This is from NME I believe....Jeffrey Lee Pierce "Shrink Rap" 1992

Afer years in the wilderness of drink and drugs excess, The Gun Club are back with a new album, "Pastoral Hide and Seek". Jeffrey Lee Pierce is rediscovering the art of playing concerts sober and finding the experience 'very, very scary'.
HOW DO YOU FEEL?
Tired.
WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU THOUGHT OF BEFORE YOU WENT TO SLEEP?
Visiting Jerusalem with my mother.
WHAT DID YOU DREAM?
Dreamt about El Monte, California and my Uncle Fred.
WHAT WILL YOU DO TODAY?
Watch Secretary of State Jim Baker address the Senate.
WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST FEAR?
No life after death.
WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST PLEASURE?
Christmas shopping with Romi Mori.
WHO ARE YOUR FAVOURITE SINGERS/MUSICIANS?
John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Willie Mitchell and Frankie Lee Sims.
IF YOU COULD BE SOMEONE ELSE (ALIVE OR DEAD) WHO WOULD YOU BE?
Joseph Conrad.
WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO KILL IF YOU COULD?
Henry Kissinger.
WHAT ANNOYS YOU THE MOST?
Nationalism.
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER YOUR GREATEST STRENGTH?
Dedication to the chosen task.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE RECORD?
"Moanin in the Moonlight" by Howlin' Wolf.
WHAT WAS THE LAST ACT YOU SAW LIVE?
These Immortal Souls.
WHAT DO YOU ALWAYS CARRY WITH YOU?
My union card.
WHAT WOULD YOU FIND DOWN THE BACK OF YOUR SOFA?
Cat hair.
WHAT DO YOU MOST DISLIKE ABOUT YOUR APPEARANCE?
Scars.
WHAT WAS THE BEST MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE?
There are too many.
WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST REGRET?
Not giving up alcohol earlier.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE ARTICLE OF CLOTHING?
My anonymity.
WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO MEET?
Siddhartha Gautama Buddha
WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING AT THE MOMENT?
"Landslide", the unmaking of President Reagan by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus.
WHAT WAS THE LAST FILM YOU SAW?
"The Mistress" directed by Shiro Toyada (Japanese 1953)
WHAT DO YOU NEVER MISS ON TV?
Foreign language films.
WHAT DID YOU LAST RECEIVE IN THE POST?
A tax penalty.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE WORD?
Inshallah.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO AN ALIEN?
Join the crowd.
WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Rock band arguments.
WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Government arguments.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE TIPPLE?
Pepsi without sugar or caffeine
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO DIE?
Bullet in the head.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR EPITAPH TO BE?
Time's up.

UNSECURE THE GUITAR!

(From Swedish Magazine SCHLAGER #4/1985)

by Lennart Persson, translated by David Bremer

Gun Club was actually never a group; it was a one-man-band. Jeffrey Lee Pierce has now taken the consequences of this and continues on his own. Lennart Persson has talked to a restless Jeffrey Lee. A man on his way, ready to challenge the whole world.

-Passion, commitment, provocation.

-But also a feeling of uniting past and present, to connect the American myths with the reality we live in.

-We - Americans - don't really have a history, just a bunch of myths that are meant to look like history.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce speaks about what qualities he wants his music to relate.

My thoughts wanders to William Least Heat-moon's "Blue Highways - Journey Into America", the tale of a man looking for a place where change doesn't equate destruction and where time, people and life goes along with each other. In many ways it's a journey far, far beyond the myths and the most common delusions, but I find a lot of surroundings where I can place my musical fantasies as well.

On page 134, Least Heat-moon comes to Dime Box, Texas. A hole, with a total of three streets, where a hair-cut still costs one and a half dollar, where the bar keeps dried rattlesnake-skins on the wall and people still hope that the oil will prevent the last pieces of their society the blow away with the vicious wind.

In a lounge called Ovcarik's Café - a large number of places in Texas consists solely of people with Slavonic origins - Least Heat-Moon eats ham and beans and drinks Lone Star. The cash register is a cigar-box and in the ceiling three bare bulbs fails to clear the darkness. No jukebox is mentioned, but it's probably there. George Jones' "These Days (I barely get by)" is drifting out of it, with far too low volume. But everyone at the bar knows the words anyway:

Woke up this morning

Aching with pain

Don't think I can work

But I'll try

Oh... these days

I wanna give up

Lay down

And die...

