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. [41][42][43], Grove contacted other artists via Myspace to contribute to the project, including Lanegan, and as the project grew, artists such as Isobel Campbell and Jim Sclavunos also agreed to contribute. [18] Another album from that period is Ramblin' Jeffrey Lee and Cypress Grove with Willie Love, which consists mainly of cover versions of blues artists such as Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Skip James. [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." . Los Angeles was one of the few American cities to follow the British and New York punk scene and the young Jeffrey soon became obsessed with Blondie to such an extent that he became president of their fan club (a couple of years earlier, a teenage Morrissey developed a similar unhealthy fascination with the New York Dolls, another proof that fandom sometimes pays creative dividends). It was never a choreographed act., While Powers returned to America to clean himself up, Pierce slid into heroin addiction. With Meg White pumping her bass drum, Jack stomps on those overdrive pedals again and hollers, You look just like an Elvis from hell! For those older heads it all clicks into place and at the same time The White Stripes acknowledge forebears every bit as important to their oeuvre as Robert Johnson, Lead Belly or Son House: the song is For The Love Of Ivy and The White Stripes are paying dues to The Gun Club. The Gun Club: Born To Burn Out Fast | Louder - loudersound It was started by Pierce, who was the president of Blondies U.S. fan club, whose lead singer Debbie Harry was a longtime supporter. At the age of 23, she hit NYC nightlife, working at music venues, bartending, and writing about all of her adventures along the way. Jeffrey adored Debbie Harry and carried a signed note in his wallet from her which included hair dye instructions. And then it happens. The Las Vegas Story is a farewell of sorts to an LA and America changing under the Reagan administration, but whether they knew it or not, The Gun Club wouldnt be returning to the US to live. At the center of everything was Jeffrey Texas-born, Los Angeles raised a music fanzine writer, an obsessive Blondie stan (as a teenager, he was president of their fan club and was fairly regularly ousted from hotel rooms by members of the Blondie contingent for overstaying his welcome) with an unscratchable reggae itch and a compulsion for Delta blues as well as country murder ballads. [41][45][44], The third album from the project is Axels & Sockets, released by Glitterhouse Records on May 2, 2014, with contributors including Iggy Pop, Cave, Harry, Lanegan, Race, Thurston Moore and Primal Scream. 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. Ramblin' Jeffrey Lee is a kind half-pseudonym that Pierce took on four years before he died. A lot the bands that I work with owe a debt to The Gun Club, and that includes The Jim Jones Revue.. The Gun Club had truly arrived. His relationship to the blues, in particular, is complex. Bath [4], The Gun Club's debut album, Fire of Love featured the songs "Sex Beat" and "She's Like Heroin to Me". As a teenager, he moved from El Monte, a working-class industrial suburb east of Los Angeles, to Granada Hills, at the time a white working- and middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley. I suppose all junkies are secretive and he was hiding it and I didnt say much to him. Jeffrey Lee Pierce's been dead and buried for some years 3 now. -Amy Haben Great Jeffrey Lee Pierce interview from '89. He did me first before the rest of the band and I loved that. I knew the situation he was in: he couldnt drink and he so he needed something else. When you were on stage and it was going well, it was fantastic; it was what music should be, enthuses Morrison. There was very little funny about The Gun Club, certainly not intentionally (Although Pierces bitter comment about Cave attending a better class of rehab than himself could be seen as humorous if you squint hard enough.). Sexual rage. By the late 1970s, Pierce was also performing as a musician. Edit. Find a Grave. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Get our latest storiesin the feed of your favorite networks. He formed the Gun Club, originally named Creeping Ritual, in 1979 and developed a reputation for flamboyant performances. With The Cramps on indefinite hiatus due to ongoing legal wrangles with their label, Powers re-joined The Gun Club. Find a Grave memorial ID. Titles like "Walking With the Beast", "Bad America" and "Wildweed" now seem sad portents of what was to come. Mori moved to bass, Nick Sanderson was on drums and the call was made to Kid Congo Powers who, by this time, was based in Berlin. 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. 