bar form into a centrifuge is repeated almost identically on "Cool Drink Of Water", which belonged to Tommy Johnson, but the same recipe is extended to most of the original tracks on the album, starting with "Black Train" (a rather successful attempt at creating a contemporary railroad blues, only to then send it off at triple speed).

"Sex Beat" runs on the same epileptic energy, but features a panting, impatient, almost neurotic vocal: the same happens on "She's My Heroin", where Pierce unleashes his erotic, dangerous howl, fusing women and drugs into a single object of desire. His stammer grows ever more anxious, always on the verge of breaking or exploding: riding on his performance, the rest of the band alternates bursts of release with nervous braking, often letting the drums spin "in neutral", keeping an obsessively steady beat. Particularly representative of these dynamics is "For The Love Of Ivy", whose opening line, "You look like an Elvis from hell" - dedicated, in fact, to Poison Ivy of the Cramps - could just as easily apply to Pierce himself: he is the Elvis burning in the flames of three chords, a title he perhaps shares only with his "most sincere counterpart", a Nick Cave still clawing away in Birthday Party. For both of them, punk is an inborn filter, the lens through which they're able to look back at themselves.

Despite its small-scale production, Fire Of Love benefits from the positive influence of the LA hardcore-punk scene and manages to win over the specialist press: among all the labels coined to pigeonhole a blend that, despite its distant roots, sounds innovative, "voodoo rock" is probably the most enduring. A reference, encouraged by Pierce's own lyrics, to the aesthetics and practice of ancient African tribal rites - perhaps a little naive, but at least able to properly capture the essence of the Gun Club brand. Brian "Kid Congo" explains further: "Everything depended on the timing, the tempo changes happened whenever the vocal came in... and the vocal lines arrived when they arrived, not when they were supposed to. You had to wait around (...) We never knew when Jeffrey's part was coming or how long he'd drag it out, we didn't know whether a moment later we'd be able to let loose or whether we had to stay quiet."

"Improvisation" was already the key word in Jeffrey Lee's art as in his life, and before it revealed its full dramatic aftertaste, it was the ingredient that could make every Gun Club show a unique event. Once well road-tested on the stages of LA and beyond, the band was signed by Chris Stein's Animal Records, who, despite his own day job (guitarist for Blondie), confessed right away that he wasn't a huge fan of "heavy guitar based" records and wanted to rework their sound.

Pierce gave the go-ahead, Stein took the role that on the first album had belonged to Tito Larriva (The Plugz) and Chris D (The Flesh Eaters), and the changes are noticeable: Miami (1982) drew a fair amount of criticism in its wake, almost all of it aimed at a production deemed "flat and lifeless". Certainly its recording sessions had called for a slightly more sophisticated approach than the two-day sprint that had produced the previous album, essentially a "live in studio" affair. And yet it's precisely thanks to Stein's hand that the band could afford to push its explorations further beyond pure blues and broaden its stylistic boundaries.

Following another old custom (this one dating back to the days of r&b), the album opens with a track sharing its title with the previous record, before moving on to explore more distant territory: "Fire Of Love", placed at the center of the album, is actually a launching pad that picks up the sonic thread right where we'd left it a year earlier: still voodoo-billy, but with more measured steps. The interplay between outbursts and moments of precarious calm returns in "Call Up Thunder" and in a future band classic like "Carry Home", a globe-trotting "on the road" odyssey summed up in three minutes of rock'n'roll and steel guitars.

Soon the album's two souls (the traditional one and the more properly rock one) would branch off onto separate tracks: on one side are songs of perhaps less headlong speed but undeniable sonic impact, like "Run Through The Jungle", the Creedence cover that picks up classic rock's connections and twists them through Pierce's morbid delivery. On the other side are the tracks that make Miami an early step in the band's sonic exploration: not only the steel-guitar chorus crowning "Texas Serenade" - a rare example of entirely electric country and western - but also the nativist tones and suggestions of "Watermelon Man", where Pierce chases the vocal ecstasy of the great Jamaican shamans, trying his hand at an almost-reggae "American style". Evidently, from the singer's point of view, American tradition, Native American customs and Jamaican exoticisms all belong to one single archaic imaginary: proof of this lies in the pairing of the stories of "Bad Indian" (back up to speed) and "John Hardy", the "desperate man" who had already passed through the mouths of half the folk-country tradition.

