Jeffrey Lee Pierce
Encyclopedia
Jeffrey Lee Pierce was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. He was one of the founding members of the 1980s punk band The Gun Club
. He was a founding member of The Red Lights before forming The Gun Club and released several solo albums.
, to Granada Hills, at the time a white working- and middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley
. Pierce attended Granada Hills High School, where he participated in the drama program, acting in plays and writing several of his own brief experimental pieces. He was a brilliant and creative but highly unconventional student, managing to graduate despite turning in one term paper to an English class that consisted of the title "Ernest Hemingway
" along with ten blank pages.
Pierce's musical influences at this time tended heavily toward glam and progressive rock, and he was particularly fond of bands such as Sparks
, Genesis
, and Roxy Music
. During the mid-70s, after attending a concert by Bob Marley
(at which he was fascinated as much by Marley's shamanistic presence as by his music), Pierce became deeply engrossed in reggae
; eventually he would travel to Jamaica
to explore the music, a trip that left him ambivalent about the music's relevance to American culture. His infatuation with reggae overlapped with the emergence of punk rock, and Pierce became a fixture on the Hollywood scene as a writer for Slash
and, to a lesser extent, as a musician. While his later interest in American blues was presaged by his devotion to the rootsiest forms of reggae, his love for the more theatrical, complex sounds of glam and prog showed up in his support for the No Wave
movement in New York City
.
Pierce found himself disappointed by the swift decline of punk rock into strict formality, and his sense that reggae was ultimately a foreign import. Seeking music with the authenticity and simplicity of reggae but more deeply rooted in American history and culture, he found the Delta blues
. By the late 70s Pierce had laid out the sound he was after, and developed the persona—a type of theatrical frontman modeled in part on Bryan Ferry
and Marc Bolan
—that would become the essential elements of Gun Club.
, is widely regarded as the band's most fully realized work, featuring the songs "Sex Beat" and "She's Like Heroin to Me." The next two albums, Miami
and The Las Vegas Story
, are highly original; the music is a unique mix of punk, country and blues
. Later albums depart from the swamp-punk template in favor of reflective, melancholic moods.
Though The Gun Club never attained significant commercial success - in large part to Pierce's willful personality and his struggles with alcohol and drugs - they were always critically lauded and widely recognized as one of the more influential bands of the age. The White Stripes
' Jack White
and The Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan
have cited the band as huge influences, as have England's Gallon Drunk
and The Flaming Stars
.
The startling debut, Fire of Love
, was a hypnotic fusion of various strands of America's musical history. The Gun Club applied a southern-swamp inspired voodoo sensibility and a punk wildness to their fundamentally bluesy style, derived from one- and two-chord Delta blues artists, such as Howlin' Wolf
, Charley Patton and Son House
. The album contains an anarchic, emotionally faithful version of Robert Johnson's "Preachin' Blues" and the sad, delicate, country-tinged swamp love song "Promise Me," regarded by some as Pierce's most inspired moment.
The follow-up Miami, produced by Blondie
's Chris Stein
, sounds more haunted as Pierce's maturing vocal style (often compared to The Doors
' Jim Morrison
) howls, wails and drones its way through fevered renditions of "Devil in the Woods," "Sleeping in Blood City" and Creedence's "Run Through the Jungle." Pierce's morosely poetic and lyrical sensibility is echoed in the later work of Nick Cave
, whom Pierce cited in his autobiography as "my truest mate." However, many critics and fans complained that Stein's mix of the album was completely lifeless.
The years 1982-84 were characterized by shifting line-up changes, with various band members testifying that Pierce's unpredictable personality and chemical excesses made him difficult to work with. Nonetheless, the next full album, 1984's The Las Vegas Story, was something of a triumph, with the ghostly "Walking with the Beast" (perhaps the band's most representative song).
Pierce recorded a solo album, Wildweed, in 1985. It was an accessible, melodic and occasionally danceable work, with the tenderly devotional "From Temptation to You" displaying his (perhaps surprising) flair for soul-searching love songs. A reformed Gun Club then made 1987's Mother Juno, generally considered one of their finest works, featuring typically punkish efforts like "Thunderhead" and "Araby" with startlingly melodic compositions like "Breaking Hands" and "Port of Souls." Pierce later said "We envisioned an album that sounded like ocean waves."
with Willie Love, consisting mainly of blues cover versions (Howlin' Wolf
, Lightnin' Hopkins
, Skip James
).