2023 Cond Nast. With Pierces drinking escalating to the point of blackout, relations within the band rapidly deteriorated. Turns out its arguably their most intriguing album, too. The demon drink: Pierce gets to grips with his downfall. [citation needed] The final Gun Club album, 1993's Lucky Jim, includes the song "Idiot Waltz". His obsessions crawled all over him. 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. At his suggestion, their next album, Mother Juno, was recorded at Hansa studios. Pierce's autobiography, Go Tell The Mountain, goes into detail about the personal turmoil he experienced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He took what was left of the band to Holland to record their final album, Lucky Jim. EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Lee Pierce, frontman singer of seminal LA punk rock band The Gun Club, is the subject of a new feature documentary. It was so sad.. The scourge, the deep scar tissue, of racism. writer: "The Stranger in Our Town" TV Series; 2012; 1 episode; Personal details. Elvis From Hell is due out in 2020. Arun Starkey. PLEASE KILL MES PUNK HISTORIANS LEGS MCNEIL AND GILLIAN MCCAIN TURN THEIR ATTENTION TO L.A. 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. But it wasnt to last. 2023 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. In 1993, the last Gun Club album, ironically entitled Lucky Jim, featured his Japanese wife, Romi Mori, on bass. 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). All rights reserved. Jeffrey's mother Margie Pierce is a stay-at-home mom; Jeffrey's father Robert Pierce is employed as a union organizer and arbitrator (Local 1710 Electrical Workers Union). Actually no, somewhere off-centre of it all was Jeffreys voice, for he rarely cleaved to the melody back then, quavering in a tremulous howl mostly sharp and occasionally flat, which further served to heighten the tension of his themes, which were, somewhat predictably: sex, pain, intoxication, and murder. Using a pick-up drummer, The Gun Club road-tested material from what was to become their third album, The Las Vegas Story. It is the only official release of the Jim Duckworth and Dee Pop line up of the band which existed for about eight months. Certainly the two bands share an intertwined history, not least thanks to Kid Congo Powers, the scrawny primitive-intuitive guitarist who initially joined Pierce after getting drunk together at a Pere Ubu concert before defecting to his idols once they summoned him (with Jeffreys magnanimous blessings). We want to hear from you! Joined by his girlfriend, Mori, on guitar and Clock DVAs Dean Dennis (bass) and Nick Sanderson (drums) for his 1985 album, Wildweed, the quartet undertook a US tour that left them penniless after being ripped off by their tour manager. His obsessions crawled all over him. Says Mori: It definitely felt like a band. It was an offer that worked to both bands advantages. But it was too good to last. The singer lived for a time in London and gigged fitfully around Europe, doing strange versions of jazz standards (John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme", Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit") and releasing disappointing albums of past and recent concerts on many labels (Two Sides of the Beast on Dojo for instance). Obituary: Jeffrey Lee Pierce | The Independent | The Independent That was part of his charm. We need you now. If nothing else, the presence on Miami of the mutant-country Carry Home, a succinct storm-threat with swing, alone justifies its existence. But also I take away all the things I learned from Jeffrey. Hollywood star Johnny Depp is also a massive fan, who has previously called The Gun Club his favourite band. Hardtimes Killing Floor Blues, filmed in 1992 and released in 2008, documents Pierce's time living in Knightsbridge, London. He tragically died of a brain hemorrhage on March 31, 1996. Hed already spent time travelling around the United States and Jamaica on a musical odyssey, and returning to LA hed regularly contribute reggae reviews to the Slash fanzine under the name Ranking Jeffrey Lee. Pierce had a relationship with singer Texacala Jones, and together they formed the band Tex and the Horseheads, with Pierce providing arrangements of traditional songs and playing the guitar in some of their initial performances. After Pierce's death, Cypress Grove had happened upon a cassette, stuffed into a drawer, whilst cleaning out his loft. 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. 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. The band upped sticks to New Yorks Blank Tape studios to record the follow-up album, Miami. cerebral . So returning later, at some point before I left the land of my birth, to the supposedly troublesome Miami, whose admittedly thin Chris Stein helmed production is nowhere near as problematic as history has decreed, I discovered a perfectly fine album. 