Title:        Recalling the overlooked life of Jeffrey Lee Pierce
Author:       Chris Morris
Source:       Billboard vol. 108, no. 16
Date:         April 20, 1996


RANKING JEFFREY LEE: About 17 years ago, we encountered a moonfaced, peroxided
kid flipping through the reggae bins at the Rhino Records store in Los
Angeles.

In short order, from a voluble flow of chatter that he punctuated by a
jittery laugh, we learned that this hyperactive individual was named Jeffrey
Lee Pierce. His opinionated prose was then appearing in the local punkzine
Slash under the handle "Ranking Jeffrey Lee." We also found out that he
was a devoted Blondie fan, a blues obsessive, and an aspiring musician.

A year later, he would form a band, the Gun Club, which went on to attain
surpassing notoriety in a city already noted for musical outlawry.

Pierce would go on to become a prophet without honor in his hometown, a
lionized expatriate in the U.K., and a restless world traveler more at
home in the Far East than in the punk clubs of L.A. or London.

He died March 31 at the age of 37, a week after suffering a brain hemorrhage
at his father's home in Salt Lake City.

Pierce ended his career as he began it, as an independent. In 1981, the
Gun Club issued its first album, "Fire Of Love," a bracing fusion of blues
and punk, on then indie Slash's subsidiary Ruby Records. In late 1993,
Triple X Records in L.A. released "Lucky Jim," a haunting record that reflected
Pierce's experiences in Japan and Vietnam, countries to which he traveled
several times in the early '90s.

We got to know Pierce well over the course of his career; he was interviewed
in this space in late '93, and e contributed liner notes to Triple X's
1994 reissue of his 1985 U.K. solo work, "Wildweed." We last saw him, gaunt
but still incessantly talkative, at an X show in L.A. last year.

Like many indie artists, Pierce was somewhat taken for granted in life;
as word of his shockingly sudden death spread, e found our phone alive
with calls from longtime friends and acquaintances, stunned by his passing.

Pierce's music, which could be either stirringly visionary or frustratingly
incoherent in concert, has come to exert an influence on modern rock bands
in the '90s. Listen, for example, to 16 Horsepower's current A&M debut,
"Sackcloth'n'Ashes": The Denver band's rampaging roots sound would be unthinkable
without the Gun Club's precedent-setting work.

Clearly, there was much to be learned from Pierce's life and perhaps something
to be gleaned from his premature death as well.

We cannot pretend to occupy any moral high ground, but it's obvious that
the road of excess did not ultimately lead to the palace of wisdom in Pierce's
case. He was a very sick man in the months before his death, and his long-term
addictions to alcohol and drugs undoubtedly hastened the cerebral accident
that ended his life.

As the obituaries that appeared in L.A.'s free weeklies last week were
quick to point out, Pierce died uninsured, leaving behind a mountain of
bills for emergency surgery and hospital care. Friends of his family say
a benefit concert to defray these costs will take place at the Viper Room
in L.A. at the end of the month.

His is a lot shared by almost every independent musician working today;
we pray that it won't take dozens of other tragedies of this kind to spur
the music industry at large to rectify this shameful state of affairs with
the establishment of a care facility for the less fortunate artists among
us.

All that's left is to say goodbye. At his worst, Pierce could be a difficult,
even impossible person who was very much a victim of his on devices; at
his best, he was an L.A. original who created some of the most vital and
incandescent music to emerge from the punk ferment of his day. Maddening
and brilliant all at once, there was really no one like him, and his loss
creates an unfillable vacuum. He was our friend, and we already miss hearing
that nervous chuckle of his.

© BPI Communications Inc. Apr 20, 1996


JUST CLICK "BACK" TO RETURN TO THE LIST OF ARTICLES