In the early stages of his career, Pierce was supported by Debbie Harry
of Blondie
, who was convinced of his potential as musician and artist. He originally met Harry, as well as Chris Stein
(also of Blondie), through his position as the president of Blondie
's US fan club. The group also paid tribute to him in their song "Under the Gun" from the 1999 album No Exit
.
Jeffrey Lee Pierce died from a brain hemorrhage in 1996 at the age of 37.
His life is the subject of the documentary Ghost on The Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club, directed by Kurt Voss
and produced by Voss and editor/composer Andrew R. Powell. The documentary debuted at the Don't Knock The Rock Film Festival in Los Angeles in June 2006 and is currently available on DVD.
Jeffrey Lee Pierce is honored by the rock star Thåström in a song from 2005. The World/Inferno Friendship Society
also paid tribute to Pierce in their song by the same title.
His friend Mark Lanegan
said in an interview in Loose Lips Sink Ships in
August 2004 about Jeffrey Lee Pierce's death: "In early 1996, he went to Japan, and right before he left he and I were at his mom's in LA writing songs. He seemed in really good health - sometimes he wasn't in such good health, sometimes he could barely walk because he was so fucked up. When he came back from Japan, he left me a couple of messages on my answering machine. He sounded completely out of his mind, though not like he was drunk. It was strange, like he'd gone crazy; finally I got hold of someone, and she told me Jeffrey had come back, that he'd been drinking while he was gone, his liver had poisoned his system, and he was experiencing dementia. The hospital turned him away saying, there's nothing we can do for him, his liver's shut down, he's dying. After this, I get a call from him; he was up in Utah and he sounded normal. And I said, what the hell, man, everyone's saying you're going to die. And he said, they always say that. And a week later, he fell into a coma and died."
Mark Lanegan did a cover of The Gun Club's "Carry Home" from their album Miami
on his album I'll Take Care of You
. They also wrote the song "Kimiko's Dream House" together, which appears on Lanegan's album Field Songs
.
2010 - OFF!
, a punk "supergroup" fronted by Keith Morris (Black Flag
and Circle Jerks
) released a song dedicated to and named after Jeffrey Lee Pierce. At live performances Morris often gives an intro describing Pierce and the relationship the two shared.
The Gun Club (band)
The Gun Club was an American punk blues band from Los Angeles, California that existed from 1979 to 1996. Led by flamboyant singer and guitarist Jeffrey Lee Pierce, The Gun Club merged the contemporary genre of punk rock with the more traditional genres of blues, rockabilly and country music.Along...
. He was a founding member of The Red Lights before forming The Gun Club and released several solo albums.
1970s
As a teenager, Pierce moved from El Monte, a working-class industrial suburb East of Los AngelesLos Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, to Granada Hills, at the time a white working- and middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley
San Fernando Valley
The San Fernando Valley is an urbanized valley located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of southern California, United States, defined by the dramatic mountains of the Transverse Ranges circling it...
. Pierce attended Granada Hills High School, where he participated in the drama program, acting in plays and writing several of his own brief experimental pieces. He was a brilliant and creative but highly unconventional student, managing to graduate despite turning in one term paper to an English class that consisted of the title "Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
" along with ten blank pages.
Pierce's musical influences at this time tended heavily toward glam and progressive rock, and he was particularly fond of bands such as Sparks
Sparks (band)
Sparks is an American rock and pop band formed in Los Angeles in 1968 by brothers Ron and Russell Mael , initially under the name Halfnelson...
, Genesis
Genesis (band)
Genesis are an English rock band that formed in 1967. The band currently comprises the longest-tenured members Tony Banks , Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins . Past members Peter Gabriel , Steve Hackett and Anthony Phillips , also played major roles in the band in its early years...
, and Roxy Music
Roxy Music
Roxy Music was a British art rock band formed in 1971 by Bryan Ferry, who became the group's lead vocalist and chief songwriter, and bassist Graham Simpson. The other members are Phil Manzanera , Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson . Former members include Brian Eno , and Eddie Jobson...
. During the mid-70s, after attending a concert by Bob Marley
Bob Marley
Robert Nesta "Bob" Marley, OM was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and musician. He was the rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the ska, rocksteady and reggae band Bob Marley & The Wailers...