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 Gun Club frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce is the subject of a forthcoming documentary called Elvis From Hell, as Deadline reports. Something was really happening there.. 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. Lets cut to the chase: theres a fuck of a lot of life experience that has to occur between Shes like heroin to me / She cannot miss a vein and Your body dont get me off no more / It takes a lot of smack to do that, and quite frankly, not much of it is pretty. After the Fur Bible offshoot and the bassist Patricia Morrison's departure for the richer and more bombastic pastures of Sisters of Mercy, Pierce went solo and released Wildweed, a pretty focused collection which included the strangely prophetic "Portrait of the Artist in Hell". 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. retrieved. cause of death. [citation needed] Pierce and Lanegan cowrote the song "Kimiko's Dream House" that appears on Lanegan's album Field Songs. After six months in Japan, Pierce and Mori returned to London in August 1986, with Pierce intending to reform the Gun Club. It features interviews with Pierce, acoustic performances and clips of the Gun Club. Hed play the songs to me and Id learn the bass parts. But it was after witnessing Pere Ubu at LAs Whiskey A Go Go in 1978 that the idea of band was hatched. If he inspired Jack White musically (and he did), he more readily recalled Jack Black, physically while embodying, in his own agitated head at least, Jack on Fire. Their problem was that they bamboozled everyone, including themselves in all likelihood. He was the rock star Ian Astbury wanted to be. In 1987 Pierce reformed Gun Club, recording with Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins as producer. They were musical geniuses. Whitechapel Jack. He tragically died of a brain hemorrhage on March 31, 1996. Jeffrey Lee Pierce Wiki, Biography, Age, Career, Relationship, Net Jeffrey always used to say, Hey, lets think like jazz! We werent jazz players but we could make our own version of it.. After punk and post-punk, the next logical step was for us to have a band.. [29] Blondie paid tribute to Pierce in its song "Under the Gun", from the 1999 album No Exit. This is a crucial moment and one that links the opening overs of the 21st century to the early 1980s, when roots music collidedwith the fury of punk. Explaining the decision to work with Robin Guthrie, Powers says: We kind of felt pigeonholed so we wanted to break out of that, just for our own artistic survival as we didnt want to keep making the same record over and over again. In fact, as ragged a fit as it is, the closest they came to a scene in the UK was probably goth (which, again, couldnt have exactly helped), especially as they werent really a goth band either, outward appearances notwithstanding. If he liked something, say, like a type of food, then hed eat that for months and months and then drop it and move on to something else. I believed in him as a songwriter and I knew the quality would be there but his health always dictated the situation. Terry and Rob joined and we pretty much had a ready-made rhythm section. 181737469. subject named as. But I think it was very difficult for him Jeffrey very often didnt make sense. In November 1994, Pierce was arrested for brandishing a Samurai sword in his local pub in Kensington after an argument. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. The blues was an anchor but we were very much into seeing what would happen if you mixed up different things. Jeffrey Lee Pierce, fdd 27 juni 1958 [ 1] i Montebello, Kalifornien, [ 2] dd 31 mars 1996 [ 1] i Salt Lake City, Utah, [ 3] var en amerikansk rockmusiker, frontfigur i det Los Angeles -baserade punkbandet The Gun Club . Anyone can read what you share. [7], In March 2012, Nick Cave gave an interview to Gun Club biographer Gene Temesy, researching for a book on the history of the Gun Club, which was published on the Australian web-based magazine Mess and Noise, noting Pierce's obsessions with the Vietnam War, dinosaurs, and Japanese horror movies. At the time of his death he survived by his large extended friends and family. 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. He was a record nerd but we were also dreamers and into a lot of rocknroll fantasy. I could feel that he was so lonely. We were all very relaxed and all good friends and we all really wanted to do it. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.

Montana Law Enforcement Academy Graduation, Articles J