{"id":1450,"date":"2015-06-23T16:02:06","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T20:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/?p=1450"},"modified":"2015-06-23T21:49:56","modified_gmt":"2015-06-24T01:49:56","slug":"in-exile-the-rootless-cosmopolitanism-of-jeffrey-lee-pierce-and-the-gun-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2015\/06\/23\/in-exile-the-rootless-cosmopolitanism-of-jeffrey-lee-pierce-and-the-gun-club\/","title":{"rendered":"in exile: the rootless cosmopolitanism of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-1457 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp.jpeg\" alt=\"jlp\" width=\"958\" height=\"884\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp.jpeg 958w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp-300x277.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 958px) 100vw, 958px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve never quite understood why the Gun Club, one of the all-time great Los Angeles bands, had an estranged relationship with their city of origin. It seems to me no local critic or serious music fan can deny their impact on L.A.\u2019s music legacy. One of the great cult bands of rock music, the Gun Club were arguably the most important band to rise out of the aftermath of Hollywood punk\u2019s first wave. Their fiery music fused a few quintessential strains of L.A. rock at the time: the poetic death trip of Jim Morrison and Darby Crash; the fascination shared by X and Redd Kross for the seedy underbelly American culture; and the reverent plunder of traditional American musical forms, most obviously blues and country.<\/p>\n<p>The term \u201cblues punk\u201d may forever be associated with the Gun Club, but except for a few tracks on their 1981 debut <i>Fire of Love<\/i>, the Gun Club never really drew musically upon \u201cswamp blues\u201d the way their frequent comparisons to the Cramps (with rockabilly) or the Blasters (with 50s R&amp;B) would suggest. Nevertheless, this reputation as well as the L.A. circles they traveled in put them at the front end of the whole \u201croots revival\u201d that re-energized underground rock in Los Angeles and very quickly other strongholds across the globe, from London to Berlin to Sydney, even if (to their great credit) they were maybe the least shackled of this cohort of bands to the musical idioms and aesthetic conventions of roots music. As L.A. bands continue to draw musical sustenance and lyrical inspiration from the the well of blues, country and blue-collar folk, the names of the Gun Club and frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce are embossed on the bucket.<\/p>\n<p><em>Below: a playlist of 22 songs by the Gun Club and Jeffrey Lee Pierce.<\/em><\/p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Jeffrey Lee Pierce: Musical Urbanism\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/videoseries?list=PLlTvTow8zgsjq781nWW12ok3d4AEHBIxJ\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<p>So what gives? How come \u201cno one gave two shits\u201d about the Gun Club in L.A., as guitarist Ward Dotson declares in the 2008 documentary <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XQH3MjNrDQ0http:\/\/\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Ghost on the Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club<\/i><\/a>? I think there\u2019s two answers to this question.<\/p>\n<p>First, to some degree, the issue is relative. L.A. liked the Gun Club well enough, and by now the band has been given their proper due, but, sure, local fans and media at the time were maybe distracted waiting for X (\u201cthe last American band\u201d) to achieve its commercial potential, or growing understandably infatuated with the bands and sounds of independent label SST Records. What made the issue salient for the group was the rare luck of scoring a great <i>New York Times<\/i> review for <i>Fire of Love<\/i> before they had ever toured outside of L.A., which set up critical and fan anticipation for the Gun Club that the band successfully exploited for the rest of their career.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s hardly a reliable narrator, but I\u2019ll let Jeffrey Lee Pierce explain the situation in his own words (All JLP quotes in this essay come from his memoir <i>Go Tell the Mountain<\/i>, published posthumously in 1998 on 2.13.61 books; all quotes from other people come from the <i>Ghost on the Highway<\/i> documentary):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When we put out that <i>Fire of Love<\/i> record, it got really popular in Boston and New York just from the release and so there was enough of a demand for us to tour. The thing is, the record was doing well there and everybody was waiting for somebody to do something different for a change. We weren\u2019t new romantic and we weren\u2019t like Echo &amp; The Bunnymen or some shit, and we weren\u2019t like some punk band, so we came out and we were doing this weird thing. And everybody on the east coast was just ready for that. So everybody was just going crazy. Every set we did there was a complete mess. So we toured and made money, in fact, which is weird