(at which he was fascinated as much by Marley's shamanistic presence as by his music), Pierce became deeply engrossed in reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
; eventually he would travel to Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
to explore the music, a trip that left him ambivalent about the music's relevance to American culture. His infatuation with reggae overlapped with the emergence of punk rock, and Pierce became a fixture on the Hollywood scene as a writer for Slash
Slash (fanzine)
Slash was a punk rock-related fanzine published in the United States from 1977 to 1980.The magazine was a large-format tabloid focused on the Los Angeles punk scene, though it did not restrict itself to local acts: its first cover featured Dave Vanian of The Damned. It regularly covered such L.A....
and, to a lesser extent, as a musician. While his later interest in American blues was presaged by his devotion to the rootsiest forms of reggae, his love for the more theatrical, complex sounds of glam and prog showed up in his support for the No Wave
No Wave
No Wave was a short-lived but influential underground music, film, performance art, video, and contemporary art scene that had its beginnings during the mid-1970s in New York City. The term No Wave is in part satirical word play rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave genre...
movement in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
Pierce found himself disappointed by the swift decline of punk rock into strict formality, and his sense that reggae was ultimately a foreign import. Seeking music with the authenticity and simplicity of reggae but more deeply rooted in American history and culture, he found the Delta blues
Delta blues
The Delta blues is one of the earliest styles of blues music. It originated in the Mississippi Delta, a region of the United States that stretches from Memphis, Tennessee in the north to Vicksburg, Mississippi in the south, Helena, Arkansas in the west to the Yazoo River on the east. The...
. By the late 70s Pierce had laid out the sound he was after, and developed the persona—a type of theatrical frontman modeled in part on Bryan Ferry
Bryan Ferry
Bryan Ferry, CBE is an English singer, musician, and songwriter. Ferry came to public prominence in the early 1970s as lead vocalist and principal songwriter with the band Roxy Music, who enjoyed a highly successful career with three number one albums and ten singles entering the top ten charts in...
and Marc Bolan
Marc Bolan
Marc Bolan was an English singer-songwriter, guitarist and poet. He is best known as the founder, frontman, lead singer & guitarist for T. Rex, but also a successful solo artist...
—that would become the essential elements of Gun Club.
1980s
In the 1980s, The Gun Club released a number of albums. The first, Fire of LoveFire of Love
Fire of Love is the debut album of the American punk band The Gun Club, released in 1981 on Ruby Records. The album is considered groundbreaking in being the first of its kind to combine the hard, stripped-down sound of punk rock with American roots musics...
, is widely regarded as the band's most fully realized work, featuring the songs "Sex Beat" and "She's Like Heroin to Me." The next two albums, Miami
Miami (Gun Club album)
Miami is the second album by punk blues group The Gun Club, released in 1982.Debbie Harry appears as a backing singer on various tracks on the album under the pseudonym "D.H...
and The Las Vegas Story
The Las Vegas Story (album)
The Las Vegas Story is the third studio album by punk blues group The Gun Club, released in 1984. This album saw the return of founding member and lead guitarist Kid Congo Powers, after a three year stint with The Cramps.-Track listing:...
, are highly original; the music is a unique mix of punk, country and blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
. Later albums depart from the swamp-punk template in favor of reflective, melancholic moods.
Though The Gun Club never attained significant commercial success - in large part to Pierce's willful personality and his struggles with alcohol and drugs - they were always critically lauded and widely recognized as one of the more influential bands of the age. The White Stripes
The White Stripes
The White Stripes was an American rock band, formed in 1997 in Detroit, Michigan. The group consisted of the songwriter Jack White and drummer Meg White . Jack and Meg White were previously married to each other, but are now divorced...
' Jack White
Jack White (musician)
Jack White , often credited as Jack White III, is an American musician, songwriter, record producer and occasional actor...
and The Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan
Mark Lanegan
Mark Lanegan is an American rock musician and songwriter. Lanegan began his music career in the 1980s, forming the grunge group Screaming Trees with Gary Lee Conner, Van Conner and Mark Pickerel. During his time in the band Lanegan would start a low-key solo career...
have cited the band as huge influences, as have England's Gallon Drunk
Gallon Drunk
Gallon Drunk are an English band formed in London in 1988. Their swamp rock sound contains a variety of influences, from punk to jazz and the novels of Derek Raymond , and is noted for its dark subject matter.-Biography:...
and The Flaming Stars
The Flaming Stars
The Flaming Stars are an English underground garage punk band. The Flaming Stars can be compared to artists such as the Tindersticks and The Bad Seeds.-History:...
.
The startling debut, Fire of Love
Fire of Love
Fire of Love is the debut album of the American punk band The Gun Club, released in 1981 on Ruby Records. The album is considered groundbreaking in being the first of its kind to combine the hard, stripped-down sound of punk rock with American roots musics...
