Apparently his health had been very bad again but it was a step in the right direction. How about a title like Shes Like Heroin To Me? He went on: "with Jeffrey, you pretty much entered his world when you saw him. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? In July 1996, Tom Engelshoven of Dutch music magazine Oor described Jeffrey Lee Pierce as the missing link between the Eagles and Kurt Cobain. It had a great feel and it was special.. And in a handful of others Like Calling Up Thunder, The Fire of Love, and Mother of Earth Pierces absorption of all those influences, his near-assimilation by the prevailing ancient creepiness of American roots music spliced with the then-still-novel exuberance of punk, allowed him to hunker down and create something not only timeless but seamless, as if Johnny Cash, Johnny Thunders, and Johnny Rotten had dropped all their differences in order to embrace whatever nameless idolatry secretly united them. The confluence of tragedy and a type of bleak, resigned comedy. Sex Beat, their introduction to the world, weve already discussed, but contrast it with the bands final song Anger Blues, and we can see the parabola of their musical journey, an ass-backwards shedding of raw punk attitude for well, the actual blues. Hed have a few drinks at lunchtime first and then do a few rounds at the Holland Park running track. Jeffrey Lee Pierce Birthday and Date of Death Jeffrey Lee Pierce was born on June 27, 1958 and died on March 31, 1996. The propulsive downstruck open-E chords: F, A, E, G. The echo-twang of the rockabilly substratum, the trebly punk veneer, cockroach legs skittering on pockmarked concrete. At the center of everything was Jeffrey Texas-born, Los Angeles raised a music fanzine writer, an obsessive Blondie stan (as a teenager, he was president of their fan club and was fairly regularly ousted from hotel rooms by members of the Blondie contingent for overstaying his welcome) with an unscratchable reggae itch and a compulsion for Delta blues as well as country murder ballads. Pierce stated that he preferred Miami, and dismissed Fire of Love: "I can't even remember making it. But, just as Gun Club seemed about to capitalise on this early critical acclaim, the Cramps pinched the guitarist Kid Kongo (ne Brian Tristan) to replace the departing Brian Gregory. Digging into layers of hopeless desperate acts, excavating strata for singular sacred artifacts, aching to merge the atavistic with the advanced. Death Party is an EP by American rock band The Gun Club, released in 1983. He was 37. He was a one-man southern death cult, a bad Indian. Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. Jeffreys voice was unbelievable, says Mori. At the center of this storm was Pierces voice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Los Angeles was one of the few American cities to follow the British and New York punk scene and the young Jeffrey soon became obsessed with Blondie to such an extent that he became president of their fan club (a couple of years earlier, a teenage Morrissey developed a similar unhealthy fascination with the New York Dolls, another proof that fandom sometimes pays creative dividends). The Gun Club, which was a key influence on bands such as R.E.M, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Sonic Youth and The White Stripes, released seven studio albums between 1981 and 1993. Pierce was born on June 27, 1958, in Montebello, California. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. At this point, Jeffrey was a musical archaeologist; he even began to dress on stage like some squat Indiana Jones, at once furtive and feral, his search for something priceless within the buried sediments of ages almost a holy one. Jeffrey Lee Pierce Live at 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival", "Gallows stream new album 'Gallows' ahead of release listen", "Gallows Everybody Loves You (When You're Dead)", "Cave, Perkins Pay Tribute To Gun Club's Pierce", "Album: Various Artists, We Are Only Riders The JLP Sessions Project (Glitterhouse)", "Nick Cave and Blondie's Debbie Harry duet on The Gun Club tribute album", "Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project to release second album,", "Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Thurston Moore and Jim Sclavunos play Nobody's City new music", "Nick Cave and Blondie's Debbie Harry duet on the Gun Club tribute album", "The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project", "Ghost on the Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club", "The Gun Club Ghost on the Highway: A Portrait Of Jeffrey Lee Pierce & The Gun Club (Ballad of Jeffrey Lee Pierce told by former bandmates)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeffrey_Lee_Pierce&oldid=1148319776, Articles with dead external links from July 2021, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles lacking reliable references from January 2022, Pages using infobox musical artist with associated