for a first tour. It\u2019s rare for bands to do that. We didn\u2019t really do anything. We were just a pretty much ignored Los Angeles group, but the thing just got really popular on the East coast. The East coast kind of invited us so we went there and we could headline and play places much bigger than the Whiskey A Go-Go and sell them out. We decided to go where <i>they wanted us<\/i> and so we started spending more of our time there. It was hard because when we came back, we were supposed to go to [independent L.A. label] Slash Records for another deal, but then I got this other offer which would have based us in New York and I thought that tactically the best thing for the group to do would be to be based in New York at that particular point because the group had so much more attention there.<\/p>\n<p>Also, we were one of the first bands out of L.A. to hit overseas. But there was a backlash. The main reason was because we were never a favorite band in L.A. We wouldn\u2019t draw more than 200 people on a good night. Suddenly, New York and Boston discovered us. And there\u2019s always been a rivalry between New York and L.A. Traitors already in one direction, and then off to Europe and the U.K. Imagine what it looked like to people over there. We were no better than defecting communists. Might just as well have taken a walk over the wall at Berlin and handed over the documents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div id=\"attachment_1455\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/GunClubSexBeat81.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1455\" class=\"wp-image-1455\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/GunClubSexBeat81.jpg\" alt=\"GunClubSexBeat81\" width=\"600\" height=\"388\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/GunClubSexBeat81.jpg 800w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/GunClubSexBeat81-300x194.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1455\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Terry Graham, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Ward Dotson, Rob Ritter (l-r)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>This passage reveals the ambition and opportunism that contextualize the relative neglect the group felt in L.A. The Gun Club always had their sights on going as far as their music would take them, so when the opportunity presented itself, they left and rarely looked back, basing themselves next in New York to record their inspired if poorly recorded second album <i>Miami<\/i> on Animal Records, a vanity label run by Blondie\u2019s Chris Stein.<\/p>\n<p>But as much as success, an innate compulsion toward movement and travel also motivated the Gun Club, which points toward the second part of my answer. Consider the careers of two key band members:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Kid Congo Powers (born Brian Tristan) grew up in La Puente and with Jeffrey Lee Pierce formed Creeping Ritual, the first incarnation of the Gun Club, before getting snatched by the Cramps (with JLP\u2019s blessing). After returning to the fold in 1983 for several albums, Kid Congo joined Nick Cave\u2019s Bad Seeds, another notorious group of international bohemians and degenerates, then pursued several lesser-known projects leading to his most recent group the Pink Monkey Birds (nominally based in Washington, D.C.).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div id=\"attachment_1454\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclublvs.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1454\" class=\"wp-image-1454\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclublvs-1024x676.jpg\" alt=\"Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Terry Graham, Patricia Morrison, Kid Congo Powers (l-r)\" width=\"600\" height=\"396\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclublvs-1024x676.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclublvs-300x198.jpg 300w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclublvs.jpg 1484w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1454\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Terry Graham, Patricia Morrison, Kid Congo Powers (l-r)<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Patricia Morrison (born Patricia Rainone) grew up in Whittier and played in Hollywood punk band the Bags alongside future Gun Club drummer Terry Graham. She joined the Gun Club in 1983 with Kid Congo to record and tour for <i>The Las Vegas Story<\/i>, an album that captures the full roar of the globe-trotting Gun Club. Following the band\u2019s disintegration later that year, Morrison joined the Sisters of Mercy and then the Damned, eventually marrying and having a child with Damned frontman Dave Vanian.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As this suggests, the Gun Club attracted a certain kind of person with a penchant for seeing the world one dark, seedy nightclub at a time. That lifestyle didn\u2019t agree with every member, most notably Dotson and Graham; their differences with Jeffrey Lee Pierce had several causes, but it\u2019s telling that the rest of their careers are associated with Los Angeles (e.g., Dotson\u2019s bands the Pontiac Brothers and Liquor Giants). The international ethos of the Gun Club would become fixed in the band\u2019s final and most solid line-up \u2014 \u201cthe greatest band that I ever worked with,\u201d Pierce said (pg. 52), featuring British drummer Nick Sanderson (ex-Clock DVA) and Japanese bassist Romi Mori.