Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Celebrating Handsome Dick Manitoba on his 70th birthday. —Ed.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but LPs? A whole different story. One glance at the cover of The Dictators’ 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!—which features roadie turned singer and “Secret Weapon” Handsome Dick Manitoba hamming it up in a wrestling outfit and a 200-watt smile, resplendent in Jewfro and dark sunglasses, an outrageous red glitter jacket bearing his name hanging from a gym locker nearby—and you know you’re in the presence of something truly outrageous and great.

Oh, how I love The Dictators. The New Yawk proto-punkers may have produced only one brilliant LP, namely Go Girl Crazy! (which sold like shit), but talk about influential; you can draw a direct line between it to The Ramones and straight to The Beastie Boys. All three bands have the same smartass “fight for your right to party” punk attitude; they all deliver tons of snotty and hilarious one-liners; and they all use great guitar riffs to deliver the goods. If The Ramones (who later did a version of “California Sun” off Go Girl Crazy!) and The Beastie Boys didn’t cop their entire shtick from The Dictators’ debut, I’m Michael Bolton, mulleted version.

But to be honest I don’t give a shit whether Go Girl Crazy! was the Sgt. Pepper of proto-punk and the Rosetta Stone for hundreds of bands that came later. All that matters to me is that Go Girl Crazy! is one of the rockingest, funniest, and most gleeful albums ever made. And it’s good-natured, too. I used the word “snotty” above, but The Dictators are a friendly lot, and as a result get away with a lot. You would expect songs like “Master Race Rock” and “Back to Africa” to be prime examples of the deliberate punk outrage, but both turn out to be just the opposite of what they appear to be, namely funny and friendly. Why, these guys don’t even swear; co-lead vocalist Andy “Adny” Shernoff says “heck!”

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Jacksonville, Florida’s Molly Hatchet released their self-titled debut LP in September 1978, less than a year after the plane carrying hometown heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd glided, gas tanks on empty, into a swamp outside Gillsburg, Mississippi, and more than anyone else they carried that band’s brand of Southern Rock into the future.

Over the course of the six albums (although the first two stand head and shoulders above the rest) they recorded during their peak—well maybe I should five, because their last one, 1984’s The Deed Is Done is a mostly a sorry spectacle—they produced a small but respectable body of songs that would have made Ronnie Van Zant proud. They were never Skynyrd’s equal—not a rock band in America was—but as the songs on 1998’s Super Hits (I love cheesy best-of compilations) prove, they learned from the best, and what’s more had a few tricks up their sleeve that their star-crossed forebearers didn’t.

The band’s history is complicated by the fact that their grit and grits lead singer Danny Joe Brown, who exuded pure swamp charisma, left the band after the band’s second LP (1979’s excellent Flirtin’ with Disaster) and didn’t return until the band’s fifth (1983’s No Guts…No Glory) and his replacement, Jimmy Farrar, simply didn’t have the same fire in the belly. And the compilation itself is flawed for the reason I stated above—when a band releases two tremendous albums and the compilers are left with having to include cuts from the other, lesser albums, you’re left to do some sorry compromising.

And it’s actually worse than that—I’ll be damned if I can understand why they only include the title track of 1979’s Flirtin’ with Disaster on the compilation while ignoring other great songs from the album like “Whiskey Man” and “Boogie No More,” while including two tracks from the largely lamentable The Deed Is Done. I’d blame it on bad moonshine, but the corporate types at Epic Records hardly seem your standard white lightning types.

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Celebrating Brian Downey in advance of his 73rd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

You wanna hear a miracle? I lived for almost five-and-a-half decades without ever hearing Jailbreak, or any other Thin Lizzy album for that matter. Here vocalist/bassist and chief songwriter Phil Lynott and his Irish compatriots put out a truly tremendous LP in America’s Bicentennial Year, not to mention a parcel of other great LPs, and what was I doing? Listening to Elton John and John Denver and England Dan and John Ford Coley, any band basically with a guy named John in it. If Debbie Gibson’s middle name been John, I would have listened to her too.

I would love to be able to say I simply wasn’t into hard rock back then, but I owned albums by Bad Company, UFO (UFO? Me? Inexplicable!), Robin Trower, and Foghat, so that’s sheer bunk. But there’s no point in crying over guilty milk, and it’s never too late to make up for past mistakes, that is unless you’re Lee Harvey Oswald or that chimpanzee (name: Travis) who ripped a woman’s face off in 2009, and I’m neither of those personages.

