Customer Reviews

Fire of Love

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4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

"Gonna buy me a graveyard of my own
kill everyone who ever done me wrong
gonna buy me a gun just as long as my arm
kill everyone who ever done me harm"

Quite possibly one of the most perfect albums ever. From start to finish every track reeks of originality. Even their interpretation of PREACHIN THE BLUES swaggers and stabs at your ear. Los Angeles owes a debt of gratitude to THE GUN CLUB, X and countless other bands from the late 70's and early 80's. They've allowed a city steeped in musical fad to retain an aura of credibility. This album, like countless albums from the GOLDEN AGE at SLASH remains timeless and influential.

In the new garage rawk era of WHITE STRIPES, YEAH YEAH YEAHS and other standard bearers, FIRE OF LOVE proves just how far ahead of the curve JEFFREY LEE PIERCE and company were. I've owned this album for three decades now, and I still come back to it several times in the course of the year. The songs on FIRE OF LOVE remain raw and fresh, holding up remarkably well. For any fans of THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, X, BEASTS OF BOURBON, THE SCIENTISTS, CRAMPS, etc. Your LA Underground education begins here. BUY THIS RECORD NOW!

I must admit having discovered Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club far too late in life; hell, I was only six when this came out, but true "punk" should never be overlooked as this band has been.

"Sex Beat", "Cool Drink Of Water Blues", and "She's Like Heroin To Me" are on constant rotation where I'm concerned, but this is high art at full throttle going downhill into oncoming traffic. It hits as hard as any mainstream punk or metal album of the day, and as such, deserves to be heard by all who care.

Gun Club manages to melt punk rage, blues-drenched despair and schizophrenic psychobilly on their unforgettable, fantastic debut. Drived by Jeffrey Lee Pierce sneaky, eerie voodoo-howls, the wailing, bleak, storming up tempo guitar of Ward Dotson and the fierce manic beat of Rob Ritter-Terry Graham rhythm section, the band delivered their songs - haunting tales of sex, terror, damnation, violence & desperate love - with harsh, passionate abandon. Pierce's career was short and tragic, but he had the firepower to lead this fantastic combo through the recording of an album of timelessly roughshod and unruly psycho-punk-blues, perhaps the first - and easily the best - of its kind. "Fire of Love" is bona-fide rock'n'roll bliss, an album that defies time idyosincrasies and music ephemeral fashions.

Simply put, this is one of the best albums ever, and save for THE CLASH's LONDON CALLING, I think THE GUN CLUB's FIRE OF LOVE just might be the best rock album ever, hands down, no contest. As a matter of fact, SEX BEAT just might be the best rock-n-roll song ever recorded, summing up the raw, ragged, sexy, unholy power of rock past, present, & future in under three minutes - but isn't that how the best of rock should be? I mistrust the current Jeffrey Lee Pierce idol worship circa 2006 - all I know is, I got this LP when it first came out on Slash in the early 80s as a teen and haven't stopped playing it since - it's almost three decades old and still puts most everything else in its path to shame. JLP and THE GUN CLUB never quite managed to scale these heights ever again (even if parts of MIAMI and LAS VEGAS are nice) - if you don't own this, you don't know good music, period.

The greatest rock and roll album ever made. With the standard makeup of vocals, guitar, bass, and drums, The Gun Club stripped away the fluffy production of the 70s that had infected even LA Punk bands and reached through the fog of corn whisky to the very swamp culture of depravity that inspired rock and roll in the first place. This is the album Panther Burns and Alex Chilton hoped to record, but never approached, and only the Cramps ever become a worthy satellite of. This is the Elvis we all always knew was underneath the jumpsuit when he said his backup singers "smell like catfish." Let us hold in abeyance the current faux-worship of Jeffrey Lee Pierce that has become a pedestrian given for dead rock figures. On the internet he has been elevated to the Jim Morison Throne of insightful poet. He never was, and I could care less, for the raw animal sensuality that the simple lyrics, beat, and illustrations Fire of Love offers are the only poetics one needs. Here is the invitation to the Bacchanal, with both Ivy and wine present, a mystery religion whose rites are held in the dark, we are lured there by the sounds of the lyre and drums of animal skin, but it all ends in a primal scream, and is as inevitable and as welcome as our own death.

Nowadays, punk-twinged blues acts like The Strokes and White Stripes are getting a lot of ink in the music press -- and deservedly so, as "Is this It?" and "White Blood Cells" (respectively) should make most "Best of 2001" lists that are soon to shower down. (to be fair, The Strokes owe more to Iggy, Lou Reed and The Wedding Present than they do to MC5 and the Gun Club -- but the punk blues influence is there, too.) In this atmosphere, music buyers would do well to check out some of the source material.

Undeniably, "Fire of Love" is one of the classic punk blues records. From Jeffrey Lee Pierce's wailing pleas (and pleading wails, for that matter) to the driving beat and sharp (Telecaster?) jangles of the guitars, this is a powerful and raw burst of creativity and passion. The band never regained this form -- as Jeffrey Lee numbed himself with drugs, the "Fire" went out of the band. Unlike Kurt Cobain, who went out with a bang (ouch, sorry for the bad taste pun!) after putting out the rawest work of his life, Pierce and the Gun Club (version 17) went out with a whimper (his trashed body gave out after surgery) after putting out the weakest and least inspired music of his career. Still, the sad real life tale of the Gun Club only heightens the emotional impact of "Fire of Love" -- for me, anyway. If you like classic punk rock, with a blues flavor, you owe it to yourself to pick up this album. ...

