Jeffrey Lee Pierce

Jeffrey Lee Pierce
Personal details
Born	(1958-06-27)June 27, 1958
Died	March 31, 1996(1996-03-31) (aged 37)

Jeffrey Lee Pierce (June 27, 1958 - March 31, 1996) 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.

Biography

1970s

As a teenager, Pierce 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. 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.

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 had developed the persona of a theatrical front-man, modeled in part on Bryan Ferry and Marc Bolan, that would become an essential element of The Gun Club.

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.

1980s

In the 1980s, The Gun Club released a number of albums. The first, Fire of Love, 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."

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 Grove with Willie Love, consisting mainly of blues cover versions (Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, Skip James).

In 1996, Jeffrey Lee Pierce died from a brain hemorrhage at the age of 37. Pierce was HIV positive and suffering from cirrhosis and chronic hepatitis at the time of his death.

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."

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.

Posthumous tributes

The French rock band Noir Désir paid tribute to Pierce in their song "Song for JLP" from their 1996 album 666667 Club .

Blondie paid tribute to Pierce in their song "Under the Gun" from the 1999 album No Exit.

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.

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. Pierce and Lanegan wrote the song "Kimiko's Dream House" together, which appears on Lanegan's album Field Songs.

In 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.

In 2010, The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project, launched We Are Only Riders, the first of a series of three albums featuring Pierce's previously-unreleased works-in-progress. The album features interpretations of Pierce's work by old friends, collaborators and acolytes including Debbie Harry, Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Mick Harvey and Kid Congo Powers. The Journey is Long, the second album from The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project, was released in April 2012 and features The Jim Jones Revue, Barry Adamson, Warren Ellis (The Dirty Three), Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate) and artists from the first album. The third and final album from the project, The Task Has Overwhelmed Us is due for release in late 2012.