So here I am making up for atoning for my inexplicable oversight, and listening to Jailbreak which mixes tremendous twin-guitar hard rockers with sweeter fair, all of which I love with the possible exception of “Cowboy Song”—in which Lynott, a black Irishman, plays rodeo cowpoke.

But I take that back. “Cowboy Song” may start slowly, but its guitar solos are tremendous and Lynott’s vocals are impassioned (especially when he sings, “It’s okay amigo/Just let me go/Riding in the rodeo”) and the jam at song’s end is a bono fido guitar marvel. Turns out I love the damn thing! Just as I love everything about the LP, except for its cover. Too sci-fi for my decidedly earthbound tastes.

Thin Lizzy was founded in 1969 in Dublin by two former members of Van Morrison’s Them and two members of the band Orphanage (which reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s quip about orphans, to wit: “To lose one parent is misfortune; to lose two parents is sheer carelessness.”). The band moved permanently to London in 1971, and recorded their eponymous debut LP that same year.

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I have never seen a musical situation so dismal that it couldn’t be made worse by the arrival of a vibraphone. Its insufferably bright, chipper, and laid-back tones are, to people (like myself) with highly strung nervous systems, a form of Chinese water torture. I recently watched a mid-seventies Frank Zappa concert on television and my chief takeaway was that Frank Zappa is a pretentious, smirking twit, which to be honest I already knew. But, and this is important, it was Ruth Underwood’s “vibes” that made me turn the television off. I thought I was going to go mad.

The vibraphone is—and this is a gross simplification—a motorized advance on the marimbas, and dates back to the mid-Twenties. And the demoralizing thing is that when I wrote about my hate for the instrument on Facebook numerous people wrote to tell me I was full of shit, which naturally led me to the conclusion that I have a more highly developed sense of musical taste than they do.

To me vibraphonists are committing a hate crime in the name of art by means of felt-tipped mallets, and the terrible fact, the unconscionable fact, is that they are destroying lives with their felt-tipped mallets, which they invariably use in a “cool jazz” context that is anathema to anyone who prefers their jazz loud, hard, and preferably free. For people such as yours truly vibraphonists with their felt-tipped mallets are not musicians at all but rather the producers of a sound that leads inevitably to universal moral decay and from universal moral decay to insanity and imbecility and ultimately to the end of everything. But perhaps I exaggerate.

The list of notable vibraphone criminals is a long one, and includes such hallowed names as Red Norvo, Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Cal Tjader, and Bobby Hutcherson. But the most ruthless and lacking in pity for the unutterable suffering of humanity is Gary Burton. Burton is an innovative giant of the instrument, in so far as he was the first vibraphonist to realize that he could double the pain he was inflicting on the feckless ears of the world by wielding four mallets (in what has been described as a “pianistic technique” inspired by pianist Bill Evans) instead of two. And to add to his resume as a bad human being he is also credited as one of the founders of jazz fusion.

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Remembering Eddie Van Halen in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

What to say about the passing of Eddie Van Halen? Sad? Tragic? Heartbreaking? If the words are trite ones, it’s because death is the mother of a vast brood of cliches. What I’ll carry with me forever is his impish grin in the video for “Jump.” Can a smile sum up a man’s life? It’s the smile of a show-off making it look easy when you know damn well it isn’t, but there’s nothing smug about it. He’s simply bequeathing us a gift, the giving of which makes him happy. As for the fireworks he produced with his guitar, they speak for themselves.

I fell in love with Van Halen as a result of that video, which many–including my lovely other half–view as a sell-out. But the song’s sheer exuberance won me over, and led me to do something I would never have done otherwise–go back and listen to, and fall in love with, the band’s earlier albums.

One of said albums is 1980’s Women and Children First, which I put in third place in the Van Halen discography behind their self-titled 1978 debut and 1984’s 1984. On Women and Children First Pasadena’s greatest ever metal band pulverize the competition–Eddie shows off his hair-raising chops while David Lee Roth does his patented Borscht Belt shtick, and drummer Alex Van Halen and bass player Michael Anthony make like a steamroller with swing. In short, it’s business as usual.

