Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (25 page)

GUN CLUB

Mark Lanegan, Screaming Trees [Melody Maker, 7/13/96]:

Just in the past few months, I’ve remembered the one thing that made me fucking want to start a band was hearing the first Gun Club record. I remember thinking, “Shit, I could play drums like that.” So I did. It was the middle of winter, I was living in a storage shed with my drums, a couch and that was it. My friends would come over, plug in their guitars, and we’d play all the slow songs off the first Gun Club record. And now Jeffrey [Lee Pierce, Gun Club leader] is gone... at 36.

Though it came out of the L.A. punk scene, the Gun Club was in love with the dark romance of Louisiana swamps and Mississippi blues. By marrying his group’s reality with his fantasy, Gun Club mainstay Jeffrey Lee Pierce created a southwestern gothic that has influenced other ·– mostly foreign – songwriters to play on notions of “bad America” that come more from folklore than personal experience: Nick Cave, early Waterboys, Simon Bonney. Back home, the Gun Club have also inspired would-be punks from the Screaming Trees to the Geraldine Fibbers and from Morphine to Sixteen Horsepower to get in touch with their blues roots.

Moby:

I loved the Gun Club. They were obviously very influenced by American roots music, but it was their own personal interpretation of it... They reminded me there was a lot of really wonderful stuff coming from that world. I loved the Americanness of it: showing how perverse and corrupt – and at the same time wonderful and emotional – mainstream American culture could be.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce was born in Texas but moved as a kid to Los Angeles, where he fell in with the early punk scene centered in Hollywood. After working a variety of odd jobs, including some time at famed punk store/label Bomp Records, Pierce formed a band with his friend, guitarist Brian Tristan. Called at first Creeping Ritual, then renamed the Gun Club, the band followed L.A. groups X and the Blasters with a sound that mixed punk with more roots-oriented and early rock sounds. And unlike the plainclothes assault of suburban hardcore groups, the Gun Club – Pierce in particular, with his peroxide blonde mane and western/gothic outfits – adopted the more glam-influenced look of Hollywood rock bands. Pierce’s appearance made his passion for playing blues music seem all the more incongruous, though his impudence in freely appropriating a tradition so clearly not his own was a bold punk statement in its own right.

By the time the Gun Club released their debut album in 1981, Tristan had left to join the
Cramps
(and renamed himself Kid Congo Powers) and Ward Dotson had replaced him. Still,
Fire of Love
presented the Gun Club at their purest and most inspired. With punked-up covers of blues songs like Robert Johnson’s
Preaching the Blues
and scorching originals such as
She’s Like Heroin to Me
, the group reimagined punk as bottle-necked voodoo music, conjuring phantoms on the highway and hellhounds on their trail.

Mark Sandman, Morphine:

That first Gun Club album was a big influence in the way it went back to the blues and came up with a really fresh way of playing the songs and the getting the feel, but skipping twenty-five years of blues clichés that really dragged it down.

For the next year’s
Miami
, the Gun Club enlisted as producer Chris Stein of Blondie, Pierce’s favorite band (Blondie’s Debbie Harry adds backing vocals as well). Stein steered the band to a slightly more accessible style by cutting down on the punk aggression, while accentuating Pierce’s lyrics and howl to fine effect.
Miami
retained the guitarists’ distinctive slide thrash style to some extent, but Pierce’s sin-and-salvation lyrics evoked the blues more in spirit than in sound. With 1984’s
Las Vegas Story
, the band (once again featuring Kid Congo Powers) moved even further away from its early sound, and in its place developed a western-style rock that could be as dry and blistering as the desert sun and as expansive as the Big Sky landscape.

Ryan Adams, Whiskeytown:

I’ve been listening to the Gun Club since I was 15. I think Jeffrey Lee Pierce is a huge influence on a lot of people. Any rockabilly I hear these days sounds to me like the Gun Club. They had a lot to do with me wanting to play faster, with bigger chords, and holding out verses longer. I was also really affected by his imagery. It’s really dark and swampy, like he might have crawled out of a New Orleans graveyard. He seemed like an American spiritualist, like Jack Kerouac on heroin.

By 1985, Pierce’s own dark side – a drinking problem – had gotten the best of him and he broke up the Gun Club. While Dotson formed the Pontiac Brothers (and later, the Liquor Giants) and Powers joined Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, Pierce moved to England and put together a solo album called Wildweed. Then after two years away, Pierce re-formed the Gun Club, with Powers (who also remained in the Bad Seeds, and later formed his own group Congo Norvell) and Japanese bassist Romi Mori (whom Pierce later married). In 1987, they entered a Berlin studio with Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins producing, and made
Mother Juno
. The record was the band’s most polished, but marked a resurgence of vitality that had waned steadily in past Gun Club records. The album was warmly greeted by the group’s fans (who by then were also centered in the U.K.), and the Gun Club seemed destined for a larger success than it had ever had. But instead the band’s label went out of business – pulling the record off the shelves – and Pierce’s drinking problems worsened.

The story of the band in the ‘90s continued to be one of ups and downs. When Pierce was sober and in good health – as with 1990’s
Pastoral Hide & Seek
and 1993’s
Lucky Jim
– the Gun Club produced strong music. Pierce’s continuing battles with alcohol, though, took their toll, making it difficult to work regularly. By 1996, things had once again begun to look up; Pierce re-formed the band and had begun collaborating with Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees. While visiting his father in Utah, however, Pierce suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died at 36.

DISCOGRAPHY

Fire of Love
(Ruby, 1981; Slash, 1993)
; a searing blend of blues and punk.

Miami
(Animal 1982; Animal/IRS, 1990)
; an expansion of the debut’s sound palette, without sacrificing the energy.

Death Party
EP
(Animal, 1983)
; recorded by Pierce and an assortment of musicians while he was in New York.