acts, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2010, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2022, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 5 April 2023, at 12:57. Over the course of seven studio albums and an ever-shifting line-up of musicians driven away by Pierces self-obsessed and self-destructive behaviour, The Gun Club left behind a body of work whose ramifications are still reverberating to this day. Death Party: 8:29: 3-6: Stranger In Our Town: 5:14: 3-7: Gila Monster New Mexico / Preachin' The Blues: 9:40: 3-8: My . [citation needed], The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project is a tribute initiative launched after Cypress Grove, one of Pierce's musical collaborators, cleaned out his loft following Pierce's death. He was very hard work. [44], The Journey is Long, the second album from the project, was released in April 2012 and features The Jim Jones Revue, Barry Adamson, Warren Ellis of The Dirty Three, Steve Wynn of Dream Syndicate, as well as artists from the first album. Send us a tip using our annonymous form. Ad Choices, The Gun Clubs Jeffrey Lee Pierce Gets New Documentary, A daily roundup of the most important stories in music, New Music Releases and Upcoming Albums in 2023, Lucinda Williams Announces Album, Shares New Song With Bruce Springsteen, Watch Clairo Cover Vashti Bunyans Winter Is Blue, Godflesh Announce North American Tour, Share New Song Nero, The Gun Clubs Jeffrey Lee Pierce, 1983 (Photo by Peter Noble/Redferns). Patricia Morrison: So many bands came from us but we never got the recognition. Bath Jeffrey adored Debbie Harry and carried a signed note in his wallet from her which included hair dye instructions. Lange and Andree will also co-produce, along with Alexander von Sturmfeder, under their Scenes From banner. Hell, right off the bat you almost recoil from the light in Shirleys lips, fleetingly grasp the tiger in Debra Anns hips. Though the audiences were small at first, Pierce tried to create a scene by adopting different personas. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The latter acted as producer on Miami, the second Gun Club album, which also featured Debbie Harry on backing vocals. His attempts at doing a guide guitar were just a disaster. See the article in its original context from. Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the leader of the Gun Club, a trailblazing Los Angeles band that began mixing punk rock with American roots music in 1979, died on Sunday at Utah University Hospital in. The Gun Club and perhaps this more than anything explains their continued marginalization were rarely if ever fun. But it was with a depressing sense of inevitability that the band would collapse once again. Hed already spent time travelling around the United States and Jamaica on a musical odyssey, and returning to LA hed regularly contribute reggae reviews to the Slash fanzine under the name Ranking Jeffrey Lee. In 1993, the last Gun Club album, ironically entitled Lucky Jim, featured his Japanese wife, Romi Mori, on bass. He was difficult to get close to because he was changing personas so much. The other two just quit on the spot but I thought, I want to see Australia, so I went with him.. An obsession for record collecting in his early teens led to him meeting fellow music fan and future Gun Club guitarist and co-founder, Kid Congo Powers (ne Brian Tristan). It was so sad.. So we went and kept in contact, and it was decided that the next album should be recorded with Robin., She continues: Jeffrey had been wanting to record The Breaking Hands and he knew that he wanted loads of bells on it, so he figured that Robin would be perfect for it. My sense of why this is rests on Pierces deep familiarity with many musical forms, not least the blues. With The Gun Club well and truly over for the time being, Pierce embarked on a short-lived solo career. The cause was a stroke, said Kim White, his manager. Ramblin' Jeffrey Lee is a kind half-pseudonym that Pierce took on four years before he died. By Gregg L. Friedman MD, I really miss the great musical groups of the 1960's. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Jeffrey Lee Pierce is best remembered as the hard-living guitarist/singer who fronted the Gun Club, a band that fused the fury of punk with the melodic structures and lyrical obsessions of the blues.Born on June 27, 1958, and raised in El Monte, California, Pierce discovered punk rock during his teenage years while working at Bomp Records, writing for such L.A.