The LP’s two opening tracks are its best. “And the Cradle Will Rock” is one of the heaviest songs in the Van Halen catalogue–less blitzkrieg than juggernaut, it boasts (as do the other songs) a guitar solo I’m sure has led many a lesser guitarist to take up the tuba, and a message (“Well, they say it’s kinda frightnin’/How this younger generation swings”) that’s resounded the whole way back to the origins of rock ’n’ roll and beyond.

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In my dream Jackson Browne approaches me, drenched in turquoise and denim, a pretender bearing precious gifts I do not want. Jackson says unto me, “I am the conscious of my generation. The anatomist of the Me Generation, of their lost dreams and pretenses and soul-killing emptiness. I sing about Yuppies—have you heard about them?—for yuppies, and my music is sweet and sad and let’s face it a tad bit boring. Here’s a song called “Disco Apocalypse.” Take it. The end is nigh.”

Jackson Browne wasn’t the best of the seventies El Lay folk and country rock crop. He certainly wasn’t its sharpest social observer—I would grant that honor to Don Henley (yeah, that’s right) or Joni Mitchell. He’s always been far too cerebral, too inward looking. He’s a serious man, and a philosopher of sorts, and a pessimistic one at that. His “The Pretender,” with its hollow men leading affluent lives of quiet desperation, is proof.

But then again the LA musical community was awash in pessimists. They knew they had it good and they took full advantage of the fact—hedonism was the order of the day—but they also knew they were living in a dystopia called the Hotel California. And Lord knows he’s never been the City of Angels’ most charismatic artist—Mr. Excitement he ain’t. No, he is (and I’m not undermining his gifts) a craftsman of solid but hardly supercharged songs played with consummate skill by a superb cast of supporting musicians. The man has always known how to put together a great band.

Browne was on a streak when he released 1980’s Hold Out. He’d released the excellent The Pretender in 1976 and followed it up with the iconic live album Running on Empty the following year, and both cemented his early promise as a songwriter to be contended with. He was no thriller, and he was a humorless git, but he had his finger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist—of the Me Generation putting away childish things like countercultural community and settling down to the job of getting rich.

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On 1976’s The Roaring Silence Manfred Mann’s Earth Band leaves Earth behind in a progressive rock-et ship powered by pure synthesizer shlock. You can call the results abominable—I do—but they’re also entertaining in an over-the-top pop prog way.

The Manfred Mann Earth Band directed their low-rent, high-energy version of progressive rock at the kids in the cheap seats, and I’m betting the kids loved it. The Earth Band weren’t as technically proficient as Yes, as rigidly neoclassical (although they have their mortifying moments) as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or as austere and melodically sophisticated as Pink Floyd. The closest comparison is to The Alan Parsons Project. The music on The Roaring Silence isn’t half as smart, subtle, and sophisticated as it thinks it is, but that’s part of its sick charm. This is art rock for people with no appreciation for good art. It’s dumb. Very dumb. So dumb I sometimes find myself rooting for it.

By the time the Manfred Mann Earth Band got around to recording The Roaring Silence they’d gone through numerous other phases, including one during which they seemed to think they were the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And Mann and Company’s cosmo-futurist jazz leanings linger on here, united, alas, with depressing and sometimes inadvertently hilarious results, to the classical past in the form of the music of Schubert, Stravinsky, and Philip Hayes, whoever the hell he is. (They’d had the same intentions on 1973’s Solar Fire, so it’s not as if they were on to something completely novel and horrific.)

So yeah. If an unholy fusion of space jazz and classical music filtered through the pop (and populist) sensibility of the British Invasion veteran who gave us “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and some cool Dylan and Springsteen covers is your idea of a good time, The Roaring Silence could be your cup of progressive shlock. If not you’re in for some very real pain and suffering, bookended by the Earth Band’s pair of Springsteen covers, “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirits in the Night,” although you’ll only get the second if you buy the 1998 re-issue of the album.

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Remembering Robert Palmer in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

I first heard Robert Palmer’s Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley the morning after my beloved alma mater, Shippensburg University, held its annual “Spring Fling” in a field in the middle of nowhere. Every year people would spend the day getting wonderfully wasted, and every year a tiny minority would disappear into the woods abutting the field for “a brief nap,” only to wake up the next morning marooned, like Robert Crusoe with a killer hangover.