An elderly woman, who recently lost her orange-colored cat, starts a conversation.

-You city folks don't believe anything of importance happens in places like this. And it doesn't, if you don't think conflicts, or love, or that people die, is important.

Here, the line between what I actually read and what I believe myself to experience is really disappearing. From the jukebox can now a wild, deserted sound be heard. Guitars with deafening feedback speaks to us. Everyone at the bar looks completely dead-pan.

Love, conflicts and death

Through the thin, wooden walls comes a wailing, moaning voice. For a moment it sounds like a shot animal. I walk out through a door in the back, right to the left of the urinal.

Outside, the desert is stretched out.

Right in front of me stands Jeffrey Lee Pierce, with a rifle over his shoulder and with his back turned. The horizon must be at least thirty miles away. An ice-cold wind sweeps along the ground. He turns straight to me and the voice tears at my very innermost.

It's about love. About conflicts. And about people who die.

Important stuff.

I put aside the sleeve of "Wildweed", Jeffrey Lee's first solo album, and returns to reality. Quickly.

-The picture is definitely not taken in a desert, quite the opposite. It's taken in England, on the south coast, next to The English Channel. But my idea was actually that it should look like Texas. Or Kansas. We just couldn't afford to go there only to take a photograph...

Pierce can at the moment be found in London, since his new record company is there, his current musicians are there, and there will his coming tour of Europe start.

His revealing about the cover both destroys the myth and enhances its power. Just as quickly he destroys our possible musical expectations; if his previous records with Gun Club cut deep into the heart of the music and mythology of the American south, the aim with "Wildweed" is different. From the Mississippi-delta to Lower East Side.

[headline] Timeless music of the big city

The desperate blues, the haunting restlessness can still be found at the bottom, but the pulse and the scenery is definitely that of the big city. You've got the sounds, the smells, the people close upon you. The music is more accessible, more sophisticated in both atmosphere and rhythm. Still without any compromise. Aware of trends, perhaps, but completely timeless in its character. Presumably the best Jeffrey Lee has made on record so far. A place where change means life and where time, music and life is connected.

-I wanted to do a record that sounded 'big city'. I wanted to paint a city landscape. You probably won't be surprised if I say that I listened to Dylan and LOTS of Lou Reed while I wrote the songs. I had a cassette with The Velvet Underground's "VU" a long time before it was released and I've played it so much the tape is almost worn out...

-I do have a lot of countrified stuff lying around, but maybe I can give that to Jason & the Scorchers or somebody. The songs come easily for me. When we started recording this album, for example, I had only four songs finished. The rest came while we were doing it.

-I never believed that the songs get better the longer time you spend on them. Instead, I think the best songs are written being short of time and during stress. Look at Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" - made when everything was spinning for him, but at the same time the best he's ever done!

-Neither is the artist himself is the best to decide which of his songs is the best or most important. Dylan is an example again - just think of "Tears of Rage" and all the fantastic songs on "The Basement Tapes" he just gave away! Or Springsteen, who spends two years recording an album with mediocre material, just to throw away great songs like "Fire" and "Because the Night"... which he probably wrote in ten minutes!

"Wildweed" was recurded during a couple of weeks earlier this year, with the studio-musician John Mackenzie playing bass guitar and Andy Anderson of The Cure behind the drums.

-Since I play just about all the guitar on the record myself, it was primarily a good rhythm-section I needed. Andy and John was recommended and it worked perfectly from the beginning. They are both professionals and musicians to their fingertips, and that was precisely what I was looking for.

-In Gun Club the situation was hopeless. I had to teach the others - note by note - exactly what to play. And that was OK so far, but this time I wanted to go one step further.

-Before "Wildweed", we repeated three days and did the songs in a couple of takes. "From Temptation To You" claimed six or seven takes, but that song was also the only one who took a little time.

-We worked according to the Motown-theory: "Record the songs before you really know them, and everyone will have more fun and the result sounds a lot more vivid". With Gun Club, when I finally had thought the first one what he should play, the second one had already grown tired of the song. Or the contrary.

