Gun Club
Fire of Love
(Ruby/Slash, 1981)

“And when you fall in love with me
We can dig a hole by the willow tree
Then I will fuck you until you die
Bury you and kiss this town goodbye.
It will be unhappy, it will be sad
But it will be understood that I am bad”
– Gun Club, “Jack on Fire”

As I enter into my 112th year on this earth (okay, I’m 47, but for a music fan it might as well be 112), my once obsessive desire to track down new bands has dwindled to almost nil. Twenty years ago, I would surely have been keen on the likes of the White Stripes, hanging on their every utterance, buying the action figures and so on. Nowadays, I don’t even give a hoot that Jack White has weighed in on the Gun Club from his Olympian indie-rock hall, decreeing that they are/were indeed a good thing.

Except that it might drive more fresh-faced youngsters to seek out the works of a band that never received the acclaim they should have. Foremost among these works is the Gun Club’s first album, Fire of Love. It appeared in 1981, a year that also gave us “Jessie’s Girl”, “Endless Love”, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and the collapse of Throbbing Gristle.

The abridged version of the Gun Club story starts around 1980, when they were brought together by Blondie fan club president Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Aided and abetted by a large and rotating cast of characters that included Ramones fan club president Kid Congo Powers (Cramps, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds), Patricia Morrison (Sisters of Mercy), and Dave Alvin (Blasters), Pierce kept the band going—often in fits and starts—until hard living hastened his early demise in 1996.

A great deal of foolishness has been spewed forth attempting to describe what the Gun Club sounded like, including such gibberish terms as “psychobilly” and its infinitely more retarded cousin, “punkabilly.” The best descriptor is obviously the music itself, but one might not be too far off in referring to the early works, in particular, as a blend of swamp music with Delta and country blues, with the whole mess amped up with energy from the then new punk movement. Which was then outfitted with nightmarish lyrics and imagery—courtesy of Pierce—that are imbued with the spirit of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and voodoo creepy-jeebie type stuff rather than the typically juvenile concerns of so many rock songwriters.

If you’re going to pick up just one Gun Club album in your lifetime, it must be Fire of Love. Case closed. Timeless is a word that gets tossed around a bunch and quite carelessly, more often than not. But unlike so much of the music that came out in 1981, Fire of Love is still fresh as a daisy after more than a quarter of a century, hence, it probably still will be in another 25 years.

The album commences with what’s likely the group’s best-known song, the punkish and seemingly X-inspired “Sex Beat.” Things get kicked up about 47 notches with the rollicking “Preachin’ the Blues.” It’s a rip-roaring, slide-fueled hootenanny that puts all other versions of the song popularized by the likes of Robert Johnson and Son House—yes, all of them—to shame, and which no doubt had the old bluesmen spinning in their graves like helicopter rotors gone amok.

You’d be hard-pressed to pick out a dud from amongst these 11 songs, but there are a few others that stand out from the pack. “She’s Like Heroin to Me” turns on its ear the tedious sappiness of half a zillion popular love songs, marrying the lyrics to a shuffling wall of sound that’s spiced up with spiffy slide guitar.

“For the Love of Ivy” pays tribute to Poison Ivy, the ever-so-fabulous guitarist for the eternally cool Cramps, mixing ominously quiet passages with full-on raveups about a decade before Nirvana brought that sort of thing to the masses. A great example of Pierce’s way with clever turns of phrase, it contains such priceless gems from the Wish I’d Said That file as “You look just like an Elvis from hell” and “Gonna buy me a graveyard of my own / Kill everyone who ever done me wrong.” Other highlights include the chugging locomotive rhythms of “Black Train” and the plodding “Jack on Fire”, which kicks things down a notch for a creepy-to-the-point-of-being-obsessively-twisted love song.

Though they put out upwards of a dozen records, it’s fair to say that the essential Gun Club releases are Fire of Love and its 1982 follow-up, Miami. Okay, and the Death Party EP, if only for the hair-raising title track. Though the impact of Miami was marred by crappy production, it included such gems as “A Devil in the Woods”, a brooding cover of CCR’s “Run Through the Jungle”, the menacing fever dream of “Watermelon Man”, and a hooting, howling, and not at all politically correct war chant called “Bad Indian.”

Later efforts would see Jeffrey Lee and his satellites refine their tactics, making albums that are worthy of a listen or six but which often seemed to lack the visceral punch of these first two magnificent efforts. And while Pierce’s unfortunate early exit relegated the Gun Club to the history books, at least we’ll all be spared the grim possibility that they’d have stuck it out past their prime, preaching a tired re-creation of their blues to aging alt fans in a Holiday Inn lounge somewhere.

Listen: “She’s Like Heroin to Me” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Gun Club, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Slash Records

Read more installments of Crate Digger:

Reagan Youth: Volume 1

Long John Baldry: It Ain’t Easy

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World