Gun Club: Classic or DUD

This sounds fantastic in theory!

I've just put Fire Of Love on because of this thread. Let's go kill Ivy, woah-oh!!

Cool piece of art, named "Gun Club". Strips of dyed velvet. Apparently it IS named after the band.

http://www.ago.net/info/ago_exhibitions/exhibition_large.cfm?ID=2740

The Gun Club - Fire of Love (Ruby, 1981)

This isn't southern gothic, it's feral white trash. Jeffrey Lee Pierce is Jack White’s charming older brother until the Wild Turkey comes on; then he’s an arrogant prick swathed in a cloud of Aqua-Net.

The Gun Club had a long career after this album and never hit this mark again. The rhythm section of Rob Ritter and Terry Graham hounds Jeffrey Lee through the scrub pine, chasing down the hollow keen of his voice. Ward Dotson's slide guitar slashes wildly at Pierce, coming after him from the shadows like a trucklot whore with her pimp’s buck knife.

The lyrics whip past your head until you catch one in the face: “I’ve been a real good tombstone / but now I’m blown away.” Gun Club co-founder (but absent from this first record) Kid Congo later covered “She’s Like Heroin To Me” with Sally Norvell, where it loomed in the half-light with an eerie, narcotic allure. "We sit together drunk / like our fathers used to be / I'm looking up and God is saying, 'What are you gonna do?' / I'm looking up and I'm crying, 'I thought it was up to you.'" Pierce sends murderous, adoring valentines to Ivy Rorschach ("For the Love of Ivy") and gets at a piece of Robert Johnson on "Preaching the Blues" that nobody else ever touched.

Then there’s the "Sex Beat," which isn’t sexy or erotic but base, urgent, murderous, nothing more than a criminal motive as unconsidered as the reflex at the base of a dog’s hunched spine. The sex beat hammers away like an all day speed freak. It’s dry hump sex; it’s a black pubic hair caught in a crust of blood on polyblend panties. It’s just a fact, a part of the mosquito landscape.

This record forges the earliest link between punk and blues. For hippies the blues represented a base truth and authenticity. For Pierce it’s raw, repetitive, hypnotic, clangorous, syphilitic. Ultimately, Jeffrey Lee drugged and drank and fucked himself into the grave, but don't get this record because he lived out his blues cliche. Get it because he knew his special rider in the dark, and he had a band that could preach the blues in hell. (David Smay)

The Gun Club - Fire of Love (Ruby, 1981)

This isn't southern gothic, it's feral white trash. Jeffrey Lee Pierce is Jack White’s charming older brother until the Wild Turkey comes on; then he’s an arrogant prick swathed in a cloud of Aqua-Net.

The Gun Club had a long career after this album and never hit this mark again. The rhythm section of Rob Ritter and Terry Graham hounds Jeffrey Lee through the scrub pine, chasing down the hollow keen of his voice. Ward Dotson's slide guitar slashes wildly at Pierce, coming after him from the shadows like a trucklot whore with her pimp’s buck knife.

The lyrics whip past your head until you catch one in the face: “I’ve been a real good tombstone / but now I’m blown away.” Gun Club co-founder (but absent from this first record) Kid Congo later covered “She’s Like Heroin To Me” with Sally Norvell, where it loomed in the half-light with an eerie, narcotic allure. "We sit together drunk / like our fathers used to be / I'm looking up and God is saying, 'What are you gonna do?' / I'm looking up and I'm crying, 'I thought it was up to you.'" Pierce sends murderous, adoring valentines to Ivy Rorschach ("For the Love of Ivy") and gets at a piece of Robert Johnson on "Preaching the Blues" that nobody else ever touched.

Then there’s the "Sex Beat," which isn’t sexy or erotic but base, urgent, murderous, nothing more than a criminal motive as unconsidered as the reflex at the base of a dog’s hunched spine. The sex beat hammers away like an all day speed freak. It’s dry hump sex; it’s a black pubic hair caught in a crust of blood on polyblend panties. It’s just a fact, a part of the mosquito landscape.