-The record is - I hope - a development of what I've done with Gun Club, but at the same time, maybe half of the songs are of Gun Club-type. Still it's different; in Gun Club we started heavily and ended heavily, now there's room for so many more moods and nuances.

-When I look back at Gun Club's recordings, I can hardly see the early rattling-stuff as real songs. I like "Sex Beat" and "Goodbye Johnny" from the first album, "Brother And Sister" from "Miami" is probably my favorite, and the three last songs on "Las Vegas Story" I think points in the direction of what I'm doing now.

-But maybe you have to include in the calculation that the first album was recorded in a few days for a couple of thousand dollars and that we weren't particularly experienced. Ward Dotson was a guitarist who hammered out the chords, but couldn't do much more.

-On "Wildweed" Jeffrey Lee takes care of almost all the guitar-playing himself and comes out on the other side with his honour retained. His playing is limited, but loaded with nerves, muscles and sweat.

-That I started playing the guitar was forced. I did play some during the tours, in order to keep the boredom away, but when Jim Duckworth left the band there was a gap Kid Congo didn't have a chance to fill...

Duckworth plays on the EP "Death Party" and built alone a wall of treacherous guitars behind Pierce on the band's first Swedish tour.

-Jim is an absolutely fantastic guitarist and the Kid and I had to work like animals in order to [italic] together [plain] recreate what he had done for the songs. Still we didn't really succeed; that's how I became a guitarist.

Likes anti-guitarists

-I've always liked the "anti-guitarists", like Ivy Rorschach of The Cramps or the guy in Einstürzende Neubauten. Guitarists who aren't that limited in just being guitarists, who are interested in getting feelings and moods across and not only old, well-structured guitar solos.

-Of the same reason I've always like the New York-school of guitarists as well. Robert Quine is fantastic and Richard Lloyd is probably my greatest favorite. Then there's also guitarists I like without being able to stand the music they make, like the early Carlos Santana. I loved the feeling in his playing, but I never owned any of his records. But I lived in the Mexican part of Los Angeles, so I heard them everywhere anyway... From transistor radios in the streets and through the walls at night.

When the album is out, Pierce is going on the road again. A European tour is planned, but Sweden is unfortunately not included in the planning.

-I'm going to use the rhythm-section from Clock DVA and Murray Mitchell, who played saxophone on the record, will probably be playing guitar. Or else it will be a Japanese girl I know on guitar. She's better than me and besides, she'd look great on stage, something like an oriental Kid Congo.

-During and after the European tour with Gun Club last fall I was totally exhausted - from boredom, overstrain, junk food and sin. I was sick and ill in body, soul and heart. Indebted and hunted. Now I'm restless, eager, on my way. Ready to challenge the whole world.

Thanks to David Bremer for typing this out!

Marilyn Monroe From Hell

Jeffrey Lee Pierce and his band The Gun Club Shoot to Sylvie Simmons

From Sounds January 30th 1982

It's getting hard to get whistled at on Hollywood Boulevard. The cops have closed the street to cruisers half the time, and anyway what chance have black stockings, slit skirt and blood fire lipstick at 15 yards got when 20mph eyes can land on some guy standing on the street corner where the Fonz star is, singing the theme from happy days with a smirk k on his face and a guitar that's completely out of tune; or a black man in a toga and dreadlocks miming to opera from a cassette machine.

No your average LA wolfwhistler has a tough time pinpointing an object for the pout to salute these days. But some people, you've got to admit, have just got it. I'm walking down the boulevard on the coldest night of the year, driven away by Wings music on the jukebox of one bar, turned away by a closed sign at Howard Johnson's milkshake café, trying to find a warm and quiet niche to interview this band that's just played a set at the Cathay de Grande that's like Muddy Waters backed by the Damned. Its one in the morning and Mexicans are leaning out of their cars whistling fit to kill. My black stockings don't even enter into it. The object of their admiration is the gun club's 22 year old singer. Jeffrey Lee Pierce. He struts like Willy de Ville and looks like a dainty Divine. Baroquely dressed with tiny bells on his wrists, a bandana round his forehead and a crucifix on his cheek, layered, peroxide blonde hair, angel eyes and brighter lipstick than mine even. 'Jeffrey Lee Pierce aka Marilyn Monroe from Hell' as the poster advertising Gun Club's recent Boston show put it. As we walk and they whistle, we get a Pierce guided tour of LA that doesn't include Liberace's swimming pool; the spot where he and a friend got drunk and pissed on Gene Vincent's star embedded in the Walk of Fame; the street where he and John Doe of X happened upon a row of Christmas trees in the gutter and cremated the lot.

