The Gun Club
Mother Juno

It only took one look to understand that Jeffrey Lee Pierce would not die of old age. A dissolute and darkly poetic spirit, dominated by alcohol and drug addiction, with a face like a suburban Marlon Brando, Jeffrey Lee sings in “For the Love of Ivy” “You look like an Elvis from Hell,” but perhaps he speaks of himself. An Elvis bloated with alcohol and overindulged, a Jim Morrison exhumed from Père-Lachaise during a voodoo ritual, who probed the chaos of his own soul until he became a victim of himself, portraying the discomfort and alienation, tearing apart the American dream, destroying everything he had created, thus becoming the flesh and blood embodiment of Oscar Wilde's verse “each man kills the thing he loves.”

Jeffrey Lee Pierce, born in El Paso but raised in Los Angeles, with his Gun Club wrote one of the most important and underrated stories of new rock and modern blues. He contaminated the roots of American music with punk. He outraged blues and country. He dismembered tradition to recompose it through a gloomy and melancholic lexicon that tells wonderfully dark stories of murders, sex and romance, alcohol and drugs, vast loneliness. “I went down to the river of sadness, I went down to the river of pain and I heard them call my name” (“Mother of Earth”). Jeffrey Lee Pierce evokes brutal and nihilistic characters that seem to emerge from the pages of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and mixes everything, music, lyrics, and suggestions, into an incendiary and stunning blend that aligns Gun Club more with the Birthday Party than with contemporary American bands.

Jeffrey Lee, in his twenties, in 1979 writes for the fanzine Slash dealing with '50s rockabilly and pre-war blues, he becomes passionate about reggae music and, fanatical about Debby Harry - whose platinum blonde haircut and color he imitates - he founds the Blondie fan club. At a Pere Ubu concert, he meets Brian Tristan, the future Kid Congo Powers, with whom he decides to form a band. Kid should be the lead guitarist, but he doesn't even own a guitar and Jeffrey Lee solves the problem by lending him his and keeping the vocalist role for himself. Initially, they baptize themselves Cyclones, but soon change the name to Creeping Ritual. They spend two years frequently playing with bands from the Los Angeles punk scene, repeatedly changing the rhythm section, until with the entry of bassist Rob Ritter and drummer Terry Graham, the lineup stabilizes and the name changes definitively to what we know (legend has it that the name Gun Club was coined by Black Flag singer, Keith Morris). But the Cramps, on tour in Los Angeles, start hanging out with the Gun Club and after the sudden departure of their guitarist Bryan Gregory, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy offer the vacant spot to Brian Tristan, who accepts with Jeffrey’s blessing and temporarily exits the scene becoming Kid Congo Powers. And since in Rock’n’Roll, as in life, the saying “tell me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are” holds true, it’s no coincidence that Kid subsequently also joins Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, alternating for a few years between Gun Club and the Ink King.

The Gun Club, replacing Kid with Ward Dotson, records in just two days and on a starving budget Fire Of Love (1981) followed by Miami (1982), epochal albums that brand the '80s with their primordial mix of wild country-blues and devastating punk’n’roll, clattering guitars and erotic deliriums, rasps and howls, substances and dark occult rituals. Gun Club explores the murkiest, roughest recesses of that American Music which the Blasters, a few months earlier, had effectively opened the season of roots-rock with.

For what it’s worth, I lean toward Miami, perhaps because it's the first Gun Club album I stumbled upon and, as is known, first love is never forgotten.

“He had a huge ego and often stupid behavior. He was capricious and deceitful. He could be as charming as unbearable. I dreamed of killing him” (Ward Dotson on JLP)

In 1983, the Club releases the EP Death Party and, in 1984, the album The Las Vegas Story which marks the return of prodigal son Kid Congo Powers and the bass introduction of the fascinating Patricia Morrison (who would later move to Sisters Of Mercy and then the Damned, marrying singer Dave Vanian). The promotional tour in the UK ends in a complete disaster. There’s too much drugs, too much alcohol, and too many fights in the Club. So, after the tour (in fact, Terry Graham leaves earlier), the group disbands. Jeffrey Lee decides to stay in London with his new girlfriend, the Japanese Romi Mori, and in 1985, he records two solo records, the album Wildweed and the EP Flamingo. He spends the next two years following detoxification programs, managing to momentarily beat the heroin addiction. Thus, in 1987, Jeffrey Lee is ready to reopen the Club to which Romi, the trusty Powers (who in the meantime has become an integral part of the Bad Seeds), and English drummer Nick Sanderson, former Clock DVA (who would later join the Jesus And Mary Chain), subscribe.

