I was just sat there having coffee waiting for him to come back from scoring and it just wasnt right any more. Youre really pushing everyone away from us.. Pierce was also a keen supporter of the No Wave movement in New York City. Hed play the songs to me and Id learn the bass parts. Nick Cave based his whole universe on Jeffrey. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in, Please refresh your browser to be logged in, Extra 20% off selected fashion and sportswear at Very, Get up to 10% off using the Booking.com app, $6 off a $50+ order with this AliExpress discount code, 15% off orders over 15 using this eBay discount code, Compare broadband packages side by side to find the best deal for you, Compare cheap broadband deals from providers with fastest speed in your area, All you need to know about fibre broadband, Best Apple iPhone Deals in the UK April 2023, Compare iPhone contract deals and get the best offer this April, Compare the best mobile phone deals from the top networks and brands. [17] With Mori now on bass, the band recorded 1987's Mother Juno, produced by the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie, and featuring songs such as "Thunderhead", "Araby" and "The Breaking Hands". I See a Rainbow: An Interview with Award-Winning Songwriter Brenda Russell, Working on Not Feeling Alone: An Interview With Josh Ritter, Living Colours Vivid Turns 35: An Interview with Vernon Reid, Satirical Miniseries White House Plumbers Is an Uneven Glimpse into Proximity to Power, PopMatters Seeks Film Critics and Essayists, PopMatters Seeks Television Critics and Essayists. He played a London gig on January 17, 1985, as 'Astro-Unicorn Experimental Jazz Ensemble', before recruiting Murray Mitchell, John McKenzie and Andy Anderson to record tracks which became the album Wildweed, the first on which Pierce played the majority of guitar parts,[14][15] and material released later in the year as the "Flamingo" E.P. The Gun Club and perhaps this more than anything explains their continued marginalization were rarely if ever fun. Whitechapel Jack. The decision to re-activate The Gun Club with a new line-up was made. Long before anyone coined the term mosh pit, my enduring memory of that concert, aside from its sheer mesmeric ebullience, is of the ripe full-body bruising I got to gingerly explore at my hungover leisure the following day. In fact, For the Love of Ivy appropriates a couplet almost immediately (Well, jawbone eat and jawbone talk / Jawbone eat you with a knife and fork). His interest in reggae overlapped with the emergence of punk rock and he became involved in the Hollywood scene as a contributor to Slash, writing on contemporary punk, 1930s blues, 1950s rockabilly, and on reggae under the name "Ranking Jeffrey Lea", including an interview with Bob Marley. It was this enormous sound of huge discordance, and Jeffrey Lee was mumbling something into his mic and when it hit critical mass and couldnt get any bigger, Jim Duckworth pointed his guitar at the baying mob that was the crowd and hit the first notes of The Fire Of Love, and the whole place just exploded. Thats what I got the most out of it. Literally. Pierce fronted the Gun Club from 1979 through to his death in 1996 . Mr. Pierce is survived by his father, Bob, of Salt Lake City, his mother, Margie, and a sister, Jackie Faretra, both of Los Angeles. Furthermore, his cover of the traditional outlaw ballad John Hardy on Miami is eerily similar to a Leadbelly version (on most compilations, the accordion-less 3:13 cut). [48], Jeffrey's Blues was a documentary filmed in 1989, directed by Bram van Splunteren for VPRO's Onrust and re-edited with unseen footage in 2016. His obsessions crawled all over him. His last TV appearance was with the Bad Seeds on Later with Jools Holland, recorded on May 14, 1994.[21]. Despite a pick-up replacement, the magic was gone and the tour ended at Dingwalls in Camden Town, London. Pierce returned to Europe to play more shows, culminating in the Quartet's final gig on December 27 in London. Digging into layers of hopeless desperate acts, excavating strata for singular sacred artifacts, aching to merge the atavistic with the advanced. We were record collectors and fans and at a super young age had dedicated our lives to that, recalls Powers. To this day, I still havent heard either Pastoral Hide & Seek (1990) or Divinity (1991), and only listened to 1987s Mother Juno relatively recently, which in itself is almost unforgivably neglectful since it was produced by another of my 80s musical touchstones, the Cocteau Twins Robin Guthrie. It was while he was there that he suffered a fatal brain haemorrhage on March 31, 1996. It will feature original interviews with the likes of Cave, Harry, Jack White, who has said Pierces songs should be taught in school, Jim Jarmusch, Iggy Pop, Mark Lanegan, Moby and Kid Congo Powers as well as never-before-seen archival footage and reenactments. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. [39], Henry Rollins, another friend of Pierce, played the Gun Club song "Bill Bailey" during his first show for the "Artist in Residence" feature on Australian national radio station Double J. Rollins stated before playing the song: "Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a very good friend of mine and I miss him horribly. He seemed to yearn unfocused, like a naked thing belched from a reeking swamp some fog-smudged night, all EC comics, AC current, and sleazy intent. It was just punk rock.. Terry, Jim and I looked at each other and went, Hmm. Four months after the Gun Club frontman had passed away, the article labeled him as the true victim of what Engelshoven interpreted as "the American disease." Harry contributed backing vocals on the album Miami under the pseudonym D.H. Lawrence, and was a longtime mentor and supporter of Pierce. To understand Pierce's ambivalence toward Los Angeles requires looking further into the particular origins Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Biography [ edit] Early life [ edit] Pierce was born on June 27, 1958, in Montebello, California. It kind of sounds like a Christmas song but Jeffrey always described it as a love song.. The maddening part for me is that I missed most of it. At night, the coyotes would howl as the moon rose over the peak to the east, and occasionally, a lone cougar would descend from the hills. He tragically died of a brain hemorrhage on March 31, 1996. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Musically, most of the pieces were in place very early. Glitterhouse Records instead released Axels & Sockets. 13 October 2015. stated in. And while the new fans are throwing themselves with abandon to the maelstrom emanating from the stage, older heads are sensing a familiarity that hasnt been heard for some time. Country:UK: . Bath The blues was an anchor but we were very much into seeing what would happen if you mixed up different things. He was due in court early in 1995, but flew instead to Japan, where he did some radio work and joined a Japanese band onstage, until he was hospitalized after a mugging. Whether consciously or not, echoes of The Gun Club are keenly felt by contemporary practitioners of punk-rock blues such as Daddy Long Legs, Guadalupe Plata and The Bonnevilles as well as more established musicians such as Mark Lanegan, Nick Cave and The Black Keys. Though the material was as strong as the debut Texas Serenade features some fine slide playing by Dotson while Mother Of Earth practically invents alt.country Steins production all but ignored the bottom end to create a trebly document that, as testified by live bootlegs from the time, was hardly representative of the bands sound. And I also think that the records speak for themselves and Im really proud to be on them. 1999-2021 PopMatters Media, Inc. All rights reserved. From his days as a peroxided, Debbie Harry-fixated Los Angeles teen-punk, through a lengthy era when he seemed convinced he could channel the spirit of Robert Johnson, to a more recent probe of the seedier side of continental balladry, Pierce who died of a cerebral blood clot in Utah at the end of March 1996 always . The Gun Club frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce is the subject of a forthcoming documentary called Elvis From Hell, as Deadline reports. [4], The Gun Club's debut album, Fire of Love featured the songs "Sex Beat" and "She's Like Heroin to Me". When you were on stage and it was going well, it was fantastic; it was what music should be, enthuses Morrison. Something was really happening there.. He went and grabbed it; it didnt come to him. Anyone can read what you share. Pierce's autobiography, Go Tell The Mountain, goes into detail about the personal turmoil he experienced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Having somehow missed their sophomore effort Miami completely, I next encountered the Gun Club in 1984, with the release of The Las Vegas Story, an album as remarkable and as perplexing as anything in their catalogue. Come back, Lux Interior. Jim Duckworth has this big, archtop semi-acoustic Gibson and he was getting feedback to go from his monitor and into his amp, and Id never heard anything like it. Soundtrack: Too Young to Die. Indeed, in interviews, an increasingly bitter Pierce had begun to refer to his work as being "full of weaknesses". The album featured tribal beats ("Walking with the Beast") and slide-guitars ("Eternally is Here"), and other tracks included "My Dreams", "Bad America" and a cover of "My Man's Gone Now". England and Wales company registration number 2008885. [citation needed], Mark Lanegan recorded a cover version of the Gun Club's "Carry Home", from the album Miami, on his album I'll Take Care of You. His Anglo father worked as a union organizer. Jeffrey digressed a lot. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. The moment was certainly right for Pierce. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was an American punk, and a bluesman lead singer and guitarist for that most contradictory of bands, The Gun Club, whose erratic embers smoldered and sputtered fitfully during the 80s and the first half of the 90s, rarely if ever catching fully in fames spotlight, yet illuminating the margins with a deep fire that, since their passing long ago now, feels richer and more blood-red the older we all get. Powers was by now living in Berlin and performing as guitarist with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but accepted Pierce's offer and managed to combine working in both bands. Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Apparently his health had been very bad again but it was a step in the right direction. and a flock of chickens. Come back, Jeffrey Lee Pierce. That was part of his charm. Born. Stack O Lee. Jeffrey Lee Pierce. But Im also amazed that you can make such great music when youre that fucked up on drink and drugs. The gulf between the two records is grimly fascinating. Interestingly, Pierce himself preferred Miami, saying about Fire of Love: I cant even remember making it. "It was Jeff's musical misery tour.". He took what was left of the band to Holland to record their final album, Lucky Jim. He died in 1996, succumbed to cirrhosis at age 37. But in Jeffrey's world, sometimes it was very inspiring and illuminating and other times it was painful and depressing. The Gun Club have themselves informed and inspired many artists, including The White Stripes, Screaming Trees, Calla, The Pixies, Henry Rollins, and PJ Harvey. It was at this place called The Gala in Norwich, he says. At the point that final album dropped, his wife and bassist Romi Mori had left him for his then-drummer (Nick Sanderson), and Pierce had probably realized how indifferent the wider world had become to his music, let alone his pain. I wouldnt be playing guitar if it wasnt for him, and I wouldnt know a lot about music if it wasnt for him. He was a one-man southern death cult, a bad Indian. When the singing is this ferally on, you can forgive the slight reduction of everything else in the mix. Its like we had this idea that the band would repeat Fire of Love ad infinitum and wed all go home happy, so when expectations were dashed, much of the critical world scowled petulantly and turned away, never to turn fully back. Come back, Darby Crash. With the band ready to board a connecting flight bound for Australia, Duckworth and Graham quit thanks to Pierces unreasonable demands. Born in 1958, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was raised in the east LA suburb of El Monte. [6] Becoming disillusioned by the evolution of punk rock into what he saw as strict formality, and feeling that reggae was an import, Pierce developed a keen interest in and extensive knowledge of the Delta blues, taking influence and inspiration from his own culture's history. She caught the band live in London in 1991 after the release of Pastoral Hide And Seek: They were so uninspired that night., The recording of Pastoral Hide And Seek in Belgium had become a workmanlike chore for Kid Congo. Says Powers: The concert was great and at the end of the night, in a fit of inspiration, I suppose, Jeffrey said, Why dont we have a band together? So I said, Well, okay, but I dont play any instrument or do anything. So he said, Well you can be the singer and Ill play the guitar, and Im like, Im not going to be the singer. And hes like, I could show you how to play guitar. Long-term alcohol abuse had left Pierce with cirrhosis of the liver and his enforced sobriety was having a detrimental personal and musical effect. PleaseKillMe.com is the home of Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk. WERE WE ALL BRAINWASHED BY THE CIA WITH SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK & ROLL? Over the course of seven studio albums and an ever-shifting line-up of musicians driven away by Pierces self-obsessed and self-destructive behaviour, The Gun Club left behind a body of work whose ramifications are still reverberating to this day. Its fair to say that the band fell almost completely off my radar at some point after 1985 (having picked up, and loved, that years excellent solo release Wildweed, one of my emigration casualties, sadly), so the news of Jeffreys death at age 37 of a brain-hemorrhage on March 31,1996 eluded me entirely. And while punk, on the surface, at least, eschewed and discarded what had come before it, The Gun Club tapped into a lineage that took them through the decades via punk, primal rocknroll and eventually the blues. Love in a cold climate: Romi Mori and Jeffrey Lee Pierce. The Gun Club, which was a key influence on bands such as R.E.M, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Sonic Youth and The White Stripes, released seven studio albums between 1981 and 1993. The former couplet is from Fire of Love and the latter The Gun Clubs 1993 curtain call, Lucky Jim. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was an American punk, and a bluesman lead singer and guitarist for that most contradictory of bands, The Gun Club, whose erratic embers smoldered and sputtered fitfully. For Patricia Morrison, it was the wonderment of seeing the world and playing music she loved. Prior to his departure and the release of the album, Ritter played Miami to former Bags compatriot Patricia Morrison, who quickly fell for the records charms and replaced the bassist. With Pierces persona in place and a fascination for roots music that saw radical re-workings of Tommy Johnsons Cool Drink Of Water Blues and Robert Johnsons Preachin Blues (Up Jumped The Devil), The Gun Club soon developed a reputation for being a bands band and in turn attracted the interest of The Cramps, who offered Powers the job of replacing recently departed guitarist Bryan Gregory. After the gig, Jeffrey Lee came up to me and started talking