I pulled this stunt one year—and figured I’d spend the remainder of my life out there all by my lonesome, living on squirrel meat and wearing bark clothing—when lo and behold another guy staggered out of the woods. And not only did he have a car, he had Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley playing on 8-track. I fell in love with it immediately, despite having a head that felt like one of those cartoon anarchist bombs that look like a bowling ball with a sizzling wick coming out of it.

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a million miles of difference between Palmer’s mid-1970s work and the swill—by which I mean the likes of “Addicted to Love,” “Simply Irresistible,” and “Can We Still Be Friends,” the Todd Rundgren tune that never fails to make me vomit from the ears—that constitutes his chief legacy to pop culture. And don’t even get me started on his stint with a few Duran Duraners in The Power Station. But the early Palmer, ah—that’s a different story. He had impeccable taste in studio musicians, could write a good song, and most importantly, he knew a great cover when he heard one.

Palmer’s solo career followed a stint with Vinegar Joe, the feckless English R&B band that released three forgettable (and I’m talking so forgettable I never even knew they existed) LPs for Island Records. Palmer obviously had friends in high places, or made a pact with the Devil, because Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, his 1974 debut, is chock-a-block with big talents.

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Celebrating Jim Stafford on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

The list of famous country novelty songs is a long one. There have been hundreds–probably thousands–of them. Just off the top of my head: Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” Loretta Lynn’s “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” Mark Chesnutt’s “Bubba Shot the Jukebox,” and my dad’s all-time favorite (he sang it all the time), Mac Davis’ “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” Any half-decent country fan could reel off dozens more.

But when it comes to country novelty tune artists, Jim Stafford could just be the king. I grew up listening to “Spiders & Snakes,” “Wildwood Weed,” and “I Got Stoned and I Missed It,” and while I’d never kissed a girl or smoked a joint in my life, I loved the obvious spirit of fun behind all of ‘em.

Stafford has released only three albums, and since 1990 he’s dedicated his energy to operating and performing at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri (no vanity there, and by the way: should you find yourself in Branson, be sure to stop by Dolly Partons’ Stampede!). Don’t know if he’s plain lazy or doesn’t need the money, but Stafford hasn’t released an LP since 1993. (He has done some acting; he played the role of Buford in 1984’s immortal Bloodsucker from Outer Space.)

Jim Stafford spawned four Top 40 hits, and if there’s one word to describe the LP it’s versatility. You get some swamp rock, a faux-lounge number, a couple of good ole’ country numbers, a blues parody, a rockabilly pastiche, and a couple of songs that pack what can only be described as a hard rock punch. And that “variety” also extends to Stafford’s knack for creating personae; he’s a shapeshifter who is, by turn, a sly hayseed, an aging rockabilly fan, a very confused courter, a Louisiana oracle, and so on.

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Celebrating Wayne Coyne in advance of his 63rd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Yeah, yeah, I know. The Flaming Lips’ 1999 LP The Soft Bulletin is brilliant. A masterpiece released just as the sun was going down on the Twentieth Century. But for my money—which unfortunately happens to be in worthless depression era German Reichsmarks—the Oklahoma band released its finest work between 1986 and 1995, before they went and got themselves domesticated.

The Soft Bulletin is a warm and fuzzy album for warm and fuzzy people looking for an uplifting musical experience. Earlier Flaming Lips albums featured songs like “Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants to Live Forever),” Unconsciously Screamin,'” Jesus Shootin’ Heroin,” and “Evil Will Prevail.”

If The Soft Bulletin is a hug-your-neighbor ecstasy trip, LPs like 1989’s Telepathic Surgery and 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head are LSD trips—you might find instant enlightenment or, conversely, locked in a Porta-John at your local music festival, because demons are pursuing you and you need somewhere to hide.

I attended a few Soft Bulletin-era shows, and they were joyous affairs—Grateful Dead concerts minus the home tapers. The concertgoers around me had the glassy-eyed look of true converts. The only song that’s ever left me glassy-eyed is Sammy Johns’ “Chevy Van,” which ought to qualify as a world religion. Your Flaming Lips idolater is a fanatic, and fanatics can be very dangerous people.