In December of that same year, the renewed Gun Club releases Mother Juno, produced by Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins and recorded at the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin, where David Bowie had recorded the Berlin Trilogy and used at that period by Nick Cave and Einsturzende Neubauten. Some music critics slam the album, claiming that Robin Guthrie’s production, musically distant from the atmospheres of the Club's early works, had cleaned up the sound too much and that the choice of producer demonstrates “creative confusion” of Pierce. “Weighted down by heavy sounds and gloomy litanies, Mother Juno marks the definitive decline of the Gun Club” (so says Alberto Campo on Rockerilla n. 88, December 1987).

I want to clarify right away that this is not the case. Mother Juno is a great album. Robin Guthrie creates a more original and elaborate sound, but the music of the Club roars as much or more than usual.

In a 1990 interview, Jeffrey Lee states: “We tried to color our music as much as possible. We are not trying to copy our previous records under the pretext that they sold well or that the media reaction was positive. I don’t want to live in my past, the spirit of the Gun Club must not remain fixed on Fire Of Love or Miami, all this dates back to almost 10 years ago.”

This choice has irritated the lovers of early punk-blues, but those approaching this album without prejudice will discover marvelous songs with intense lyricism as only the Gun Club could produce. And if in the arrangements the European and Berlin atmosphere sometimes emerges, in content this is an intrinsically American work, offering a modern reinterpretation of the blues without fearing comparisons with the band’s previous works, thanks to the superb quality of the tracks (anything but creative confusion!) and a Jeffrey Lee Pierce in a state of grace who declaims his desperate sermons with total abandon, with a voice now compelling and epic, now alluring and sinister, baring his pulsating and idiosyncratic soul.

Despite exploring new sound possibilities, indeed, Jeffrey Lee does not lead us into the land of toys and it's understood right from the beautiful cover by Claus Castenskiold, which is the representation of what awaits the listener between the grooves of this record: a suicidal journey towards nothing, through the desert. The moral desert of Bad America, the stepmother, bitter and cursed America, sung by Pierce.

The Club offers members, once again, a great album of Rock’n’Roll, imbued with mysterious atmospheres, sharp riffs, slide and feedback guitars, gloomy and disturbing lyrics that speak of cruelty, betrayal, abandonment, love and death, despair, defeat with no chance of redemption. An abrasive, dark, spectral, psychotic album, with nerves on edge, between a restless Nick Cave and the gothiest Cramps.

Nine tracks - plus two bonus in the CD version - and nothing to throw away. The album opens with “Bill Bailey”, a ragtime track composed by Hughie Cannon in the early 1900s, violated and distorted into a riveting psychobilly as in the best tradition of the Club and dedicated to friend Nick Cave, followed by the sonic assault of “Thunderhead”, frantic and brutal. Two of the rawest pieces since Fire of Love. “Lupita Screams” is the first masterpiece of this album, Nervous and sharp Garage yet epic and exciting, in which Jeffrey proves to have become an excellent guitarist. “Yellow Eyes” (enhanced by the noise inserts of guest Blixa Bargeld) and “The Breaking Hands” are splendid ballads. Carnal and Funky-Blues the first, lethargic and shoegaze the second, which clearly bears the trademark of Scottish producer Robin Guthrie, who envelops this song - unique in the discography of the Gun Club - in a cloud of slide guitars and synthesizers. "Araby” is breakneck surf-punk. “Hearts”, an anthem burning in the fire of Powers’ feedback and Pierce's vocal extension. Followed by the pulsating punk of "My Cousin Kim" and the dazzling epilogue of the intense "Port of Souls".

Mother Juno is a bold and powerful album, sinuous and venomous like a rattlesnake lurking among the desert rocks infested with Jeffrey Lee's demons, leading us to an appointment with the devil, at the crossroads where he and Robert Johnson sold their souls.

They will follow with Pastoral Hide And Seek (1990) and the superfluous Divinity (1991) as well as Pierce's second solo album, Ramblin’ Jeffrey Lee & Cypress Grove with Willie Love (1992), a gesture of love towards the Blues.

In 1993, the final act of the Gun Club takes place with Kid Congo definitively exiting the group and Jeffrey Lee releasing Lucky Jim. But by then, the Club has closed its doors for lack of members. Romi also leaves with Nick Sanderson and Jeffrey Lee loses in one fell swoop the rhythm section, the love, and the will to live, already diluted by alcohol and drugs.

On the road to self-destruction, Pierce returns to Los Angeles, but his health deteriorates inexorably. He is HIV positive and has a liver destroyed by hepatitis, and while visiting his father in Salt Lake City, Utah, he is struck by a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. It's March 31, 1996. Jeffrey Lee was 37.

The Gun Club leaves an enormous legacy to posterity and the merit of having combined, first, punk and blues, glam theatricality, and folk severity. Nobody before and after will sound like them or have the singing style of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, one of the most creative and underrated rock artists of the last forty years.

“There is nothing so unreal as life” (Jeffrey Lee Pierce).