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1458\" style=\"width: 510px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/motherjuno.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1458\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1458\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/motherjuno.jpg\" alt=\"Romi Mori, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Nick Sanderson, Kid Congo Powers (l-r)\" width=\"500\" height=\"464\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/motherjuno.jpg 500w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/motherjuno-300x278.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1458\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Romi Mori, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Nick Sanderson, Kid Congo Powers (l-r)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Still, the Gun Club was always Jeffrey Lee Pierce\u2019s band. \u201cHe was the star of the show, and we all just jumped on and off,\u201d says Terry Graham. \u201cIt was Jeff\u2019s musical misery tour.\u201d To understand Pierce\u2019s ambivalence toward Los Angeles requires looking further into the particular origins Jeffrey Lee Pierce. How his rootless worldview came to be is a very Los Angeles story, I think, even if it left him to travel and finally die far from home.<\/p>\n<p>Like so many Hollywood punks, Jeff Pierce came from the L.A. suburbs. He was born in 1958 and grew up in El Monte, an inner-ring metropolitan municipality of L.A.\u2019s San Gabriel Valley in the process of racial transition from white to Latino and Asian. He was the first child of a bi-racial marriage. His white father, a Korean War veteran, was a union organizer; his Mexican mother Margie stayed at home raising Jeff and sister Jacqui. Margie spoke Spanish, but evidently the Pierce household was predominantly Anglo in language and lifestyle.<\/p>\n<p>In Southern California, questions of identification as \u2018Latino\u2019 can be complex, given the massive population size, phenotypical diversity, and long history of the population who can trace its lineage to the pre-Yankee Spanish-speaking peoples of the Southwest. I identify with this part of Jeff Pierce\u2019s story: my own Mexican grandfather and grandmother were born a century ago in El Paso, Texas, and Jerome, Arizona, learned Spanish as their first language, worked as an East L.A. policeman and a Fairfax District (West Hollywood) jewelry shop assistant, and raised my father and aunt first in (Latino) Alhambra and then (Anglo) South Pasadena, before finally retiring as Reagan Republicans among other (Anglo) police retirees in a small coastal town of Central California. \u2018Mexicanness\u2019 comprises a diverse and sometimes unexpected range of experiences in neighborhoods where Spanish is a predominant language and racial intermarriage happens often enough, but it\u2019s also a confining label that Anglo institutions and neighborhoods place on people and neighborhoods of visible skin characteristics and ways of life. Thus, you can grow up Mexican by biological descent (at least <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/06\/11\/opinion\/the-myth-of-a-white-minority.html\">defined by America\u2019s one drop custom<\/a>) and, by chance of skin color and class status, not \u201cbe Mexican\u201d in the eyes of outsiders.<\/p>\n<p>All of this is to say, I think Jeff Pierce grew up both insider and outsider to Mexican identity. To strangers he didn\u2019t \u2018look Mexican,\u2019 which allowed him to travel in circles of European\/White privilege and not question his own ability to pass. At the same time, he experienced an instability of identity, which left him hungry for the sense of community and solidarity in the face of oppression that \u2018Mexicanness\u2019 symbolized at this point in L.A. history. The kind of Mexican identity he crafted over his lifetime is illustrated in this somewhat rambling passage from his memoir, which starts with the appearance of <a href=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2012\/01\/31\/tito-larriva-the-hombre-secreto-of-l-a-s-culture-industry\/\">Tito Larriva<\/a> to record the Gun Club\u2019s first album:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Little did [Slash Records\u2019 Bob Biggs] know that my fellow Latino, Tito Larriva, had already arrived on the scene. Recording for the Plugz\u2019 Fatima label, we already had six tracks for our debut EP. IRS Records had been doing good business with EP\u2019s and Fatima followed suit. I also enjoyed the comfort of an all Mexican label, I was raised by a Mexican mother in El Monte and had spent my entire life in her family environment. I was even briefly in a gang at Valle Lindo Junior High School. I understood Spanish and spoke a little. Tito\u2019s label consisted of The Plugz, The Brat and the Gun Club. Indeed, even now I still find Anglo-Americans strange and foreign. I have a penchant for black haired girls and can deliver a fearsome street rap. It\u2019s all a part of my Mexican upbringing. The girlfriends of my youth were all either Mexican, Korean, Japanese or Black. My first kiss was with a girl named Sandra Gutierrez, and my first tit game was with a girl named Darcy Kimura. Miss Kimura\u2019s pearly little breast in my palm is still a memory I cherish. The Mexican girls were often inaccessible \u2014 property of the cholos. But the Asian girls were excellent students, and often lonely and as inexperienced as I was. So I continued to see Miss Kimura until high school split us apart (she went to Rosemead; I went to Mountain View).