Which is why I prefer albums like 1989’s Telepathic Surgery. It doesn’t hurt that the LP’s title sounds like the name of a Blue Öyster Cult song. But what really wins me over are song titles like “Hare-Krishna Stomp Wagon,” “Hell’s Angel’ Cracker Factory,” and “Redneck School of Technology.” And the songs are as strange as the titles. A fair number of Flaming Lips fans would hide in a Porta-John to escape them.

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Let me give you a piece of life advice, pardner. Be real careful when you tell people you’re a Commodores fan. Because before you know it people will slap the “Lionel Richie Fan” label on you, and that’s bad, real bad. Worse, they’ll assume you’re talking about the Commodores of “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady” and that’s fatal. Forget about that job promotion. Forget about your friends. They’re gone. Forget about your kids getting into that elite pre-school. They’re headed straight for drug addiction and rehab, and they’re only four. And forget about your significant other. Gone too. A person can only bear so much shame.

No, if you want to come out of the Commodores closet without going down the commode you have to be mighty specific, and tell everyone you know—in writing preferably—that you’re exclusively a fan of the funky R&B side of the Commodores that brought us such immortal tunes as “Machine Gun,” “Brick House,” and “I Feel Sanctified.” You can even throw in their homage to Marvin Gaye, “Nightshift.” It’s not funk but it passes muster. In short, “Slippery When Wet,” yes, “Just to Be Close to You” no, no, no, no, no. You don’t want your preschooler pawning your shit for narcotics, do you?

There’s a relatively clear line of demarcation between Commodores good and evil—it was the early Commodores that had the funk in them, although they were still good for the occasional dance classic later on—”Brick House” didn’t come along until 1978, when the band had pretty much gone over to the dark side of easy-listening treacle. But if you want to be sure you’re getting the right stuff you should sit your ears down and listen to their 1974 debut Machine Gun, It’s all funk and R&B all the time, and there isn’t a single sappy song on it. Even “There’s a Song in Your Heart”—an unpromising title if ever I’ve heard one—is funky brother.

The title track alone should give pause to anyone looking to dismiss the Commodores out of hand—it’s one of the premier funk-disco instrumentals of the era, a clavinet-powered dance track that boogies up a storm. The title says it all—Milan Williams’s rapid fire clavinet will fill your reservations about the Commodores with bullet holes. It’s a slick and sleek machine, this one, pure Motown swinging, and it includes a colossally super-funky segment so supernaturally cool the Beastie Boys stole it for “Hey Ladies.”

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Remembering Clarence Clemons, born on this day in 1942. —Ed.

Well here it is—the most operatic, overblown, bombastic, and yes wonderful slab of vinyl that has ever caused my ears to cry hallelujah. On 1975’s Born to Run a cocksure Bruce Springsteen went right over the top, blew a fuse, and tried to pack as much of the majestic mystery of the New Jersey night as he could onto one LP. It was a desperate gamble but it paid off in spades, and we’re all the richer for it.

On such Phil Spector-worthy epics as “Thunder Road,” “Backstreets,” and especially “Jungleland” Springsteen risked all trying to say all, and the results are indeed awesome. To a small town kid like me, Born to Run captured the wild and inchoate delirium of coming of age—of wanting to go out and explode like a skyrocket in the warm summer night. Is the whole contraption at the risk of overheating? Sure. But listening to this album never fails to return me to that innocent kid desperate for experience, and for that alone I will always love it.

To more jaded ears Born to Run may have sounded hokey, but therein lies the genius of Bruce Springsteen; on Born to Run he’s as shameless a romantic of the American Night as Jack Kerouac, and he captures the wild and heedless excitement of being young and mad with an unquenchable thirst for everything. On Born to Run Springsteen says yes to the night and to all it represents. “Roll down the window/And let the wind blow back your hair,” he sings in “Thunder Road,” “Well the night’s busting open/These two lanes will take us anywhere.” On Born to Run Springsteen sings of the possibilities, and of risking it all to run the backstreets, and I’m not certain if anyone has ever come even close to doing a finer job of doing so.

Springsteen does nothing by half-measures here; he howls, barks, and emotes like a mother—just listen to his wildcat yowl on “Backstreets” and all of the dead-end passion he pours into the immortal title track. In a gushing overflow of pure street poetry he tells us there’s no place left to hide, calls himself a tramp, and delivers the greatest “Hup dat!” in the history of rock’n’roll. This isn’t music—it’s a fever dream at the end of the night, and as pure a howl of sheer animal hunger as you’re ever likely to hear.