Also in the spirit of American music is the closing "Mother Earth": a songwriting masterpiece and one of Mr. Pierce's most inspired performances, revealing his high lyrical standing to anyone who had dismissed him as little more than a punkster.

Looked at in hindsight, even the image on the cover can prove telling as a diagnosis of the band's state of health: Rob Ritter is missing from the group photo, having quit right after the recordings wrapped. The other two members would soon follow: Graham's sidelined figure and that of Ward Dotson, pushed into the shadow behind the singer's face, say a lot about the Jeffrey-centric dynamics that were taking hold of the group: "Jeffrey could be charming when he wanted or needed to be, and that only increased my resentment toward him. He was also a huge liar, sometimes he'd lie just for the fun of it. It might sound romantic to you, but try being stuck in a van with someone like that, and you'll start dreaming about killing him. And I don't care how good a songwriter he was."

Walking with the Beast: cadute e riformazioni (1982-1984)

With the whole crew in mutiny, Pierce and the people at Animal hastily recruited a stand-in lineup (Jim Duckworth on bass, Dee Pop of the Bush Tetras on drums, Jeffrey Lee himself on guitar) to record, on an EP, the material the previous lineup had left unused: Death Party is the last exploit in the style of the early Gun Club, close to that imagery of love and death that was beginning to haunt their leader. Alongside the dissonant title track, co-written with some members of Flipper, the mini-album features four other songs: it opens with the robust ballad "The House On Highland Ave", showing Jeffrey's considerable growth as a songwriter and storyteller. "The Light Of The World" and "The Lie" tread steeper paths, dancing a dance of death we already knew, but one that was growing ever more funereal as time went on.

In a work entirely focused on the theme of death, there was bound to be room for an ode to the guardian spirits of the afterlife too: it comes last, a fast, drum-driven punk splinter titled "Come Back Jim". Whoever the dedication was originally meant for, this track would remain fertile ground for comparisons with Jim Morrison, parallels that were already steadily growing thanks to similarities between their vocal styles but, above all, thanks to the aura of doomed genius that seems to bind them together.

Even paired with genius, however, recklessness doesn't exactly make for stability within the band, and the group is at loggerheads again after just a few months: on the eve of the Australian tour, two members of the band will refuse to board the plane to Melbourne, leaving Jeffrey Lee on his own once again. And yet, as the critics of the time put it, "The Gun Club is Jeffrey Lee Pierce": and knowing this all too well, he boards that flight anyway, bringing along bassist Patricia Morrison and figuring he'll find the rest of the cast once he's there. Fate proves him right and holds a welcome surprise in store: waiting for him on Australian soil is Kid Congo Powers himself, finally free of his commitments with the Cramps and willing to pick up the adventure again with the band that had been his first. As he put it, "in Australia a ton of people were waiting for us. It was the Birthday Party crowd, and our reputation as the drunkest, most drugged-up garage band in America must have gotten there before us." Chaotic but fun, the tour manages to give the band the jolt it needed and, back in America, Pierce decides "for some strange reason" to re-enlist original drummer Terry Graham to get back into the studio.

Even though the lineup at this point is three-quarters the same as on the debut, the results are entirely new: The Las Vegas Story (1984) picks up the conversation where Miami left it off and earns the title of the Gun Club's "pop record", if only for the variety of material on offer and the approach taken to it. "We were in our free jazz phase, we were exploring new territory and we wanted a record that would satisfy us. We knew that combination of people was really sharp and could create a completely different sound from before. We were very, very into disco. Very into pop music too, Prince was our biggest influence at the time. Him and the drugs."

The sessions take place at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles, right next door to the room where Ry Cooder is recording the soundtrack for Wim Wenders's new film, "Paris, Texas". The band members will "borrow" a lot of his vintage gear and those "strange noisy machines" to further broaden their sonic palette. The production of Jeff Erych – brought in to give the album a "dreamy" touch – also lets them indulge a few whims, like having Julio Iglesias's pianist play the piano on "My Man's Gone Now"... "it was a strange and fun studio experience, even if decidedly not very 'punk'. A lot of people wanted 'earthly punk' from us, but the more they asked for it, the more we wanted to move away from it."