Eventually the wind blows us back in the direction of the noisy Cathay, so we pile into an old car outside for the interview - all of us except bass player Rob Ritter, that is. He has a different idea about clutches and is being warmed by two females outside the club while his colleagues comment and whoop and blow the horn at all the right moments. Earlier the band had played a set that started with a devilishly odd and haunting rendition of Billie Holliday's 'Strange Fruit', the first time they'd ever played the thing, and few seem to recognise it. The Cathay is a two-levelled affair with a video lounge bar upstairs where you can watch crap tapes like 'Air Supply' and get bored and drunk, and a dark den downstairs with candles on the tables, pillars and a dance floor with a stage the height of a doormat. Vision is removed for all but the lucky few by the looming rockabilly quaffs and generally tall, well-fed LA people. But this is a band you can close your eyes and sink into, and I've always preferred listening to their album - a gem of an affair on Ruby Records, 'Fire of Love' to seeing (or not seeing) them live (though on record you don't get to see Jeffrey stagger and writhe and leave the band to an instrumental while he finds the quickest route possible to the bar and back; Jeffrey is often in a state of alcoholic bliss) There's titles like 'Fire Spirit', 'Sex Beat', 'Ghost on The Highway', She's Like Heroin to Me', Preachin the Blues' (a reworking of the Robert Johnson blues song) and 'For the Love of Ivy' written to one of the Cramps by Jeffrey and another Cramp, Kid Congo, an original member of the Gun Club.

How to describe it? Swamp rock is the label a lot of people have fallen back on. Voodoo rock's another. New noise could cover it somewhat. It's certainly not safe and it will definitely move you. The flesh is weak. But back to the car. With the windows misting up, drummer terry Graham is telling how he lived in Texas heard the Ramones, saw them play, 'Wanted to see more and just became a fan of that sort of thing. And I came to LA originally to go to film school, but it was very expensive." He ended up joining a band instead "Just as a joke - and it turned serious" The group was LA's Bags fronted by Alice Bag In Texas there's no such thing as an original creative band…. I hate country music. It symbolises everything that was horrible and fascist and right wing and conservative in America, however chic it is. "I'd played drums a long time ago and given them up, but I was into the scene when it developed here in LA in 1977, a real fan for about a year, then this girl asked me to join this band and it got serious and that's when I joined the Gun Club. The Bags was a very mutual agreement that we break up before we killed each other." And this was supposed then to be such a close and friendly scene. "Are you kidding?!" Jeffrey steams up the windscreen in the front seat. "Its no different from any other big butt F***shit. It's just like New York or London or anything else. Everybody hates everybody, everybody steals things from everybody." But in Los Angeles, says Terry, "Everybody went anyway, it didn't matter in '77 or '78 who was playing at the Masque. It was such a small scene that everybody went even if they hated the people and the band. And it was a very creative scene." "The Runaways ", Jeffrey interrupts,"ruined it for all of LA. They were the most horrible group ever, and that was the only band that there was in LA at the time. The thing is, in the mid '60s when all the punk bands originally started, all of them were from LA. The Balloon Farm, the Psychedelic Lollipop, it came from this city….." Guitarist Ward Dotson with the light-brown Eraserhead hairdo comes from Anaheim, next door to Disneyland, where he and a band called Middle Class were the only people in Orange County to come into Hollywood to hang out. "I was never in any band. I tried out for the Cramps and some other guy made it - Kid (Congo, his predecessor in this band). He's the best choice they could have made, because I'm not a homosexual and I'm not a junkie, and he's funny looking. "I tried to get in the Cramps, shooting right for the top, and I don't know anybody, nobody knows me, and I was really depressed. And I saw this guy" he points to the front seat, "at a club and I just asked, "Are you still looking for a guitar player' and he goes 'Yes you're in the band' and next thing I knew we were playing Club 88 (a Westside former strip club turned rock venue). We're getting bigger now so I guess it was worth it. "I should move up here to Hollywood but this is the worst city in the world. The sleaziest, slimiest, grossest-" "--Even though it did start punk rock "Terry interjects. "That's why it started punk rock, because it's so gross." "Can you imagine ", asks Ward, "dropping acid and walking around here? There's so much to blow your mind. Hollywood Boulevard is so sick. It beats the shit out of everything."

