The Gun Club was born out of punk rock, burning with eloquent rage and gilded by catchy pop tunes. Frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce was way ahead of his time, merging Country, Blues and Punk.

Pierce, a former music journalist, was obsessed with two things: Punk Rock pin-up Debbie Harry and primitive American music. The Gun Club went on to record with Harry’s partner and hit producer Chris Stein. Only, the hits never happened as Pierce’s other obsession with primitive American music was way ahead of its time.

I mean, Pierce played slide guitar in 1981 when that style was universally sneered at as hopelessly hicksville. Take a look around now and count the slides and pedal steels and what have you.

Now it’s cool to incorporate a bit of Country and ancient Folk sounds from hidden hollows in the depth of Tennessee. That sort of carrying on has a name these days, Americana, and an ever growing fanbase carrying acts like the Fleet Foxes into the charts - At least on this side of the Atlantic. It’s time to look back at the granddaddy of them all: Ladies & Gentleman, purrlease put your hands together for the The Gun Club.

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If you want a one-stop, concise overview Pierce’s and The Gun Club’s best moments, try the freshly released compilation ‘The Life And Times Of Jeffrey Lee Pierce’. You get 68 tracks on four CDs spanning both the Gun Club days and Pierce’s solo recordings. This box set is available by mailorder through the links below.

In retrospect, it’s amazing how timeless a lot of this music sounds. The Gun Club didn’t do 50’s retro chic like their contemporaries The Cramps. Pierce sang about all-consuming desires, destruction and redemption. The Cramps embraced the bizarre side of the 50’s singing about wrestlers, strippers and assorted freak show characters. By the way, guitarist Kid ‘Congo’ Powers played in both bands at some stage and is considered by many to be the definitive Pierce sidekick. The Cramps were good fun, The Gun Club were, well, intense.

Hampered by less than sympathetic studio engineers in their days, The Gun Club on record often sounded a bit weedy. But if you ever saw them live on stage, you went away a believer. ‘The Life And Times Of Jeffrey Lee Pierce’ features live and radio recordings that add some extra flavour to the available Gun Club catalogue.

I’d encourage you to also check out their original albums - particularly ‘The Fire Of Love’, ‘Miami’ and ‘The Las Vegas Story’ - and Jeffrey’s solo debut ‘Wildweed’. Theirs is a body of work that’s well worth your time.

Pierce died in 1996 from a brain hemorrhage, aged 37.

Rating For ‘The Life And Times Of Jefrey Lee Pierce’ 4-CD Box Set
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