<\/p>\n<p>Later in my life, that comfort was always still there. Among Latinos or Asians, I always felt quite at home. I even experienced some militancy when my family moved to the San Fernando Valley, being unable to get along with the wealthy Anglo kids. I was always reading Eldridge Cleaver or Huey Newton, supporting the Viet Cong, who were my idols. Needless to say, I didn\u2019t have many friends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Pierce family relocated to the largely white Granada Hills, then part of the outer suburban edge of L.A.\u2019s San Fernando Valley (\u201cthe Valley\u201d to the rest of the world), when Pierce was 15 years old. Here his outsider status followed the familiar arc of the bohemian \u2014 a fertile soil for his imminent punk career. Jeff devoured the literature of William Burroughs, Joseph Conrad and other modernists who shared the critical, horrible truths that came with rejecting society and immersing oneself in debauchery. He sat in acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in West Hollywood and considered acting as an artistic pursuit. That would pass, but a love of performative deception would remain; his memoir marks the appearance of his first \u201cpen names and alter egos\u201d (Mika, Mikki, Michi, Michiko, Maki, and Chili B) to 1975-79. His alienation from the affluent Valley teens eventually took visible form. Pierce always kept a certain amount of baby fat up through the mid-80s, something that in his early photos (before the peroxide) seems to place him along the edges of whatever group he might be seen with.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp-1.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-large wp-image-1456 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp-1-1024x702.jpeg\" alt=\"jlp 1\" width=\"1024\" height=\"702\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp-1-1024x702.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp-1-300x206.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/jlp-1.jpeg 1562w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When Hollywood\u2019s glitter scene gave way to punk and new wave\u2019s visual transgressions, Pierce delighted in the verbal and performative shock that dying his hair and cross-dressing offered:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>By Halloween that year [1981], Kid [Congo Powers] and I were a regular couple\u2026 The next night was Halloween and Rosemary Patronette rove me out to the Valley where The Cramps were playing. Kid was with us. We were dressed as Rita Moreno and Marilyn Monroe from Hell. Kid and I were always looking for some excuse to put on women\u2019s clothes. Phil Alvin as backstage complaining to Lux Interior about how horny he was.<\/p>\n<p>Lux simply pointed to us and said, \u201cThere\u2019s plenty of girls around, Phil. Look at those two lovelies there.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Phil then walked up to me and said, \u201cIf I didn\u2019t know that was you, Jeffrey, I swear I\u2019d fuck you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m not a cheap girl,\u201d I replied. \u201cAsk Rita, not me, you dreadful man.\u201d At which point I turned a flattened rouged cheek and slammed the door behind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A comment from a peer, Theresa Kereakes (now a widely-published photographer) is worth noting:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>THERESA KEREAKES: I think especially with the lipstick and the, sort of, strange male attempt to look like Marilyn Monroe \u2014 kind of an homage, and tribute \u2014 to his fascination with Debby Harry\u2026 He was almost the equivalent of your gay best friend.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Just how queer was Jeffrey Lee Pierce? In fact, his memoir paints a picture of him as a rampant womanizer, a taste for garish drag notwithstanding. Also telling is his silence about the sexuality of Kid Congo Powers, now a very out queer musician. Without knowing anything about the timeline by which Kid Congo came out, I find it curious that Pierce writes nothing about his longtime friend\u2019s sexuality, which he surely must have known about. Was Pierce simply being discreet about his friend\u2019s sexuality? If so, why digress about Phil Alvin\u2019s horniness?