Michael Draine's Twisted Vista
Gun Club
Early Warning
(Sympathy for the Record Industry)
Seductive, pelvic grooves, blazing Delta slide
guitar, and lyrical vision on par with Jim
Morrison’s made up the Gun Club’s explosive
compound. The early Gun Club played with a
passion, commitment, and an ear for tradition
that set them apart from the monochord macho
of Hardcore of their L.A. contemporaries and
freeze-dried irony of New Wave. The founding
fathers of the blues provided singer/writer
Jeffrey Lee Pierce with inspiration, but JLP
reached deeper into the darkness of the
American collective unconscious than his
predecessors dared. Images of desolation
and depravity, haunted highways, and deadly
women roam through Jeffrey Lee’s songs,
intoned in a plaintive, desperate tenor.
JLP’s drunken onstage conduct and ego
began thinning the Gun Club’s ranks
after only two albums; the forces which
fueled the artist destroyed the band,
and ultimately, the man. Disc 1 opens with		Rob Ritter: bass, Ward Dotson: guitar,
April, 1981 demos of “Goodbye Johnny,”		Jeffrey Lee, Terry Graham: drums
“Preaching the Blues,” “Watermelon Man,”
“Devil in the Woods,” and “Fire of Love”
that strike like lightning. The incredibly
tight 13-song May, 1982 set pulls the
listener a harrowing ride on the edge of the
abyss. This show may well have been
the original lineup’s finest hour, providing
definitive performances of seven songs
from the band’s debut LP, Fire of Love;
“Bad Indian” and “Devil in the Woods”
from their follow-up album Miami,
and a harrowing rendition of “Strange
Fruit,” delivered with a conviction which
puts Jeffrey Lee’s fondness of racial
epithets in perspective. The tender “I
Hear Your Heart Singing” blows away the
slick take on 1990’s Pastoral Hide and
Seek. The poignant, almost lighthearted
second disc captures a twentyish JLP
at home, playing mix of blues standards
and originals on acoustic guitar. Disc 2		Music Reviews
includes a particularly intriguing work-in-
progress, “The Devil and the Nigger,” a
driving antecedent to “Devil in the Woods.”
The vinyl-dub sound on disc 1 is the only		Twisted Cinema
drawback to this document of short-lived
brilliance; a first-generation tape had to
have existed at one point.
Pictured above is the 1500-copy leatherette-
bound deluxe edition. On the Sympathy
Records mail-order page, you'll find this
review quoted in its entirety.
www.sympathyrecords.com/news/page_1.html