And indeed Las Vegas Story is also the first LP to show a noticeable "slowdown" in the rhythms, while at the same time making room for the frontman's lyrical streak, less and less the "agitator" and more and more in the mood for confession. His howl shifts from ferocious to desperate, taking center stage on sweeping tracks like "Gives Up The Sun", or the measured ballad "My Dreams", among the best cuts of the bunch.

What speed can no longer provide is now supplied by Congo Powers's work, by this point a seasoned noise-maker able – thanks to Cooder's gear – to paint landscapes of restless unease on the canvases of "Moonlight Motel" and "The Stranger In Your Town". The mid-tempo of "Walking With The Beast" can be considered the manifesto track from several angles: the purely stylistic one (its measured, steady pace, which captures the new sonic setup) and the biographical one, where JLP openly comes to terms with his own "demon" as a faithful travelling companion.

The shows start up again, with Animal Records' management once more booking dates mostly outside the US. Gig after gig, the band distances itself from the ugly mood on the American live circuit, where, as children of the more liberal Seventies, they watch with concern the rise of a "strange nationalism" in their peers' performances. Stars-and-stripes flags and various symbols of the Reagan era push the Gun Club to play mostly in Europe, though they can't quite leave the more practical problems behind: their tour bus gets cleaned out twice, and in Paris, after the second theft, Terry Graham decides to skip town in the middle of the night. Waking up crippled and without their gear, the band – or what's left of it – has a final nervous breakdown: with relations between the musicians once again at an all-time low, Jeffrey Lee, wise for once, calls off the session for a long hiatus.

Ramblin' in Europe: the return and the solo outings (1987-1993)

The Gun Club's reformation falls in 1987, the same year the world finally learns about L.A. street-rock through the name Guns 'n' Roses: the chart-topping, glittering mix of punk and glam-rock with blues undertones, Axl Rose's stage-animal posturing, and even the name of his band all owe more than a little to fellow Angeleno J.L. Pierce, who nonetheless doesn't seem interested in cashing in, too busy as he is treading entirely different paths.

Despite the promises he'd made to himself, the hiatus hasn't managed to keep him away from his addictions, least of all the one for music: in these three years Pierce has already gone back into the studio without the band on two separate occasions, releasing one and a half records under his own name. Wildweed and Flamingo, the EP that follows it, aren't exactly two perfect records, but they do have the merit of documenting the development of an artist constantly in the mood for experimentation and, at last, able to take back the reins of the project he holds dearest.

Meanwhile, Kid Congo hasn't exactly been sitting idle either: the call to arms catches him in the ranks of the Bad Seeds, though he returns to devote himself entirely to the mother band right after recording the guitar parts for "The Good Son". Rounding out what Pierce will later call his all-time favorite lineup (and, not coincidentally, the longest-lasting one) are the two musicians who had already backed him on his solo outing: Nick Sanderson on drums and Romi Mori, the bassist of Asian descent whom Nick Salmon of the Scientists had introduced him to during the Australian shows, and who would soon become his partner.

From these hands, and under the direction of Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins), Mother Juno will take shape, the first and perhaps the most representative of their "mature-era" records. Having abandoned their pop digressions, the Gun Club go back to what they do best, alternating fast tracks with more traditional atmospheres, in a tempered return to their roots that the singer would compare to the ebb and flow "of the waves in the Ocean".

Despite such a romantic image, the opening trio ("Bill Baley"-"Thunderhead"-"Lupita Scream") is old-style, and the opening salvo also boasts one of the most memorable tribute songs in the Gun Club catalogue: the "Bill Baley" that opens the record is none other than Nick Cave, disguised as a stand-up comedian leading a dissolute life. Not much later, and at the same breakneck pace, he's followed by what's likely a nod to Kim Salmon, hinted at by the words of "My Cousin Kim", even though the song actually tells a completely different story: in both cases, these are edgy, nervous tracks, tasked with bringing back memories of the "good old days" of Fire Of Love.

There are no more than two tracks ("Breaking Hands" and the long, swaying "Yellow Eyes") that slow the pace down instead, giving in somewhat to the charms of new wave, which by that point wasn't really all that "new" anymore. Otherwise, Mother Juno is valuable above all for how it manages to repackage an already-familiar sound through the excellent technical chops of a new lineup.