"People here," muses Jeffrey, "have got nothing else to do but lose their minds. Did you ever see any of these horrible parties at the Tropicana (motel) and Kim Fowley used to drag people off the street into the party and make them play? It would be like some horrible completely burnt out psychedelic black cat standing there going 'yaba dabba dob' playing no chords or nothing." Jeffrey comes from El Paso, Texas moved to El Monte, California, the so-called City of Industry. "The Barrio. It's almost all Mexican and there's a big swamp right next to it and the smog makes for wonderful colourful scenery." His father was a Baptist but his mother brought him up Catholic. His sister's boyfriend had a drum set, and after bashing around for a while he got toget6her with local character Phast Phreddie and said "Phreddie, let's form a band." "I'd never played drums before, " he chuckles. It was about time to make my debut - I could keep a beat now." The Precisions, as they were known, could play one song, " Oobie Doobie." "It would just be noise because the guitarist just made feedback and I couldn't play drums and stuff. "We only played for an audience once ever in our life. We called up this house where we knew there was a party going on. They passed the telephone around and we played on the phone. And then we broke up." Jeffrey moved to New York City "I couldn't deal with LA any more, personal things, so I just left. And in New York all I did was work work work, slave slave slave, fight fight fight. I got into at least three street fights in six months. I just got beat up and thrown into Bellvue about three times in a row. But the whole thought of Santa Monica Boulevard and the Tropicana just made me want to kill myself." In New York, Jeffrey worked for Blondie's fan club, writing fanzines, and dabbled in two bands, The E.types and Red Lights. Then he moved to wealthy retirement home Miami, an 'elephants' graveyard' except for the districts above 14th Street where the Cubans threw wild parties and the Haitians taught him about voodoo and magic. And then a spell in Jamaica. "I got beat up there too. I never talked to the Rastas much; there was this religious thing I could never get past. I'd just meet these cool kids on the street and buy them drinks and feeling horribly guilty because I was in this hotel; and one guy took me to his house and it was really depressing. A disgusting mess. The only thing that was nice about it was not talking to anybody and going to the beach by yourself, because it's really a beautiful island. "I left fast - right around the time I got beat up. I went to New Orleans, which was pretty weird too, and then I went to San Antonio Texas and wrote a lot of the songs on the record because I don't speak Spanish and there's nothing there to do. I went thrift shopping and got a lot of my clothes and ate some really great Mexican food. " A Girlfriend sent him some money and he took the Greyhound back to Hollywood and locked himself away from the world, coming out at a party Kid Congo threw "I beat somebody up at the Valentine's Day party. This guy really tried to humiliate me in front of everybody - he was a rockabilly asshole - and I grabbed him by the neck and pulled him down the stairs and he broke all his bones and shit. But it felt good. Then me and Kid got to be good friends after that - he thought I was some mad person or something. "And we formed this band - named with that Deep Southern lyncher feel to it by Keith of the Circle Jerks," just because there was all these horrible art bands at the time like the B People and Catholic Discipline.