<\/p>\n<p>I think these patterns suggest the limits of the iconoclastic Pierce\u2019s self-understanding. Unafraid to look down the depths of human despair and depravity, he nonetheless lacked a language to understand the studied, sometimes contradictory construction of personal identity. Here I can\u2019t help but think again about his status as Latino\/Anglo biracial. Admittedly, the term \u201cbiracial\u201d is rather contemporary, not something something Pierce (or many others at the time) would have reached for. Note how his friend explains his situation in hindsight:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>THERESA KEREAKES: One of the first things that Jeffrey ever said to me was, \u201cWhat are you?\u201d And I thought that was a little odd. And then he said to me, \u201cWell, I\u2019m half Mexican.\u201d And I didn\u2019t think he looked half Mexican. I told him I couldn\u2019t tell, and he said, \u201cWe\u2019re both half-breeds\u201d&#8230; The idea of being a half-breed and not fitting in with either\/or \u2014 really, sort of polarized culture of what our halves were \u2014 seemed to be, at least you know from where I stood, a constant theme in Jeffrey\u2019s struggle and probably why he was such an intense artist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As this suggests, Pierce externalized his internalized contradictions, set in motion at the racial and metropolitan crossroads of Los Angeles, into his art. The ugliness of racial anxiety, hatred and obsession were preoccupations of the Gun Club\u2019s early work. Their attraction to \u201cswamp blues\u201d may have been more important to the group\u2019s thematic symbolism than to their sound. On the two album covers <i>Fire of Love<\/i>, the now-politically incorrect imagery of Southern voodoo cults drew upon a transgressive yet historically informed take on American culture.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Despite my romantic fantasies, the most common subject remained low-life Amerika. It appears in the early songs. I was filled with anger, hatred and sexuality. Dejected, disbelieving and disappointed. In a sense, a punk. Although out of uniform.<\/p>\n<p>I was in the early stages of forming a band which had not yet played out. A friend, Don Waller, said something that still echoes in my ear.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTell them what they don\u2019t want to hear.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So, as a rule, all of the lyrics of the early Gun Club dealt with unpopular subjects, namely: Sex, Murder, Drugs, Insanity, Desperation, Loneliness, Suicide and just plain Bad Vibes. There is also a fair amount of Self-Destructive Serial Killer and Racist War Criminal mentality portrayed. Much of this was based on people I had either encountered or read about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div id=\"attachment_1452\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/fireoflove.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1452\" class=\"wp-image-1452 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/fireoflove-300x150.jpg\" alt=\"fireoflove\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/fireoflove-300x150.jpg 300w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/fireoflove.jpg 1003w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1452\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Two album covers for Slash Records (on right) and Red Rose Records<\/p><\/div>\n<p>This symbolism also informed a new stage persona, Jeffrey Lee Pierce the \u201crefugee Civil War soldier,\u201d as his biographer explains:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>RYAN LEACH: You know, almost like everyone was talking about Vietnam in the late 60s, Jeffrey was talking about the Civil War in the early 80s. So you had Jeffrey Lee Pierce as a 22-year-old kid from the Valley [sic], no nexus to anything involved at that time, and he just wrote these great songs about, you know, riding on a black train. You know, this kid didn\u2019t ride on a black train!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Of course, Pierce also rode a black train outside of his art, most notably with his drug use. He\u2019s rather sanguine about his substance abuses in his memoir, but what he fails to note is how his descent into hard drugs really began only after he wrote songs such as \u201cShe\u2019s Like Heroin to Me.\u201d In the documentary <i>Ghosts on the Highway<\/i>, Ward Dotson recalls Pierce seeking out heroin connections for the first time while on tour, while Dotson\u2019s replacement Jim Duckworth describes Pierce eagerly absorbing the heroin culture that Duckworth was already familiar with.<\/p>\n<p>Pierce also turned to travel to explore the human condition and, in the process, his own identity. A pre-Gun Club obsession with reggae took him to Kingston, Jamaica, ostensibly to research the genre that he was writing about in L.A. zines. Kid Congo recalls that Pierce \u201cmostly got hustled\u201d and came close to getting hurt, but he was undeterred. On tour or in the downtime, the Gun Club offered Pierce the opportunities to travel to Europe, North Africa, Asia and elsewhere.