This record forges the earliest link between punk and blues. For hippies the blues represented a base truth and authenticity. For Pierce it’s raw, repetitive, hypnotic, clangorous, syphilitic. Ultimately, Jeffrey Lee drugged and drank and fucked himself into the grave, but don't get this record because he lived out his blues cliche. Get it because he knew his special rider in the dark, and he had a band that could preach the blues in hell. (David Smay)

The new Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds album should be (indie label gods willing) out by September, but if you're on Myspace you can listen to two of the tracks here: http://myspace.com/kidcongoandthepinkmonkeybirds

I'm in the band. I'd like to know what my fellow ILM'ers think. xox

(Though my personal favorite's probably be Miami)

I know there's a lyric or two on Fire Of Love or Miami (both records I love) but I'm listening to a great bootleg from 1982 and at the beginning of Jack On Fire he just says "N-Word".

Is this ok?

To address the heart of the matter, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was not a racist; he loved and respected black people, and he was an avid follower of many blues and reggae artists. He certainly wasn't a bigot on account of his lyrics. In his music he used a device called a persona, which is to say he delivered his songs from the perspective of a fictional character whose views were not necessarily consistent with his own. If the line "I was hunting for niggers down in the dark" makes you uncomfortable, just pretend the narrator of the song is a deranged mid-20th-century Kentucky preacher whose wife just left him for a black woodcutter whose name is probably LaDerrick. And if you're offended by Jeffrey's casual use of the word "nigger" at the beggining of "Jack on Fire," just pretend he was hopped up on heroin -- and thuis deprived of his social conscience -- for the duration of the concert. [/prolixity]

"It is not an art statement/to drown a few passionate men"

Fire of Love totally beyond classic

She's like heroin to me, she cannot miss the vein... Wow. Fuck "Miami", it's indeed all about "Fire of Love"... Oddly the GC is currently being revived here in Montreal by an up and coming band which regularly plays covers of their songs during their live sets. The Club's really another one of these obscure bands from which spring various cult figures... the Kid, Patti Morrison... It's a bit like Crime & the City Solution, confidentially yours...

And "Sex Beat"! What an album-opener!

-- Simon, Wednesday, April 4, 2001 12:00 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark Link

i wonder what band this was/is

mother of earth (from 'miami') is one of my favourite songs of all time.

are the gun club really obscure these days? i remember tons of kids seeming to dig/ at least know about them -- goths, rockers, punkers, mockers...

but then i do speak of twenty-plus years ago.

and yeah i love them a lot, in small doses. best rev. gary davis cover, ever.

ohh wait that's son house, doh.

are the gun club really obscure these days? i remember tons of kids seeming to dig/ at least know about them -- goths, rockers, punkers, mockers...

but then i do speak of twenty-plus years ago.

lol

i wonder what band this was/is

Godspeed You Sex Beat

are the gun club really obscure these days?

yes

Waht! I thought they were pretty well known.

I wouldn't have heard of them if not for the Left of the Dial comp which I only came across thanks to the internet. Even then they were still buried amongst 50 other artists.

I knew about them cause of the Guthrie production, apparently "Breaking Hands" is awesome tho I dont know if I have it/have heard it.

I know their music from way back when.

Kid Congo's living in DC these days. He was in the row ahead of me seeing "the Fabulous Stans" movie at the Library of Congress a little while back.

His new album's pretty nice, and there's ILXor involvement...

Yes.

Two Lone Swordsmen are doing their best to revive them.

My typo above--Kid Congo was seeing the "Fabulous Stains" movie. I am also trying to remember if I ever saw the Gun Club. I know I missed them opening for the Cramps at the Bayou in Georgetown (DC) because I was studying for a final. Hmmmm, I wonder if they ever came back to town.

Lucky Jim's a bit crap though, IMO.

I wouldn't have heard of them if not for the Left of the Dial comp. . . . .

And what a fantastic -- utterly classic -- comp it is.

Original drummer Terry Graham has got a Kickstarter going for a book project on the time/place -- looks well worth it!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1417342148/its-a-book-punk-like-meliner-notes-for-a-revolutio

"Lucky Jim's a bit crap though"
no it isn't. it is one of the great last albums. like nirvana's unplugged.