to me and he just wouldnt let me go, says Romi Mori, then a Japanese fan and later Gun Club bassist. The whole dynamic changed and he didnt sing as well because he was concentrating so much on playing the guitar. The Gun Club's last ever gig, with bassist Elizabeth Montague replacing Bradbury, was at The Palace in Hollywood on December 18, 1995. With the first line-up imploding, Pierce and Powers were joined by Rob Ritter (bass) and Terry Graham (drums) from LA band The Bags, whose contribution was instantly felt. Theres a clip out there of him performing Alabama Blues by Robert Wilkins, which seems wrenchingly poignant to me, the woe writ large on his face, the naked self-deprecation at the end after he stumbles, the hollow weariness when he looks right into the camera, even his apparent lack of awareness at the questionable spectacle of a white man singing Brownskin women, gonna be the death of [me]. Perhaps he no longer cared. In the early stages of his career, Pierce became friends with his idol Debbie Harry, having met Harry and Chris Stein through his presidency of Blondie's U.S. fan club. [7], The follow-up album, Miami, was produced by Stein,[8] and features renditions of "Devil in the Woods," "Sleeping in Blood City" and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through the Jungle." It was an even trade! laughs Powers. By subscribing, I agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. [3] He started learning guitar at the age of 10. But fantasy bled into reality and it was annoying to the band. Ad Choices, The Gun Clubs Jeffrey Lee Pierce Gets New Documentary, A daily roundup of the most important stories in music, New Music Releases and Upcoming Albums in 2023, Lucinda Williams Announces Album, Shares New Song With Bruce Springsteen, Watch Clairo Cover Vashti Bunyans Winter Is Blue, Godflesh Announce North American Tour, Share New Song Nero, The Gun Clubs Jeffrey Lee Pierce, 1983 (Photo by Peter Noble/Redferns). According to Jones, the note was "written out in beautiful handwriting and 'with love, Debbie' at the bottom" and was Pierce's "most prized possession". Its now 20 years since the untimely passing of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and his legacy is apparent in any number of current bands now active, as well as his contemporaries who are still performing. She left him and began a relationship with her future husband, Nick Sanderson. The band's first album, "Fire of Love" (1981), remains its most admired, with a fast-paced, irreverent version of the Mississippi blues song "Preachin' the Blues" and Mr. Pierce's warbling voice wailing about dark themes like drugs and death. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. While Jeffrey was slipping into a coma and dying, I lived (totally oblivious) on 16 acres of unfarmed flood plain surrounded by mountains alongside my common law partner, my baby son, two big dogs, a Manx cat, a rooster. I couldnt do it any more; we had too many arguments and disagreements.. writer: "The Stranger in Our Town" TV Series; 2012; 1 episode; Personal details. A scheduled recording session for Tex & the Horseheads, the band Jeffrey Lee Pierce had put together around his girlfriend Linda/Texacala Jones was going to go unused. In July 1996, Tom Engelshoven of Dutch music magazine Oor described Jeffrey Lee Pierce as the missing link between the Eagles and Kurt Cobain. Jeffrey decided that he wanted a girl in the band and they were wary of who they were going to get, so they said, Would you do it? says Morrison of her entry into the band. Formed in 1979 and based around the core of frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce, The Gun Club drew deeply from the well of American vernacular music and infused it with the stripped down energy and elemental values of punk rock. In 2014, Sergio Rotman of the Argentinian band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs edited a special edition of 500CDs with versions of 14 Gun Club and Pierce songs. The latter acted as producer on Miami, the second Gun Club album, which also featured Debbie Harry on backing vocals. With his tousled blond-dyed hair, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was in many ways the archetypal American cult musician, at the crossroads of many musical styles (the goth scene, the swamp blues now revived by G-Love & Special Sauce) which later came to prominence. Death Party is an EP by American rock band The Gun Club, released in 1983. And I could navigate Jeffrey when he was saner. Despite the continued alcohol and drug abuse, Pierces talents were flourishing. As excellent as it is in isolation, its nonetheless a little sad in context. He was being deported and he needed somebody to take him to the airport. But it wasnt to last. So bookends of sorts: one darkly prosodic, the other starkly prosaic: one running frenzied from the swamp-demons of the past, the other recoiling in vain from the keening horror of an unspeakable future. Bluntly, they never quite got famous enough to sustain themselves in the down times, of which there were many. This was a more ambitious offering, from the reworking of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through the Jungle" to the voodoo feel of "Like Calling Up Thunder" and "Devil in the Woods".