Title:        THE BACK HALF: LOST SOUL (Blondie's "No Exit" review)
Author:       Richard Cook
Source:       New Statesman
Date:         February 26, 1999


Listening to the new Blondie CD, No Exit (Beyond), I was musing on the
resonance of yet another rock' n' roll comeback, this time from the punchiest
American pop band of its day. No Exit isn't a bad record, but it feels a bit
heavy and clenched, as if the sheer effort of fitting into their old clothes
was strangling the band. Then I got to track nine, "Under the Gun", and when I
looked at the sleeve booklet, I realised that the song was a dedication by the
composer, Chris Stein, to the singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce.

I thought back 16, maybe 17 years. I am sitting in a bar with Jeffrey, in a
modest English town, where he and his group are playing for small English
audiences. Not yet 25, he is an amiable, puppyish figure, with straggly blond
hair and an unquenchable enthusiasm for music. He is the frontman for a group
called the Gun Club, which is making a bit of noise as a coming thing. Their
sound filters a coarse blues feel through the thrash and clatter of American
"new wave", the kind of catch-all term which in the 1990s would become "indie
rock". The Gun Club aren't much like their contemporaries, who would rather
take off from the urbane slickness of Talking Heads or, indeed, Blondie. What
Pierce is interested in is the rural howl of authentic Southern blues, and how
it might sound in his hands - the hands of a polite, middle-class California
kid - and in an idiom of blasted, amplified guitars and drums.

Jeffrey is an unlikely devotee of American music. At school he sang in
homespun productions of things like Oklahoma!, and he remembers that kind of
stuff with much the same affection as the old black music that he spent time
researching at the Library of Congress. He proudly shows me a copy of an LP a
fan gave him a couple of nights ago, a collection of very early tracks by the
Fletcher Henderson Orchestra from the beginning of the 1920s. I doubt if any
of Jeffrey's peers even have any idea who Fletcher Henderson was. I look at my
watch and realise the group are due on stage in a matter of minutes and we are
not even at the club yet. I have to cajole him out of the bar and we walk to
the venue, singing snatches of West Side Story along the way.

I never saw him again after that night, and it is a long time since I've
listened to the music of the Gun Club, who never made much headway, despite
several strong records. Chris Stein produced one of them for his Animal label,
but the connection offered the group no luck by association. Jeffrey had a
difficult time of it for the rest of an intense but muddled career, and was
often hindered by a taste for alcohol and other temptations. In 1996, he died
in Salt Lake City of a cerebral blood clot.

"Under the Gun" isn't exactly a wistful farewell; it's actually one of the
bounciest tracks on No Exit. Without the dedication I would hardly have
guessed its subject, since the lyrics encrypt only a couple of references to a
lost soul. Popular music, which ought to be life-affirming, always hesitates
when it addresses death, and Blondie's response, however heartfelt Stein is,
feels almost throwaway. The music of the Gun Club had a lot of mortality in
it, but unlike such lugubrious harbingers of doom as Nick Cave, Pierce and his
various line-ups played like men looking to spit in death's eye.

Jeffrey loved music in the raw: he and his group played ferociously that
night, and although his subsequent records have largely been forgotten, he
deserves better. Now he has his name on a top-ten album, and today, I remember
him.

© 1999 Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd. (UK)


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