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>JOHN DOE: He would keep himself inspired. I think that was part of the romance with Romi, and part of the romance with Japan and Vietnam, and that Far Eastern thing. He had the element of adventurer in him and did promote that mythology. And I thought it was brave to do that stuff. I didn\u2019t go to Vietnam, you know, hitchhiking around or taking trains, or whatever he did.<\/p>\n<p>DAVE ALVIN: Guys like that, they go to Southeast Asia, they\u2019re not going really to look at ancient ruins in Angkor Wat; they\u2019re going for drugs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Maybe he was in pursuit only of drugs sometimes, but his travels allowed him to achieve a condition of stateless moral freedom \u2014 a rootless cosmopolitanism that he idealized:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>All my life, people have been pushing me around. Mr. &amp; Mrs. DRILL SERGEANT and their 50\u2019s Korean War ways, I will immediately go the other way. Authority, I do not respect. Unless it\u2019s the respectful authority of a street educated human being. The REAL PEOPLE. Assholes talking about the program, when they have never been there. I will live as I wish, unless somebody can show me something I don\u2019t know. Shove your philosophy up your ass. War! Is in the streets! For the Blacks, the Mexicans, and the Japanese! We can understand each other. What\u2019s wrong with you?<\/p>\n<p>A former junkie without hepatitis is lucky. A junkie without track marks is a yuppie. You\u2019ll never really understand life until you live it near death. Crackk! What does that sound mean? Death, you fuck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Pierce\u2019s obsession with the Far East deserves special attention. He spent much of his last ten years in Asia, before his life reached an inglorious denouement in a medical facility in Salt Lake City. Asia also gave form and fulfillment to the longings he first felt back in El Monte, starting with his romantic life.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of which, there\u2019s no delicate way to put this: Jeffrey Lee Pierce the self-identifying Latino had a thing for Asian women. The high school tit game with Darcy Kimura was just the beginning of a fetishizing attraction to the physical and cultural attributes of Asian women. It would be easy to write this off as the <i>Orientalism<\/i> scrutinized in critical race and ethnic studies, except to note how much his obsession provides the hidden backstory to the Gun Club\u2019s career. As his memoir notes, a \u201cdisastrous relationship\u201d with a Japanese-American girl from Tacoma provides the inspiration for \u201cPromise Me.\u201d Jeffrey Lee helped form the long-forgotten L.A. death-rock\/cow-punk group Tex &amp; the Horseheads, fronted by his Asian girlfriend Linda \u201cTexacala\u201d Jones; notes Horsehead guitarist Mike Martt, \u201cIt was funny because later on I realized Jeffrey had a penchant for girls who looked exactly like Tex.\u201d And it reached its peak with Japanese bassist Romi Mori, whose roles as bassist and romantic muse to Pierce drove the entire last half of the Gun Club\u2019s career.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s worth pausing here to consider those final three or so albums (I\u2019m never quite sure how to categorize the \u201cDivinity\u201d EP or the <i>In Exile<\/i> compilation). They tend to be overlooked by many Gun Club fans because they display neither the \u201croots\u201d sounds nor \u201cBad America\u201d lyrical themes that the band is associated with. Too bad, because these last albums comprise a powerful, emotionally and musically moving body of work, featuring some of Pierce\u2019s most affecting vocals and impressive guitar work. <i>Mother Juno<\/i> is especially strong \u2014 easily one of the best albums of 1987, even though the choice of the Cocteau Twins\u2019 Robin Guthrie as producer confused many listeners. (Ask Rick Rubin how such unexpected choices of producer have become the norm today.) 1990\u2019s <i>Pastoral Hide &amp; Seek<\/i> is maybe more of a mixed bag, with a strong batch of songs treated to the most \u2018alternative\u2019 mix (no guitar distortion!) of any Gun Club record.<\/p>\n<p>Personally speaking, 1992\u2019s <i>Lucky Jim<\/i> is the most striking record in the Gun Club oeuvre. Kid Congo had left at this time, unable to commit to an increasingly erratic and unhealthy Pierce, leaving the latter to handle all the guitars. He summons some beautiful sounds (words I\u2019d never before associate with Gun Club recordings) from his guitar, be it the haunting acoustic strums of \u201cLucky Jim\u201d or the chiming arpeggios of \u201cBlue Monsoons\u201d (written by Mori) Unexpectedly, <i>Lucky Jim<\/i> includes some convincing electric blues \u2014 not the crazed slide guitar of the band\u2019s early era, but a warm, full-band treatment you might hear in a Chicago bar. \u00a0The album name and title track reference another Pierce alter ego, a post-colonial roamer adrift and unaccounted for in the Vietnam that Pierce had begun to explore before hepatitis brought him low:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Not so lucky though. The Australian named Jim has disappeared now. His parents know nothing of him. They don\u2019t want to. He worked for Telegraph, Co. He used to live singing \u201cWichita Lineman\u201d at all times of the night in the streets of Saigon, 1991\u2026<\/p>\n<p>I will go back someday. Vietnam is God\u2019s land.