The Las Vegas Story
(Animal, 1984; Animal/IRS, 1990)
; a strong continuation of Miami, with an even greater thematic focus on America’s dark side.

The Birth the Death the Ghost
(ABC, 1984; Revolver, 1990)
; a live collection of more recent material.

Danse Kalinda Boom: Live in Pandora’s Box
(Dojo, 1985; Triple X, 1994)
.

Mother Juno
(Red Rhino/Fundamental, 1987; 2.13.61/Thirsty Ear, 1996)
; a strong return after a few years away, this record finds the new band more mature and polished, but retaining Pierce’s initial spark.

Pastoral Hide & Seek
(Fire, 1990)
; recorded in Brussels, this record moves Pierce away from his home country, literally as well as thematically.

Divinity
(New Rose [France], 1991)
; a more sonically adventurous studio effort.

In Exile
(Triple X, 1992)
; this compiles Pierce’s later work with the reformed group.

The Gun Club Live
(Triple X, 1992)
.

Lucky Jim
(Triple X, 1993)
; Pierce’s final studio recording, which hinted at a possible creative resurgence that he would not live to realize.

KRAUTROCK

For some, the thought of German popular music brings to mind either the cheese metal of groups like the Scorpions or the Eurotrash pop of Milli Vanilli. Fortunately, that’s not the whole story. In fact, for a period in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Germany produced rock music rooted in the best underground and avant-garde traditions, variously hypnotic and thrilling, melodic and funky. Kosmische (“cosmic”) music, as it was known to the Germans, was even more progressive, adventurous, and extreme than the underground music being made in the U.S. and Great Britain, a fact that certainly didn’t help it win fans around the world. As the music has slowly filtered into the English-speaking world, journalists have generally dubbed it “krautrock.” Today, krautrock’s relative obscurity, utter foreignness, and amazing prescience – not to mention it’s overall quality – make it an attractive reference point for current rock and techno bands.

Kosmische music began as a natural outgrowth of the cultural climate in post-War Germany. Two forces worked simultaneously: First, the Nazis had wiped out large segments of the liberal artistic tradition in the country, and second, the large presence of American and British soldiers in Germany meant an influx of Anglo culture during the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Young German bands, disconnected from their own culture, generally imitated the rock music they heard coming out of the English-speaking world. Sometimes – as in the case of the Beatles’ early stint in Hamburg – they heard it even before we did.

As rock music bloomed in the mid-‘60s as a vehicle for social change, German students were quick to notice. Though the American struggle between the youth movement and the establishment was strong at the time, German kids were faced with an even more personal struggle in the knowledge that their parents’ generation had been accomplices, victims, or apathetic bystanders to the Nazi atrocities. They wanted nothing to do with Germany’s recent past and desperately yearned to reestablish German culture as they envisioned it.

With this backdrop, a new generation of German bands emerged in the late ‘60s that borrowed from the art rock of Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground (and even sang in English most of the time), but infused the music with its own, distinctly German character. A lot of the earliest Kosmische bands were quite psychedelic and formed as extensions of communes, such as Amon Düül. Others had a more formal music school background, such as Can, the first group to have widespread exposure. By adopting the cultural elements on hand – such as the stark minimalism of the Bauhaus design school or the early electronic music of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen – these groups created some of the most complex, experimental, and visionary rock music of their time.

The golden age of Kosmische/krautrock music spanned the years 1968-1974, when – in addition to the bands discussed in this chapter – groups like Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Temple, Guru Guru, Brainticket, and Cluster flourished. Many released records on adventurous German labels like Ohr and Brain, with inventive cover art and designs that have been appropriated by later indie rock and electronic groups (such as the adaptation of Guru Guru’s Kanguru for Pavement’s Wowee Zowee cover). By 1975, many of the bands – with the exception of Kraftwerk, who had its most successful years in the late ‘70s – had either split up or passed their prime.

Of course, little Kosmische music ever reached the U.S. at the time (though it did play a larger role in the British glam, punk, and post-punk music scene). But over the years, word of this freaky foreign music spread in underground circles and even showed up in the music of mainstream artists such as David Bowie and U2. Now, two decades after its German peak, krautrock has established itself as an important element in ‘90s music.

CAN

Toby Marks, Banco de Gaia:

I grew up being pretty rational and intellectual, so I always analyzed music in terms of scales and chord sequences and rhythmic structures. But
Yoo Doo Right
, I just couldn’t figure out how they’d make twenty minutes out of this two-note riff and bad singing. It just felt right. They’re one of the bands that gave me the idea you don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to think about it for music to be evocative and effective. It’s all about feel rather than intellect.

The undisputed kings of krautrock, Can’s music is so influential it can be said to have transcended its ghettoization as krautrock and joined the ranks of rock’s most important work. Like the Velvet Underground, Can was a primary meeting ground between music traditionally defined as high and music deemed low, and in its ability to make experimental sound groovy – and dance music intricate – Can helped wipe away the distinctions between the two. Blending a modern classical background with ‘60s psychedelic rock and free jazz, Can serves as a precursor and inspiration to the funky world music of
Brian Eno
and David Byrne, the post-punk exploration of
Public Image Limited
and the
Fall
, the ‘80s progressive pop of the Eurhythmics and U2, the trippy dance rock of the Happy Mondays, the space-age sounds of Stereolab and Moonshake, the electronic trance music of the ‘90s, and scores of other groups you’d never expect to have been touched by them.

Gary Louris, Jayhawks:

A song on our album [Sound op Lied], “Dying on the Vine,” has this great throbbing bass intro that was influenced by Can. Sometimes you listen to something and say, “I like the idea.” I don’t want to write a song that sounds like Can because we’re not like that, but little snippets can lock into some little piece of the puzzle.