The Gun Club have always been a hit or miss band and this disc represents their best recorded material. Jeffrey Lee Pierce's early synthesis of blues, punk, country and swamp rock created a path that few have been able to follow. Each track on this disc drips with heat and intensity, from the vicious "She's Like Heroin to Me" to the slow pulse of "Promise Me." The cuts are clean (don't rely on the samples) and the collection forms a complete statement. A must for those who like their rock with a strong dose of raw emotion.

Every once in a while, the underground vomits up a work of pure genius - "Fire of Love" is such an example. I remember listening to this slab when it was first released by Slash Records in 1982 (or was it '81????) and thought it was the worst piece of [poo] I'd ever heard. Over time, of course, I came to recognize what a brilliant album it is. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was the first to recognize that the anger and dysphoria that drove so much of punk rock had a lot in common with the deep delta blues.

You can't understand punk rock, or the blues for that matter, until you've heard this album.

"Bury me way done deep in hell . . . I was too drunk, man, I wanna go to hell!" Indeed.

10 stars.

p.s. When will someone reissue "Miami" on CD?????????????

More than any other white musicians in the latter half of the 20th century, the Gun Club embodied the true spirit of the blues. Members of the musical intelligentsia like to point to 1960s as a period of revitalization for blues music, the decade in which major British Invasion rock groups like Cream and the Stones, having cut their teeth on the recordings of Robert Johnson and Skip James, paid tribute to their idols and introduced the blues to a new generation of enthusiastic young fans. In reality, however, the true legacy of the '60s Brits, however sincere their adoration may have been, was to sanitize and whiten the blues, to minimize the ragged starkness and raw emotion and instead to emphasize technical proficiency and a sense professionalism that bordered on sterility (in the process giving rise to empty guitar-wizardry-as-blues, exemplified by the likes of Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan). The result was a product more commercially accessible to the record-buying public (mostly white teenagers), but it was drained of the visceral power that had made the blues such an authentic and enduring form of cultural expression.

Ironically enough, it took the Gun Club, a bunch of white California punks, to recapture some of that lost essence. Coalescing in 1980 around lead vocalist and songwriter Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the Gun Club were, along with bands like X and the Flesh Eaters, a staple of the Los Angeles punk movement, a regional music scene that spawned some of the most intriguing, enigmatic, and downright weird music of punk's golden age--stuff so garish and surreal it could only have come out of Hollywood. And the Gun Club were perhaps the greatest and weirdest of them all.

On their 1981 debut Fire of Love, Pierce and company strip away the veneer of politeness that had infected the blues since the '60s and restore the raw intensity that one finds in the recordings of early country blues artists, demonstrating themselves to be the real heirs of the blues legacy that pretenders like Eric Clapton and other polished veterans of the British Invasion laughably tried to claim for themselves. Most music writers point out that the Gun Club were among the first groups to combine punk with blues, but such a simplistic description does the band a grave disservice. Incorporating punk, noisy garage rock, swampy Delta blues, and even gothic country and rockabilly, the Gun Club crafted a sound that is completely unique and almost impossible to describe. Though music writer Denise Sullivan takes an admirable stab at it by coining the phrase "tribal psychobilly blues," even this fails to do justice to the band's threatening swagger, to Jeffrey Lee Pierce's sinister, demonic howls, and to the eerie, unsettling voodoo rhythms that throb and pulse like blood pounding deafeningly in your ears.

Pierce, whose depraved poeticism and shamanistic persona draw inevitable comparisons to the Lizard King himself, fully embraced the macabre subject matter so pervasive in early blues music--mysticism, murder, violence, and the occult--penning some of the most startling, imaginative, and nightmarishly surreal lyrics in all of rock music. Every song on this album is outstanding, from the perverse country bounce of "Sex Beat," the terrifying murder-sex ballad "Jack on Fire," and the explosive punk assault of "She's Like Heroin to Me," to the frenetic energy of "For the Love of Ivy" (the album's magnum opus) and the slashing slide guitar of "Preaching the Blues," one of the most inspired reinterpretations of a Robert Johnson tune that I've ever heard.

Jack White hit the nail on the head when asked why Fire of Love "isn't taught in schools." Nothing before or since has ever sounded like this. Simply put, Fire of Love is one of the greatest albums ever, a collection of recordings that sounds simultaneously fresh and timeless, that stands alone as a uniquely visionary work and also fits effortlessly into the populist tradition of American roots music. If Skip James had taken a stab at performing garage rock before he died, I have a feeling that it would've sounded something like this.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce is amazing. This album is the one to buy...some may prefer 'Miami', but I believe this is the Gun Club at their best.

Their sound is unique but can be compared to early Violent Femmes, but more heroin and blues. Yeah punk rock/heroin/blues that's what I would try to describe it as (not label it). In my humble or bad opinion, every song is a winner; "...I will fu** you til you die, bury you and kiss this town goodbye uh hey hey".... They just don't write them like that anymore!

Great songs, all of them, but I have been remembering and singing in my head(like a nut job)'Jack on Fire', 'She's Like Heroin To Me', For The Love of Ivy', 'Ghost on the Highway', and 'Fire Spirit'.

If you are interested in the Gun Club for what ever reason, then you are, in my opinion, on the right path. Buy Fire of Love it is a solid choice, your parents will love you more, and chicks/dudes will dig you.

Trivia- Vince Neil of Mutley Crud swiped his look from Jeffrey Lee Pierce.