"Our biggest influences were "Metal Machine Music" and 'John Coltrane' We were really into freeform jazz. We didn't like it, the whole thing was that it was so obnoxious that we loved it. "Originally Kid and I played guitar and we had a rhythm section and just made a noise, and everybody ran. We were so noisy and so gross. " The best part though was that people would try and interpret it as art. They'd come up and say, 'I really loved that, that was an incredible statement you were making right there, this is really what the world's like, noise is really all that means anything' and all this shit, and we'd go, 'Yeah, yeah, can you buy us a drink?' and we'd just bum drinks off these artists and shit who were trying to read things into what we were doing.' "And all we were doing was, Kid couldn't play guitar for his life, he didn't even know what a chord was, and even though I could play guitar I didn't try. I just kicked it around on the floor. We determined the music by the volume levels at which the racket rose and fell. It was horrible." Then the itch started and the band started to take it seriously. We found all these psychedelic drugs and went crazy and decided we should be a rock and roll group and seriously contend with X and the GoGos, even though we still couldn't play." So Jeffrey wrote a lot of one-and two-chord songs influenced now by country blues albums that Blaster Dave Alvin had got him listening to. The Gun Club continued with Kid Congo for eight months before he defected to the Cramps, and in the almost- year since have been gradually building up quite a following. A bit too gradually for them. "People don't really like us In LA," says Jeffrey. "It's all right, but it's taken a really long time to get to this level. "Everything here revolves around cliques. There's certain bands that don't enter into cliques and they don't play anywhere - a band like 100 Flowers that's been around as long as we have and they're incredible and there's so many influences going on there. And the rockabilly kids don't like them, nobody likes them and they're an incredible group. We suffer from the same thing exactly. The only other band in or 'group' is The Blasters, and the biggest difference between us and them is they do it straight and we mess it up completely. The attitude is so different that we're nothing like them, though we basically play off the same influences: country blues, Louisiana swamp music, traditional New Orleans rhythms, all this stuff. They play it literally and we don't even bother to try. Like, 'Ooh, lets do a swamp song now,' which means he plays a funny beat and we make a racket.' Let's do a blues song now,' which means he plays in e and we make a racket. 'Lets do a country song', which means he plays slow and we make a racket!"

The band fared better on a recent East Coast tour where their album's selling nicely, though the critics, 'guilt-ridden liberals' according to Ward, didn't like the so-called sexist, racist lyrics, which Jeffrey laughs were all stolen from old blues stuff anyway, or at least not meant to be taken on face value. "People who take things that seriously should just go out and commit suicide. I was drunk when I wrote most of those songs - I don't remember anything!" The East Coast trip also brought an offer from Chris Stein of Blondie to produce the next Gun Club LP, due to begin around March. "They're very professional and this band is not very professional yet," says Jeffrey." They've (Blondie) all hate each other as long as they've been a band, so they should be able to lend some of that wisdom to us. He's very wise and he's much older than us and so is she and they would be very good people for us to work with. "We don't sound anything like that band, that band sounds nothing like us, we have nothing in common except that they like our band and would like to do our band like our band sounds." The album when it appears -with or without Chris Stein -will not be o small Ruby Records where they were signed "As a tax write-off. Except we made money" though it could still come out on parent label Slash. "There's been a lot of whining and there's still a lot of bitching," concludes Jeffrey. "It's not been dedication. Stamina's a better word. I've never been dedicated to this band. I just figured I had nothing else to do. Because what am I going to do. Work?" Sylvie Simmons From Sounds January 30th 1982

FROM CARBON 14 MAGAZINE...WRITTEN BY FALLING JAMES MORELAND

Except on the West Coast By Falling James (August 2002)

Apart from New Jersey, it appears that Los Angeles is the most openly hated place on the continent. That's sorta amazing when you realize this dusty slab also contains Salt Lake City and certain parts of South Carolina and Texas, but perception determines reality, ultimately. You hate us, we're hateful. When the Lakers and even the geographically distant Anaheim Angels go on the road, they're greeted with synchronized chants of "Beat L.A." Not "Beat the Lakers" or "Beat the Angels." It's always "Beat L.A." Does any other city get singled out for this unsportsmanlike contempt? You'd think we were the Yankees or something. I suspect this deep antipathy might be provoked by all the horrible TV shows and movies and commercials - and lukewarm generic porno - perpetrated by the big film studios in Hollywood (and North Hollywood, respectively).