, was a hypnotic fusion of various strands of America's musical history. The Gun Club applied a southern-swamp inspired voodoo sensibility and a punk wildness to their fundamentally bluesy style, derived from one- and two-chord Delta blues artists, such as Howlin' Wolf
Howlin' Wolf
Chester Arthur Burnett , known as Howlin' Wolf, was an influential American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player....
, Charley Patton and Son House
Son House
Eddie James "Son" House, Jr. was an American blues singer and guitarist. House pioneered an innovative style featuring strong, repetitive rhythms, often played with the aid of slide guitar, and his singing often incorporated elements of southern gospel and spiritual music...
. The album contains an anarchic, emotionally faithful version of Robert Johnson's "Preachin' Blues" and the sad, delicate, country-tinged swamp love song "Promise Me," regarded by some as Pierce's most inspired moment.
The follow-up Miami, produced by Blondie
Blondie (band)
Blondie is an American rock band, founded by singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein. The band was a pioneer in the early American New Wave and punk scenes of the mid-1970s...
's Chris Stein
Chris Stein
Christopher "Chris" Stein is co-founder and guitarist in the New Wave band, Blondie. He is also a producer and performer for the classic soundtrack of the hip hop film Wild Style....
, sounds more haunted as Pierce's maturing vocal style (often compared to The Doors
The Doors
The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger...
' Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison
James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...
) howls, wails and drones its way through fevered renditions of "Devil in the Woods," "Sleeping in Blood City" and Creedence's "Run Through the Jungle." Pierce's morosely poetic and lyrical sensibility is echoed in the later work of Nick Cave
Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, and occasional film actor.He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1984, a group known for its eclectic influences and...
, whom Pierce cited in his autobiography as "my truest mate." However, many critics and fans complained that Stein's mix of the album was completely lifeless.
The years 1982-84 were characterized by shifting line-up changes, with various band members testifying that Pierce's unpredictable personality and chemical excesses made him difficult to work with. Nonetheless, the next full album, 1984's The Las Vegas Story, was something of a triumph, with the ghostly "Walking with the Beast" (perhaps the band's most representative song).
Pierce recorded a solo album, Wildweed, in 1985. It was an accessible, melodic and occasionally danceable work, with the tenderly devotional "From Temptation to You" displaying his (perhaps surprising) flair for soul-searching love songs. A reformed Gun Club then made 1987's Mother Juno, generally considered one of their finest works, featuring typically punkish efforts like "Thunderhead" and "Araby" with startlingly melodic compositions like "Breaking Hands" and "Port of Souls." Pierce later said "We envisioned an album that sounded like ocean waves."
1990s
Pierce's autobiography, Go Tell The Mountain, goes into some detail about the personal turmoil he experienced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. His health had been poor for some time, and he suffered further from prolonged use of opiates ("I beat scars into my arms waiting for an early death"). The final Gun Club album, 1993's Lucky Jim includes the song "Idiot Waltz". Another album from this period is Ramblin' Jeffrey Lee and Cypress GroveCypress Grove
Cypress Grove may refer to:* Cypress Grove, California * Cypress Grove Chevre, cheese company...
with Willie Love, consisting mainly of blues cover versions (Howlin' Wolf
Howlin' Wolf
Chester Arthur Burnett , known as Howlin' Wolf, was an influential American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player....
, Lightnin' Hopkins
Lightnin' Hopkins
Sam John Hopkins better known as Lightnin’ Hopkins, was an American country blues singer, songwriter, guitarist and occasional pianist, from Houston, Texas...
, Skip James
Skip James
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter, born in Bentonia, Mississippi, died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania....
).
In the early stages of his career, Pierce was supported by Debbie Harry
Debbie Harry
Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers...
of Blondie
Blondie (band)
Blondie is an American rock band, founded by singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein. The band was a pioneer in the early American New Wave and punk scenes of the mid-1970s...
, who was convinced of his potential as musician and artist. He originally met Harry, as well as Chris Stein
Chris Stein
Christopher "Chris" Stein is co-founder and guitarist in the New Wave band, Blondie. He is also a producer and performer for the classic soundtrack of the hip hop film Wild Style....
(also of Blondie), through his position as the president of Blondie
Blondie (band)
Blondie is an American rock band, founded by singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein. The band was a pioneer in the early American New Wave and punk scenes of the mid-1970s...