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclubluckyjim.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-1453 size-medium aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclubluckyjim-296x300.jpg\" alt=\"gunclubluckyjim\" width=\"296\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclubluckyjim-296x300.jpg 296w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclubluckyjim-50x50.jpg 50w, https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2015\/06\/gunclubluckyjim.jpg 700w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 296px) 100vw, 296px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><i>Lucky Jim<\/i> is an album of unrequited love, betrayal, anger and remorse \u2014 sentiments that sustained his wanderlust in the final years. A track that particularly stays with me is \u201cKamata Hollywood City,\u201d which recalls his attraction to Mori\u2019s best friend, with whom he lived, at first platonically, in a 1987 spell in Tokyo.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This was my second trip to Tokyo. Kayoko joined us this time. As usual, Romi spent most of her time at home with her parents (where I could not stay). Instead I stayed with her best friend Kayoko. Kayoko was supposed to take me back and forth from the city. Entertain me. Feed me. Translate.<\/p>\n<p>Our new residence was Kamata. I had tried hard all winter and succeeded to stifle my feelings for Kayoko, but after a couple of weeks, it was becoming a struggle. Once we walked together through Machida, and she wove a humorous story about our other friend Yuko.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYuko is tired of being married to English,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat does she want?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Somebody wild. Like American. Like you. Or Australian like Nick Cave.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhy doesn\u2019t she go find one?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe is married, but she like someone of your style.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLike I prefer yours,\u201d I mumbled.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She didn\u2019t quite understand. I was lucky again. As always happens with me, the truth slipped out. I hardly saw Romi at all. Only on outings to Kamakura or Yokohama did she ever join us and we were almost never alone. I spent a lot of time biting my tongue and drinking myself senseless, trying to forget the very real dilemma that I was obsessed with my roommate.<\/p>\n<p>After drinking bouts all over Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki City, I would wake up hungover in Kamata, senses distorted, listening to the Korean children below our apartment screaming and shouting in the overcast morning. Clothes from the balconies hung like flags. The river was muddy and grey. Smoke belched on the other side. A sort of Japanese ghetto scene. The images that greeted each morning would stay etched in my memory for an eternity, because I had already written them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Pierce and his companion would finally consummate their attraction, thereby pushing Mori away permanently (even as they continued to work together for another five years) while losing Kayuko at the same time. Having lost the two final great loves of his life, Pierce exiled himself for the rest of his life. After travels to Vietnam, he would return to Japan once more, now in Osaka, to pursue a strange musical project (never recorded!) in pidgin-Japanese rock-rap. His memoir ends with bitter anecdotes, seemingly ripped from the pages of a Graham Greene update, of how this project (with erstwhile collaborator Johnny Depp!) came to naught:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>So I went back to working with Johnny. All this time [1995], I was running out of money, desperate to do something with Japan. But the Japanese don\u2019t understand it. Nor do most Americans. Then came the day I got sick, and went again to the hospital. Out to meet me came Keith Peterson of my own Embassy. A D.W.A. (Diplomat With An Attitude). After he admitted he knew all about me, I rebelled and told him to \u201cFuck Off\u201d like the old gang-banger I was.<\/p>\n<p>He said, \u201cJapanese don\u2019t people like you and Johnny Depp around here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I said, \u201cWell, I\u2019m also experimenting with Japanese language through a Rap Music style and D.J.\u2019s as communication between the two worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He said, \u201cJapanese wealth does not want more Black Culture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I said, \u201cWhy? They like the music. Africans are PEOPLE YOU KNOW!