We are ashamed -- even if it's not our fault -- as local punks. If we have any connection to the Industry (take your pick, music or film), it's as pool cleaners, gardeners, extras, maids, waiters - as resentful underlings. We hate them more than you do. Our worlds don't intersect with theirs, even if "they" now have their own "punk" scene. We still advocate a class war and an end to the caste system. A class war about having class, better manners to all people, sharing the resources (what's left of 'em). It's one of many reasons why Angelenos are so masochistic. We're told we're plastic so much, we turn brittle. We resent ourselves. We despise our own and tend to worship things from afar; the farther, the better. We've always been suckers for accents. Royalty, peasants, we can't tell the difference. You're all nobility to us. My true, lazy heart lies elsewhere, buried under missile silos and grain silos and grain alcohol, chewed up by sawtooth mountains. I remain here, don't know how to leave. The siren songs pull me into the rocks; I'm fascinated by the collision exchange of elements, earth and water, desert and ocean. Even if you're agoraphobic, you end up seeing a lot of great shows in Los Angeles. You don't have to try; the music comes to you. For a quarter century, we've witnessed a nonstop, thriving diversity of uniquely flavored underground bands, both obscure (Hector & the Clockwatchers, the Alley Cats, the Imperial Butt Wizards, Fearless Leader, the Sheiks of Shake) and semi-legendary (Minutemen, Ice T, the Germs, X, the Runaways). For whatever reason, there's always been a couple dozen more viable clubs here than in any other American city, including New York, Seattle, Austin, Detroit, New Orleans, anywhere except maybe Mexico City. That's the consolation prize, the saving grace, of being stranded in the desert.

Where I live, in Silver Lake (a hilly neighborhood between downtown and Hollywood to the west), there are four clubs - Spaceland, the Silverlake Lounge, the Garage, and Zen - and a punk record store (Destroy All Music) in walking distance. Along with hysterical coyote-pack screeching and the still-of-late-night keening of trains down by the L.A. River, you can't help hearing the occasional sounds, bouncing across the hills, of bands practicing or playing parties. It's not paradise, but there are signs of life. Every year, on the last weekend of August, a dozen-block stretch of Sunset Boulevard is blocked off for the Sunset Junction street fair. This allows the pavement to slow down, and the rest of us a chance to take over the street, to chomp churros, gulp lemonade and wander like starry-eyed rubes on the asphalt carnival midway. The best part is that, most of the time, the booking of the scattered outdoor stages is wide-open, ranging from underground locals like Radio Vago, W.A.C.O., Candye Kane, the Urinals, Pigmy Love Circus and the Hangmen to bigger names like Mike Watt, Tijuana No!, Mary Wilson, L7 and Chaka Khan. Atypically, all of this year's headliners were from out of town. On Saturday, Mudhoney came off most powerful on their earlier, shorter songs; the long jams tended to lose discipline. Sonic Youth also noodled and meandered, kinda sunny and breezy, Dead-like, but without Mudhoney's weight, making standing in the crush of the crowd an endurance test, and eventually we wandered away. The next night, I was charmed by Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker, who looked so deceptively sweet and innocent, then belted out with such yearning power. The real magic, though, came earlier Sunday afternoon during a tribute to the Gun Club, helmed by guitarist Ward Dotson (the Phillip Blues, Pontiac Brothers, Liquor Giants) and backed by Possum Dixon bassist Rob Zabrecky and drummer Byron Reynolds. It was a gen-u-wine thrill to hear Dotson scrape up those distinctive scraps of slide guitar one last time (Ward claims this is it, he's had it with music, he ain't playing live anymore).

Without the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce, this was as close as we were going to get to the early Gun Club vibe ever again. Where was Terry Graham? Or Kid Congo, the band's first and future guitarist? And R.I.P., dear Rob Graves, rip it up. Various singers with connection to the band got up and rasped a song or two, including the Hangmen's Bryan Small ("Ghost on the Highway"), Mike Martt (who replaced Jeffrey in Tex & the Horseheads), Thelonious Monster's Bob Forrest, the Flesheaters' Chris D (many forget that the prescient Mr. D released the debut Gun Club and Misfits LPs when no one else wanted to), Keith Morris (who named the Gun Club in exchange for Jeffrey Lee Pierce writing the Circle Jerks' "Group Sex") and the Last's Joe Nolte (who gave Jeffrey his first, pre-Gun Club live exposure in L.A., when Jeffrey used to come up near the end of Last sets and sing his anguished kick-drum-heart-pulse epic "Jungle Book"). And, oh yeah, I got to jump onstage, too. I wore the coat of the ghost, inhabiting his grand persona, inhabiting Jeffrey, who seemed to intone directly through me on "Goodbye Johnny": "It's coming like a god with no name . . . Look down the line, Johnny/there's flashlights on the back roads, Johnny/look down the line, Johnny, of the American unknown . . ." It felt more like a séance than a set of oldies. --Falling James

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Red Skeleton Fanzine 1982 Scans

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