The distance from the band's previous path becomes more pronounced in the lyrics, however: Jeffrey Lee's lyricism here completes a journey toward disillusionment already begun in certain moments of past records, a "parable" that gradually leads him toward bitter resignation, going "from rebel to madman and from madman to loser" (Scaruffi).

By now fond of the Old Continent and its scents, Pierce had wanted his band's journey to start over at Hansa Studios in Berlin, in what had once been a ballroom for Nazi soldiers and which, in more recent and less bellicose times, had also hosted the Duke, David Bowie, at work on his masterful Berlin trilogy. Mother Juno thus opens the band's European phase, still fleeing that "Bad America" he had sung about only a few years earlier: Jeffrey was running away from Los Angeles, from his ghosts, from alcohol and from drugs.

"We're on our home turf and we're drawing crowds of no more than fifty, by now we're seen as a band touring in from Europe," Tristan remarked, after one of the many dates on their new American tour that played to near-empty rooms. "In our band we've got people from Japan and from England: we've learned to look at things through European eyes, so we've become a bit more European ourselves."

On the back of these new multicultural reference points, Pastoral Hide And Seek (1993) borrows its title from a Japanese surrealist film that neatly sums up the band's situation: "playing hide and seek" in what, at least to a red-blooded American, must have looked like untouched wilderness. The Club's sixth studio effort, in fact, took shape in the Belgian countryside, with Pierce and Romi Mori bound by an ever-tighter partnership, and with Kid Congo once again commuting between the Bad Seeds and the sessions for the new record. "Jeffrey was really committing to the guitar, he was living with Romi, they were lovers and bandmates together. So they lived in their own world. And everything became a matter for the couple."

Pierce's greater involvement as a musician is perhaps the most obvious feature of the new album, released in 1990 and crediting him as producer too: by then adulthood had taken over, definitively shelving the punk spirit and the most visceral blues urgency in favour of a greater interest in form. The ballad "Emily's Changed" shows a new balance between the music and the "literary" bent of the lyrics, while "St. John's Divine" is the mid-tempo track that best sums up the musical character of this new phase: comparisons keep piling up, pairing the proto-punk of Television with the traditional rock of Thin Lizzy, and late-period Led Zeppelin with (needless to say) the final Doors.

Pierce still feels the need to take hold of his own music and turn it into a personal diary, even at the cost of scaling back the angry outbursts in favour of more reflective compositions: this becomes clear in the lyrics too, and naturally leads into another solo chapter.

Recorded around the same time as "Pastoral" but released only two years later on the American label Triple X, Ramblin' Jeffrey Lee is a self-portrait in blues, pairing a couple of important original songs with standards by some of his most beloved songwriters of all time, from Howlin' Wolf to Skip James. Blues still represents the only medicine for Jeffrey Lee, and quite a few of the works from this late phase carry the weight of this cathartic burden, of a responsibility that feels almost therapeutic.

His standing as a songwriter benefits from this, and these very years see him produce some of his finest work: above all "Sorrow Knows", built on one of the catchiest riffs the Club ever came up with. Inexplicably left off the previous album, it was quickly rescued as the standout track on the mini-album Divinity, which also features, among other notable numbers, the screaming, apocalyptic hard rock of "Black Hole". This would be the last release to bear Kid Congo Powers' signature. Beyond his friend's (now also technical) intrusiveness and the uncomfortable position of being the third wheel between him and Romi, there was something more that no longer sat right with the guitarist.

"I loved Jeffrey, I thought he was something wonderful and that this band was wonderful, but there really was something seriously wrong, something dark and wrong. Normally we wouldn't even have noticed, but this time there was really nothing good about it. And it wasn't even fuelling our creativity, it was dragging it down." It's the final parting of a founding member of the Club, but it plays out without much drama; if anything, the two founders stay on good terms and keep in close touch.

Replacing him is the guitar of Tony Melik, already credited on "Ramblin'" under the pseudonym Wille Love, but only for the shows that followed the band's new and final album: Pierce's increased skill as a guitarist and the addition of Van Pipper on organ make Lucky Jim the most "classic", and perhaps the most mature, Gun Club record.

Behind his Squier Strat, Jeffrey now seems like an unexpected cross between BB King and David Gilmour (!), his songs take on ever more expansive forms, making proper room for the bleak autobiographical streak that once again dominates the lyrics: "A House Is Not A Home" tells the story of musicians with no roots left - the same story we've been trying to tell for the past few paragraphs... - while "Idiot Waltz" and "Anger Blues" are perhaps the most anguished and representative titles of this new style.