-based punk magazines as Slash . (LA WEEKLY), GARY LACHMAN (NEE VALENTINE): A NEW YORK ROCKER SAILS INTO THE MYSTIC, FACE IT: DEBBIE HARRY HAS HAD A HAPPY AND LUCKY LIFE, Please Kill Me Remembers Jeffrey Lee Pierce | Death Or Glory. Hed go for a run every lunchtime, says Mori. We were recording in Holland and, as you can imagine, you could get hold of anything you wanted. Says Mori: It definitely felt like a band. Driven by an obsessive personality from an early age, Pierces love of alcohol, drugs and the romanticism of playing in a band would be both his making and undoing. Interestingly, Pierce himself preferred Miami, saying about Fire of Love: I cant even remember making it. It was too painful. The 1992 album Ramblin Jeffrey Lee & Cypress Grove with Willie Love was in effect his final paean to that musical style, from acoustic Mississippi Delta to electric Windy City. PLEASE KILL MES PUNK HISTORIANS LEGS MCNEIL AND GILLIAN MCCAIN TURN THEIR ATTENTION TO L.A. At the time of his death he survived by his large extended friends and family. His Latina mother was a homemaker, taking care of Pierce and his sister, Jacqui. But The Gun Club made things happen on their own terms. Essaying the pop culture that matters since 1999. Powers was by now living in Berlin and performing as guitarist with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but accepted Pierce's offer and managed to combine working in both bands. The three songs were "Ramblin' Mind", "Constant Waiting", and "Free To Walk", with further material uncovered over time to support the tribute project. From his days as a peroxided, Debbie Harry-fixated Los Angeles teen-punk, through a lengthy era when he seemed convinced he could channel the spirit of Robert Johnson, to a more recent probe of the seedier side of continental balladry, Pierce who died of a cerebral blood clot in Utah at the end of March 1996 always . (part 1)", "OFF! Jeffrey's mother Margie Pierce is a stay-at-home mom; Jeffrey's father Robert Pierce is employed as a union organizer and arbitrator (Local 1710 Electrical Workers Union). In 2014, Sergio Rotman of the Argentinian band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs edited a special edition of 500CDs with versions of 14 Gun Club and Pierce songs. Elvis From Hell is directed by Heiko Lange and Jessica Andree, and it features interviews with artists including Nick Cave, Jack White, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Mark Lanegan, Moby, and more. The Gun Club had truly arrived. They were going to be playing that night and I said, Jeffrey! More images. Dissonance on the former (Black Train) becomes plain ugliness on the latter (Day Turn To Night), while Fires haunted and unhealthy lyricism (Ghost On The Highway) is tempered by Lucky Jims sonorous melancholy (Idiot Waltz). Sometimes I say The Las Vegas Story album as a work. Recruiting bassist Don Snowden and drummer Brad Dunning, the quartet named themselves The Creeping Ritual before changing their name to The Gun Club at the suggestion of The Circle Jerks Keith Morris. Co-edited by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil, the authors of, The Knack had an amazing sound. It was difficult to do anything because he was using. During the mid-1970s, after attending a concert by Bob Marley, Pierce became an avid fan of reggae, and subsequently traveled to Jamaica, where he met Winston Rodney and others, but also "got beat up there too", as he later recalled in an interview.[5]. The Gun Clubs 1981 debut Fire of Love was rarely off my turntable in those days. With his tousled blond-dyed hair, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was in many ways the archetypal American cult musician, at the crossroads of many musical styles (the goth scene, the swamp blues now revived by G-Love & Special Sauce) which later came to prominence. Fucking, murdering, leaving (I will fuck you til you die / Bury you and kiss this town goodbye). David Antrobus is a former youth worker and a writer (for. Jeffreys idea was to be as antagonistic as possible. Come on! Its now 20 years since the untimely passing of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and his legacy is apparent in any number of current bands now active, as well as his contemporaries who are still performing. Probably even The Cramps were better known. By Gregg L. Friedman MD, Nirvana were really great - never liked any other 'grunge' bands, only later liked some Mudhoney - though i did own a flannel shirt, but, SAM CUTLER: LIFE WITH THE STONES, THE DEAD & OTHER WONDERFUL REPROBATES, ALL THE RAJ: HOW NORWEGIAN WOOD UNLEASHED THE INDIAN INVASION, THE KNACK AND HOW TO GET IT: AN INTERVIEW WITH PRESCOTT NILES, PLEASE READ ME: THE BEST OF PKM FOR 2021, PART II, UTOPIA PARKWAY: THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF JOSEPH CORNELL, THE TOP TEN MOST SHOCKING, BIZARRE, AND HISTORIC DEATHS OF ROCK & ROLL DRUMMERS ONSTAGE. Produced by The Flesh Eaters Chris D and released in 1981, The Fire Of Love was the perfect distillation of Pierces vision of punk and blues coming together. Springheel Jack. He remained in a coma until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage on March 31 at the University of Utah Hospital. May 18, 1961 Jacqui Pierce, Jeffrey's . "It was Jeff's musical misery tour.". [39], Henry Rollins, another friend of Pierce, played the Gun Club song "Bill Bailey" during his first show for the "Artist in Residence" feature on Australian national radio station Double J. Rollins stated before playing the song: "Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a very good friend of mine and I miss him horribly. What can you say about a record that you cut for 2500 bucks in 48 hours, on speed? And move! [48], Jeffrey's Blues was a documentary filmed in 1989, directed by Bram van Splunteren for VPRO's Onrust and re-edited with unseen footage in 2016. [7][46] Axels & Sockets opens with a rendition of "Nobody's City", for which Iggy Pop, Nick Cave and Thurston Moore used an original Gun Club demo recording from the Berlin demo tapes from the Mother Juno album in 1987. If he hadnt have been so tenacious then nothing wouldve happened for the band. Powers was the west coast head of The Ramones fan club and Jeffrey was the head of the Blondie fan club. The blues was an anchor but we were very much into seeing what would happen if you mixed up different things. When he was a teen-ager, he was president of the Blondie fan club. He was the biggest influence in my life and thats a pretty big thing to take away. He was always at our gigs selling his autograph. Im an important man! At the age of 23, she hit NYC nightlife, working at music venues, bartending, and writing about all of her adventures along the way. An incredible musician who loved Blondie as much as he did Delta blues, when he died in 1996, the world was left without one of its most unique artists, and his loss left a void that has never been healed. He was due in court early in 1995, but flew instead to Japan, where he did some radio work and joined a Japanese band onstage, until he was hospitalized after a mugging. Learn how your comment data is processed. Love in a cold climate: Romi Mori and Jeffrey Lee Pierce. He was very unusual and a very unique guy. "He was the star of the show, and we all just jumped on and off," says Terry Graham. In my defense, my own life was undergoing plenty of upheaval, both outwardly (a migration to Canada, which required my relinquishment of every piece of vinyl I owned at the time) and inwardly. With Meg White pumping her bass drum, Jack stomps on those overdrive pedals again and hollers, You look just like an Elvis from hell! For those older heads it all clicks into place and at the same time The White Stripes acknowledge forebears every bit as important to their oeuvre as Robert Johnson, Lead Belly or Son House: the song is For The Love Of Ivy and The White Stripes are paying dues to The Gun Club. He was one of the founding members of the band The Gun Club, and released material as a solo artist. Originally released on the LA-based Ruby Label, Fire of Love attracted much interest in Europe and was picked up by the Beggars Banquet label for the UK while France's New Rose acquired the rights for that territory. Pierce taught Powers how to play the guitar using an open-E tuning and one finger. Because hed stopped drinking, he found that he couldnt perform, because it was always about him being pissed, explains Mori. But Im also amazed that you can make such great music when youre that fucked up on drink and drugs. 1 reference. He tragically died of a brain hemorrhage on March 31, 1996. I See a Rainbow: An Interview with Award-Winning Songwriter Brenda Russell, Working on Not Feeling Alone: An Interview With Josh Ritter, Living Colours Vivid Turns 35: An Interview with Vernon Reid, Satirical Miniseries White House Plumbers Is an Uneven Glimpse into Proximity to Power, PopMatters Seeks Film Critics and Essayists, PopMatters Seeks Television Critics and Essayists. His Anglo father worked as a union organizer. And speaking of language, Ive tried to avoid it, but his last name even rhymes with fierce. Outwardly, I might have been a character in a Gun Club song, thankfully absent all the mayhem, betrayal, and sex killing. He still made ends meet by working hard in a record store and contributing to music fanzines but, by 1981, he was at the helm of Gun Club, an impressive fourpiece (also featuring Kid Congo Powers on guitar, Rob Ritter on bass and Terry Graham on drums) who seemed to create their own brand of swampy, ramshackle, psychotic, blues- influenced music. Jeffrey Lee Pierce July 2, 1959 July 28, 1975 Since the death of Jeffrey Lee Pierce on March 31st of 1996, Creeping Ritual Music then became a vital resource for archiving. Having somehow missed their sophomore effort Miami completely, I next encountered the Gun Club in 1984, with the release of The Las Vegas Story, an album as remarkable and as perplexing as anything in their catalogue. Toward the end of his life, Jeffrey Lee Pierce increasingly embraced a more traditional blues, as if hed lost interest in the future altogether. The film will cover the singer/guitarist's life and career through his death in 1996 at age 37 from causes related to heroin addiction, alcoholism, and HIV. [43], In 2010, The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project launched We Are Only Riders, the first of a series of four albums featuring Pierce's previously unreleased "works-in-progress". Imagine hearing the opener for the first time Sex