Gun Club

Marilyn Monroe From Hell

Jeffrey Lee Pierce and his band

The Gun Club Shoot to Sylvie Simmons

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