Although it doesn't rank among Pierce's most accomplished works, Lucky Jim is a fragment of stylistic last will and testament that belongs alongside his solo output, a kind of pantheon paying tribute to his various musical inspirations. Beyond the aforementioned classic blues, there are echoes of Hendrix on "Ride" and an attempt at building a soul ballad for electric guitars on "Cry To Me". Inevitably, though, the strongest emphasis falls on the title track, a semi-acoustic, anguished final cry aimed once more toward the heavens: “We need you, oh Lucky Jim/ where have you gone, oh Lucky Jim/ we miss you here, oh Lucky Jim”.

Morrison's ghost begins hovering over his successor's head once again, and it couldn't have picked a more tragically fitting moment: with Jeffrey bent over practising guitar, the rhythm section starts... fraternising. Romi Mori and Nick Sanderson begin a romance behind their friend's back and decide to leave the band. For the singer, it's the final blow.

The Black Hole: The Final Days (1993-1996)

All his efforts to clean up his life collapse within days under the weight of his old demons, alcohol and drugs. The last reports and public sightings do indeed paint him as "ramblin'", wandering, almost lost... old friends step in, putting him on for the odd sporadic show: in '94 he turns up at a couple of the Bad Seeds' European dates (to perform "Wanted Man"), then leaves the Netherlands for good, the country that had taken him in over the previous years, and returns to Los Angeles. There he reconnects with Kid Congo, and together they play a night at Johnny Depp's Viper Room for old times' sake: the set features songs from Fire Of Love and Miami, rekindling old passions and bringing the pair several offers for a reunion tour. But the proposal doesn't seem to interest either of them, least of all Pierce, who after these last appearances retreats to his mother's house to work on writing his autobiography.

"Go Tell the Mountain" is yet another session of self-analysis, this time on paper, but without the cleansing effect the previous ones had managed to produce. What's left is a j'accuse aimed at almost all his old comrades-in-arms, accused of having abandoned his cause, and a bitter farewell to the world.

The cold, matter-of-fact account of Jeffrey Lee Pierce's final moments is likewise entrusted to a friend who, when it comes to knowing doomed souls, is certainly no stranger to it: Mark Lanegan, the voice of Screaming Trees. "He left me a couple of messages on my answering machine: he sounded completely out of his mind, but not like when he used to call drunk. It was strange, as if he'd gone mad; finally someone called back, told me Jeffrey had relapsed, that he'd been drinking while he was away, that his liver had put poison into his system and now he was going through dementia. The hospital had discharged him, saying there was nothing they could do for him, that his liver was gone and he was dying. After that I got a call from him: he was in Utah and sounded normal. I told him, 'what the hell, man, everyone's saying you're dying'. And he said, 'oh, they always say that!'. A week later he fell into a coma and died."

Pro Memoria

“The writing of Kid Congo Powers and Jeffrey Lee Pierce is the freshest white contribution to the blues of their time. ‘Sex Beat’, ‘She’s Like Heroin To Me’ and ‘For The Love Of Ivy’… why aren't these songs taught in school?”. So says Jack White of the White Stripes, who undoubtedly borrowed from Gun Club the most visceral and “radical” sides of their sound.

Even sifting through the covers and half-hidden tributes that so many have wanted to dedicate to Jeffrey Lee's memory since that 30th of March 1996, a general tendency emerges clearly: whether handled by old friends or by seemingly distant admirers, even Pierce's fastest songs end up bringing all their melancholy back to the surface, turning into slow, aching blues in his honour. Just listen to the version of “Mother Of Earth” offered by Mick Harvey of the Bad Seeds, or the dark and beautiful tribute album “I Knew Jeffrey Lee” by Italy's own Circo Fantasma; or the two different versions of “Carry Home”, which turn up in many of Bonnie “Prince” Billy's live sets, as well as opening “I'll Take Care Of You”, Mark Lanegan's own covers album, where it sits alongside timeless pieces of American popular music.

Despite limited and inconsistent success, a life of missed opportunities and self-sabotage, and a curse that weighed constantly on both his mind and his art, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and his music have managed to stand the test of time and earn, in their own way, the deserved status of “classics”.

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