Much to my wife's concern, I'm becoming the sort of person who walks around the house muttering about politics. She's caught me doing it a couple of times, and no longer believes that I'm just "singing softly to myself", as I've tried claiming. Realizing that it's a short hop from such behavior to the kind that involves wearing a ratty old bathrobe in public, I've been trying to do some corrective mental surgery by eschewing my usual diet of online news for the more stately and civil Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. (Which has been a regular thing in my house for years anyway, but which lately is becoming more a matter of exclusivity. Especially in the recent wake of worrisome news a la Libya, Japan, and the national budget.)
I've also found myself in desperate need of a good laugh. The kind of laugh that makes your gut ache, your eyes water, and which summons aftershock snickering throughout the rest of the day. The kind of laugh that drives a wedge between my brain and its seemingly limitless obsession with the folly of man. In short, I needed the kind of laugh that's routinely inspired by Jack Handey's all-too-infrequent New Yorker submissions, which I have just decided to catalog here for my convenience and sanity's sake, as well as your hilari-tainment. Enjoy! I recommend consuming these while riding the subway, where strangers will certainly regard your uncontrollable cackling as evidence of severe mental instability. Stretch out and enjoy those vacant seats on either side of you.
It's odd for a cover song to reveal so much about a band as unique as the Gun Club were. With the exception of the lyrical overhaul, their rendering of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Run Through the Jungle" is pretty faithful, but goes down like a cruel lover with a mile-wide mean streak. The Gun Club's music excels in revealing the dark and inaccessible regions of the subconscious self—leading the listener down a long and dark corridor, they invite them through an unmarked exit, and then turn on them in a frenzy of sexual and sometimes violent depravity. They were scary, self-destructive, and had an air of real recklessness about them—just like all the good things that come from Los Angeles.
Seen above is Gun Club leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce, from the cover of his Wildweed LP—a record that, along with the lion's share of his band's catalog, totally defined some corner of my personal aesthetic. I buy that album every time I come across a cheap vinyl copy in a cutout bin, which, if you know me personally, might explain why you own it. Oddly enough, Wildweed isn't really a very consistent listen. A number of its tracks have aged poorly, but I've always been willing to look past them entirely on the strength of the song "From Temptation to You", which sounds as lonely and desperate as JLP appears in that iconic photo. My wife and I listened to that song over and over again while driving the rural highways from Jerome, Arizona to the Grand Canyon during the Spring of 2005, and it's now impossible for me to hear it without mentally conjuring the eternal nothingness of that barren landscape at dusk. Use the player below to hear it.
At the opposite end of the GC spectrum are the destructo speaker-crankers that most fans adore them for. This isn't a Gun Club primer, just the appreciation of one fan who believes they complete all the important punk-blues circuits better than any other band who's tried, with hooks and snarl to spare. Witness below: the totally unhinged, hoodoo ritualism of "Death Party", in which Blind Lemon Jefferson meets a blown Marshall stack.
All the original Gun Club albums are mandatory listening as far as I'm concerned, but don't sleep on the (hopefully still available) Early Warning double disc of demos, live songs, and previously unheard solo-acoustic Jeffrey Lee Pierce material. I also strongly recommend JLP's Go Tell the Mountain autobiography, if you can find a copy. (Used ones are currently fetching stupid money on Amazon.) Though I haven't read it in years, I remember it being a deeply personal and commanding read chronicling the years just short of those which lead to the author's untimely death. Reminiscent of the troubled loners, outcasts, and drunks that inhabit the songs of the Gun Club, Jeffrey Lee's narrative is at times like watching a toilet flush in slow motion. And while it's easy to romanticize anyone after they're gone, JLP's story offers plentiful evidence that he was a guy who really lived it, something that his closest confidantes tend to agree with while in the same breath citing his arrogance and unbridled narcissism as the root of his undoing. Like many others, I still find myself deeply moved by the Gun Club, and I remain in awe of their routine exorcisms of the ghosts down every highway, real or otherwise.
No slag intended... these are awesome! The badass "album covers" of yesteryear, now festooned upon 100% cotton upper body coverings! What splendid and thought-provoking conversation starters they must be... You think you're smooth? OK Barry White: What would YOUR opening line be to some geeky babe spotted in the local hipster-hut wearing a Pride & Prejudice or Catch 22 t-shirt? Hey sweet thing, wanna compare library cards? And high school students, think of the brownie points you might score by strolling into your Honors English seminar wrapped in a hard-worn Great Gatsby or Lord of the Flies number.
This may very well be the most critical forward leap in young adult fashion since the heyday of the iconic Rolling Stones "Sucking in the 70s" t-shirt. And if you're already fretting over what to get that oh-so-hard-to-shop-for Tea Partier/Ayn Rand devotee in your life this holiday season... Atlas Shrugged, yo!