's US fan club. The group also paid tribute to him in their song "Under the Gun" from the 1999 album No Exit
No Exit (Blondie album)
No Exit is the seventh studio album by the US rock/new wave group Blondie. It was released in February 1999 and marked the first time the band recorded or performed together since 1982, when they released their previous studio album The Hunter....
.
Jeffrey Lee Pierce died from a brain hemorrhage in 1996 at the age of 37.
His life is the subject of the documentary Ghost on The Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club, directed by Kurt Voss
Kurt Voss
Kurt Voss is an American film director, screenwriter and musician/songwriter. He often works with fellow UCLA alumnus Allison Anders...
and produced by Voss and editor/composer Andrew R. Powell. The documentary debuted at the Don't Knock The Rock Film Festival in Los Angeles in June 2006 and is currently available on DVD.
Jeffrey Lee Pierce is honored by the rock star Thåström in a song from 2005. The World/Inferno Friendship Society
The World/Inferno Friendship Society
The World/Inferno Friendship Society is a band from Brooklyn, New York. Its style merges punk, soul, klezmer and jazz, while its collective membership features horns, piano and guitar. The ensemble has over 30 members, including a former member of Dexys Midnight Runners. About nine or ten members...
also paid tribute to Pierce in their song by the same title.
His friend Mark Lanegan
Mark Lanegan
Mark Lanegan is an American rock musician and songwriter. Lanegan began his music career in the 1980s, forming the grunge group Screaming Trees with Gary Lee Conner, Van Conner and Mark Pickerel. During his time in the band Lanegan would start a low-key solo career...
said in an interview in Loose Lips Sink Ships in
August 2004 about Jeffrey Lee Pierce's death: "In early 1996, he went to Japan, and right before he left he and I were at his mom's in LA writing songs. He seemed in really good health - sometimes he wasn't in such good health, sometimes he could barely walk because he was so fucked up. When he came back from Japan, he left me a couple of messages on my answering machine. He sounded completely out of his mind, though not like he was drunk. It was strange, like he'd gone crazy; finally I got hold of someone, and she told me Jeffrey had come back, that he'd been drinking while he was gone, his liver had poisoned his system, and he was experiencing dementia. The hospital turned him away saying, there's nothing we can do for him, his liver's shut down, he's dying. After this, I get a call from him; he was up in Utah and he sounded normal. And I said, what the hell, man, everyone's saying you're going to die. And he said, they always say that. And a week later, he fell into a coma and died."
Mark Lanegan did a cover of The Gun Club's "Carry Home" from their album Miami
Miami (Gun Club album)
Miami is the second album by punk blues group The Gun Club, released in 1982.Debbie Harry appears as a backing singer on various tracks on the album under the pseudonym "D.H...
on his album I'll Take Care of You
I'll Take Care of You
I'll Take Care of You is the fourth solo album by former Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan. This album consists of cover songs.It features Lanegan's interpretation of songs from a wide variety of songwriters, including Tim Rose, Tim Hardin, Booker T. Jones, and Buck Owens...
. They also wrote the song "Kimiko's Dream House" together, which appears on Lanegan's album Field Songs
Field Songs
Field Songs is an album by Mark Lanegan, released in 2001 on the Beggars Banquet label.The two largest instrumental contributors are Mike Johnson and Ben Shepherd. The album also features Duff McKagan of Velvet Revolver as well as Lanegan's ex-wife, Wendy Rae Fowler.The album represents a...
.
2010 - OFF!
OFF!
OFF! is a well-known insect repellent brand from S. C. Johnson and produced in Finland. Its active ingredient is DEET . It was first sold in 1957.- Products :*OFF! Family Care*OFF! Active*OFF! Deep Woods...
, a punk "supergroup" fronted by Keith Morris (Black Flag
Black Flag (band)
Black Flag was an American punk rock band formed in 1976 in Hermosa Beach, California. The band was established by Greg Ginn, the guitarist, primary songwriter and sole continuous member through multiple personnel changes in the band...
and Circle Jerks
Circle Jerks
The Circle Jerks are an American hardcore punk band, formed in 1980 in Los Angeles, California. It was formed by Black Flag's original singer, Keith Morris, and future Bad Religion guitarist Greg Hetson. They were among the preeminent hardcore punk bands of the L.A. scene in the late 1970s.The band...
) released a song dedicated to and named after Jeffrey Lee Pierce. At live performances Morris often gives an intro describing Pierce and the relationship the two shared.