Beat, that post-traumatic explosion of damaged purity if indeed purity can emerge from such mongrel ferocity (which of course we all know now it cannot. Come back, Sid Vicious. In the early stages of his career, Pierce became friends with his idol Debbie Harry, having met Harry and Chris Stein through his presidency of Blondie's U.S. fan club. In addition to directing the documentary, Andree and Lange will serve as producers alongside Scott Crary , Anahita Nazemi, Katrin Sandman and Alexander von Sturmfeder. A scheduled recording session for Tex & the Horseheads, the band Jeffrey Lee Pierce had put together around his girlfriend Linda/Texacala Jones was going to go unused. Something born mewling reluctant from the bayou mud. He was 37 years old. He had to pretend being wild; he had to pretend being Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Beneath the attitude, there was always a sweetness, a reverence. We were record collectors and fans and at a super young age had dedicated our lives to that, recalls Powers. The Gun Club became the seminal swamp-blues, post punk band that had come screaming out of the LA club scene during the 1980 s. In 1982 Creeping Ritual Music was created by Pierce and later became the soul source for his music publishing. [16] A different line-up including Romi Mori, Dean Dennis and Nick Sanderson also recorded with Pierce, completing the six-track "Flamingo"[16] The EP featured a remix of Wildweed's opening track "Love and Desperation" and two cover tracks. It stopped him doing what he wanted to do. Louder is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. The odd thing is that although they are understandably pigeonholed with fellow haunters of the gothic margins such as Cave and The Cramps, they were also different. 181737469. subject named as. We really liked the songs. Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! By coincidence, Robin and Liz were walking towards us, remembers Mori. And then it happens. And while punk, on the surface, at least, eschewed and discarded what had come before it, The Gun Club tapped into a lineage that took them through the decades via punk, primal rocknroll and eventually the blues. The future was acknowledged, however grimly envisioned. The band upped sticks to New Yorks Blank Tape studios to record the follow-up album, Miami. He was a record nerd but we were also dreamers and into a lot of rocknroll fantasy. Formed in 1979 and based around the core of frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce, The Gun Club drew deeply from the well of American vernacular music and infused it with the stripped down energy and elemental values of punk rock. Pierce's autobiography, Go Tell The Mountain, goes into detail about the personal turmoil he experienced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The film will cover the singer/guitarists life and career through his death in 1996 at age 37 from causes related to heroin addiction, alcoholism, and HIV. As a teenager, he moved from El Monte, a working-class industrial suburb east of Los Angeles, to Granada Hills, at the time a white working- and middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley. Patricia Morrison agrees with Mori on this point. Or can, I forget which). By then, his influence could be felt on the work of rootsier American outfits like Green on Red and on the new direction taken by Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds (which featured for a time the Gun Club refugee Kid Congo). [17] With Mori now on bass, the band recorded 1987's Mother Juno, produced by the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie, and featuring songs such as "Thunderhead", "Araby" and "The Breaking Hands". The multi- talented Pierce wrote for Slash magazine as a Reggae reviewer and even lived in Jamaica for a bit. Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy. [4], The Gun Club's debut album, Fire of Love featured the songs "Sex Beat" and "She's Like Heroin to Me". Jeffrey always used to say, Hey, lets think like jazz! We werent jazz players but we could make our own version of it.. Jeffrey was full of digressions. Certainly the two bands share an intertwined history, not least thanks to Kid Congo Powers, the scrawny primitive-intuitive guitarist who initially joined Pierce after getting drunk together at a Pere Ubu concert before defecting to his idols once they summoned him (with Jeffreys magnanimous blessings). "[9], In September 1983, as the Gun Club prepared for an Australian tour, two band members quit due to financial concerns and ongoing frustration with Pierce's behavior. It was never a choreographed act., While Powers returned to America to clean himself up, Pierce slid into heroin addiction. As were The Gun Club as a live draw, and their popularity increased in Europe, especially Britain. Im glad that those records mean something to people and I hear that all the time, and Im really proud of that..
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jeffrey lee pierce cause of death