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He said, \u201cYou are trying to explain something you cannot explain in L.A.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I said, \u201cI want to experience and learn Japanese bottom level up.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He said, \u201cYes, but stay down very low. It\u2019s interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I said, \u201cWell, I\u2019m out of money.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He said, \u201cCatch your flight at Narita, Terminal 3.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That night I went back to Ebisu [Osaka]. The Milk Bar. Two Americans in three-piece suits threatened me. Said they didn\u2019t want people like Johnny &amp; me fucking with \u201ctheir\u201d women. They obviously were executives. They also said that I was so rude. Dancing on the floor, describing the movements of \u201cgood sex.\u201d An American executives\u2019 personal playground, I observed. Tramps like Mr. Depp and me could maybe have changed their girls\u2019 minds. Selfish protectionist bastards. Now I know why we always fail as Americans to open Japanese markets, because Reagan raised Americans work for the Japanese. However, the Japanese kids are bored with it. They are our heroes. Always support the Japanese feminist, and the boys (who have it harder). And especially the woman, who, in Japan is really the much stronger of the race. This country is too smart for its own good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Pierce\u2019s self-imposed exile ended without clean resolution. A lifelong attraction to geographic and cultural others led him along in those final years with the promise of drugs, sex, and truth about the human condition, yet it could never resolve the anomie found at the origin of his life back in L.A. It\u2019s uncomfortable to read in <i>Go Tell the Mountain<\/i> his striving toward self-understanding, so wrapped are these accounts in bluster, futility and dissipation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A time would come where I would be speaking good Japanese, but they would forever close the door on me. I would later come to experience real racism first hand and end up in hip-hop bars full of Africans and African-Americans looking for an escape from hard-ass Tokyo bigotry.<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t love that country or any other anyway. I AM a country! And that\u2019s where my bitches come from. Pass the Kikkoman sauce motherfucker: Its [sic] Nampa Time! Next appointment, please!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I prefer to remember Jeffrey Lee Pierce\u2019s years of exile through \u201cKamata Hollywood City.\u201d Unexpectedly subdued and reflective, it speaks a truth about his own failures (here to a fictionalized wife) through an idiom he has greater command of than literature. The listener is left to ponder the unexplained title that juxtaposes downtown Tokyo and Hollywood; the latter isn\u2019t manifest in the lyrics, but as a geographic emblem of Pierce\u2019s beginnings, it suggests the ways that Los Angeles haunted Pierce\u2019s journeys through the end of his life.<\/p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Gun Club - Kamata Hollywood City\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/s2sD3i9BZ34?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve never quite understood why the Gun Club, one of the all-time great Los Angeles bands, had an estranged relationship with their city of origin. It seems to me no local critic or serious music fan can deny their impact on L.A.\u2019s music legacy. One of the great cult bands of rock music, the Gun Club were arguably the most important band to rise out of the aftermath of Hollywood punk\u2019s first wave. Their fiery music fused a few quintessential strains of L.A. rock at the time: the poetic death trip of Jim Morrison and Darby Crash; the fascination shared by X and Redd Kross for the seedy underbelly American culture; and the reverent plunder of traditional American musical forms, most obviously blues and country. The term \u201cblues punk\u201d may forever be associated with the Gun Club, but except for a few tracks on their 1981 debut Fire of Love, the Gun Club never really drew musically upon \u201cswamp blues\u201d the way their frequent comparisons to the Cramps (with rockabilly) or the Blasters (with 50s R&amp;B) would suggest. Nevertheless, this reputation as well as the L.A. circles they traveled in put them at the front end of the whole \u201croots [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":1457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43678,43700,78,43686,43652,43654,43675,43696,43697,43806,43661],"class_list":["post-1450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alienation","tag-chicanoa","tag-gender","tag-los-angeles","tag-mobility","tag-post-colonialism","tag-punk-rock","tag-subculture","tag-suburbanism","tag-tokyo","tag-touring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1450"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1464,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions\/1464"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}