Title:        THE GUN CLUB MARRIES PUNK ROCK TO THE BLUES
Source:       The New York Times
Date:         September 16, 1981


   MOST of the American musical idioms that preceded and shaped
rockand-roll were regarded "the Devil's music" at one time or another -
especially the blues. Early blues lyrics are rife with satires on
preachers, who are depicted as hypocrites with their minds on adultery and
financial gain, and often the most uncompromising blues have suggested
their own pragmatic value system as an alternative to Christian values.
   One would have thought that a music as fundamentally outspoken and
irreligious as blues would have attracted the attention of musicians
involved in punk rock, since punk, in its early days at least, was
fundamentally an assault on traditional values. But many punk musicians
associated blues with the blues-based rock of the 60's, a brand of music
that has been very much out-of-fashion in punk circles.
   Recently, as punk has outgrown its original musical limitations,
musicians have been experimenting with a number of fresh approaches.
Several bands, including New York's Hi Sheriffs of Blue and Memphis's
Panther Burns, have begun to forge a punk-blu es hybrid. But the
firstalbum of punk-blues is "Fire of Love," reco rded by a Los Angeles
quartet called the Gun Club and released this week by that city's Ruby
label.
   Ruby is a subsidiary of Slash records, and Slash records is an
outgrowth of Slash magazine, Los Angeles's original punk-rock fanzine. At
its best, Slash magazine was an argumentative, engagingly written
publication, and two of its most interesting writers, Chris D. and Jeffrey
Lee Pierce, have become songwriters and bandleaders.  Chris D. fronts an
on-again, off-again aggregation called the Flesh Eaters, whose "A Minute
to Pray, a Second to Die" was the first release on the Ruby label. That
album combined punk energy with jazz and ethnic influences in a highly
original manner, but the lyrics to songs like "Satan Stomp" and "See
You in the Boneyard" were uneven, suggesting, at their worst, the occult
posturing of heavy-metal bands like Black Sabbath. The lyrics Jeffrey Lee
Pierce has written for the Gun Club have some of the same concerns, but
they are more coherent because they are grounded in a tradition - the
blues tradition.
   The key performance on the Gun Club's "Fire of Love" album is a
version of "Preaching the Blues," a Mississippi Delta blues standard
recorded by Robert Johnson and Son House in the 30's. The song's gibes at
Christianity are typical of blues' traditional role as a "live now"
alternative to the church's promise of salvation in the hereafter; "I'm
gonna become a Baptist preacher," goes one line, "then I sure won't have
to work."
   The sound of a punk band attacking this archaic blues, with slide
guitars whining madly and the drums and bass thrashing away at a
deliberately manic tempo, is wildly exciting. The rest of the album
doesn't quite live up to this performance - rockers who reject
Christianity can certainly be as inconsistent as those who embrace it. But
several of Mr. Pierce's original songs use blues imagery and explore the
subject matter of traditional blues in an imaginative manner, and the band
paces episodes of raw, pounding punk overdrive with a keen sense of
dynamics.
   The Gun Club's "Fire of Love" and Bob Dylan's "Shot of Love" are
worlds apart in terms of their diametrically opposing viewpoints. But they
were both recorded in Los Angeles during the last year, they are both
rock-and-roll, and they are both the work of musicians who have been
fascinated, at one time or another, with the blues and other "sinful"
music. Heard back to back, they suggest that rock is neither the Devil's
music nor the Lord's - it is capable of transmitting almost any message,
or (as sometimes seems to be the case) no message at all. And if the
fundamentalist Bob Dylan sounds tired and somewhat confused when compared
to the supercharged drive of the Gun Club, one should note that Mr. Dylan
is at least 15 years old er. What k ind of music the members of the Gun
Club and other punk bands will be making in 15 years' time remains to be
seen.


© 1981 The New York Times Company.


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