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THE GUN CLUB

Miami BLIXA SOUNDS

9/10

Jeffrey Lee Pierce and company’s blues-steeped punk rock soars to new heights.

By Erin Osmon

AMID THE drawly landscape of America’s swampland floats a mysterious spectre. Famously channeled by Charley Patton, Dr John and Creedence Clearwater Revival, the spirit of Southern Gothic didn’t quite penetrate the rock underground until Jeffrey Lee Pierce dosed his punk outfit The Gun Club with the area’s country, blues, voodoo and hoodoo. With Miami, the quartet of Pierce, guitarist Ward Dotson, bassist Rob Ritter and drummer Terry Graham took those influences to create a nexus of sound and energy, which endures as the outfit’s finest statement.

The band previewed their fusion of punk rock and roots music on their debut, Fire Of Love, a raucous and well-received 11-song cycle wrapped in voodoo imagery, which had as much to do with the sex-and-horror-drenched garage camp of The Cramps as it did with two-chord blues. Bolstered by the success of Fire Of Love, for Miami Pierce shed the touchstones of the LA scene and leaned fully into knotty tales written from a lonesome traveller’s pen, as well as a handful of moody, transformative covers. For the first time The Gun Club was its own thing entirely, freed from the trappings of early ’80s Southern California, its affected rockabilly and hardcore, and emboldened to craft an album whose dark undercurrent wasn’t performative but a natural and cathartic release of personal demons and individual taste.

As president of the Blondie fan club in the US, Pierce had a years-long relationship with its figureheads Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, whom he tapped for the making of the album, Stein inhabiting the role of producer while Harry stepped in on background vocals. Pierce’s writing was at its peak even as his proclivity for self-destruction took him to some new lows. It’s said that he came down with hepatitis at the time of Miami’s making, a fact that didn’t prevent him from delivering some of the best lines and sounds of his snaking career, a potent blend of heartworn sketches and eerie, mystical wonderment.

“Come down to the willow garden with me/Come go with me/Come go and see,” Pierce beckons at the start of album opener “Carry Home”, an enticing preview that doubles as an invitation, his voice echoing the ghosts of Tommy Johnson and Jim Morrison, hypnotic, trembling and pained. Side One of Miami is a masterclass in what it takes to hook a listener, fusing glistening guitar twang, propulsive bass and locomotive percussion with twisted lyrical poetry. Pierce relays tales of carnal desire (“Brother And Sister”), spellcasting (“Like Calling Up Thunder”) and the legacy of a lonely veteran, dead in a West Texas town (“Texas Serenade”) with the command of an omniscient narrator, emotionally attuned to his characters as he relays a potent sense of place and time. The band’s take on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through The Jungle”, transported by Dotson’s skilled guitarwork, takes the song to the underbelly of South Florida, where the jungle is a metaphor for Miami’s thinly veiled hedonism and clandestine gatherings. “I’ve never been no Christian/I don’t want to be baptised,” Pierce says with a defiant hiss.

The album’s second side doubles down on Pierce’s shamanic persona, especially so on “Watermelon Man”. Here he howls like a man packed with hellfire, as Harry echoes his terror with higher-octave wailing and Stein’s bongo playing anchors the ritual with earthen tones. “He no dead,” Pierce insists, which translates not as acceptance but harrowing denial. The traditional folk song “John Hardy” is updated to a rock’n’roll romp à la Johnny Cash while Jody Reynolds’ “Fire Of Love” recalls the band’s roots in the Los Angeles rockabilly scene without devolving into the histrionics of its live show.

A second disc of demos reveals how fully formed the songs were ahead of the sessions, many of them all but a twin of the final product. What’s most illuminating about them is the intensity of Pierce’s delivery, his voice tearing through the room like a charismatic preacher. “Just do it at your live tempo,” he tells the band