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Celebrating Jimmy Page on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

So if this Hobbit Trilogy of a ditty ain’t the greatest epic in the history of rock’n’roll, what is? It contains multitudes! Encompasses whole mythopoeic civilizations of stargazing shrub worshippers! And oh, it’s got three sections each of which is a wheel, which means it ain’t a stairway, it’s a tricycle! And if you hop aboard said tricycle it’ll ride you straight to heaven, which will save you from having to take the stairs!

“Stairway to Heaven” is both an architectural folly and the fullest and most baroque realization of the rock’n’roll dream–if Chuck Berry’s songs are street-ready hot rods, “Stairway”’s the fucking Sistine Chapel set down on the chassis of an Oldsmobile 442.

Written in part at the band’s Welsh hideaway Bron-Yr-Aur in 1970 following Led Zeppelin’s fifth American tour and in part at recording sessions at Headley Grange, Hampshire, “Stairway to Heaven” is–to employ yet another metaphor–a majestic and ever-widening river, one fed in turns by the tributaries of Renaissance music, English folk, heavy metal, and progressive rock.

“Stairway to Heaven” was famously never released as a single, but two U.S. promotional discs were issued in very small numbers, so collectors start your engines. Of course FM radio played the shit out of it anyway–I’m talking to the tune of an estimated 2,874,000 times by 1991, which if you were to listen to all 2,874,000 radio plays back to back would take you 44 YEARS! So start listening!

No wonder so many people hate the fucking song. If familiarity breeds contempt, for some folks “Stairway to Heaven” breeds homicidal ideation. You never hear drunks shouting “Play ‘Stairway to Heaven’!” at live shows, probably cuz they’re afraid the band will take ‘em up on it.

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Remembering David Bowie, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Having emerged more or less psychically shattered from his disastrous sojourn in Los Angeles—where he is said to have subsisted on a diet of cocaine, peppers, and milk—David Bowie took the extraordinary step of relocating himself to West Berlin, that Cold War capital of duplicity, intrigue, and espionage, to escape a galloping case of paranoia. And it was there, having absorbed both the motorik sounds of Krautrock and the ambient explorations of Brian Eno, he produced 1977’s “Heroes,” the only one of his much-touted “Berlin Trilogy” to be wholly recorded in that city.

“Heroes”—which was recorded at Hansa Studio by the Wall a short 500 yards from that deadly monument to the Cold War the Berlin Wall—is art rock at its best, and I’m not just talking about its largely ambient and instrumental B-Side. Bowie didn’t just soak up the sounds of West Berlin, he soaked up its feel, and by so doing bequeathed us an LP that is by turns defiant, taut with menace, and eerily calm.

“Heroes” is Bowie the human synthesizer at the top of his game; if any rocker understood T.S. Eliot’s adage that good poets borrow while great poets steal it was the Thin White Duke. But everything he stole he made his own, and this is especially true of the various sonic experiments on “Heroes.”

His ambient exercises, for example, are far more dynamic than those of Eno’s, and I say hooray for that. As for the LPs more traditional cuts, they’re extraordinary. The title track, for example, may be the pinnacle of Bowie’s long and justly celebrated career. Bowie’s vocals, riding atop a mesmerizing but sinuous drone, become increasingly impassioned as the song builds and builds, and the results are utterly enthralling.

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The Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a purveyor of American myths. Dark myths—of long dead trains, ghosts on the highway, bad voodoo, murder and fire spirits and hellhounds on your trail. His was a vision of a haunted America where every day is judgment day, an America stained by blood and tormented by sins for which there is no forgiveness, and he translated that vision into a totally unique and new musical form—a raw punk blues infused with the imagery of our continent’s violent past. This alone set him apart from an LA punk scene set in a chaotic, dystopian present, one with no past and no future. Pierce’s vision was, ironically, closer to that of the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead than to the Germs’ (GI). A taste for the past makes for strange bedfellows.

Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s fixation on the American deathtrip was odd indeed when one considers he was the one-time President of the Blondie Fan Club. He would bring a Bible on stage and preach fire and brimstone like a clay-eating, itinerant Pentecostal minister. In his mind he dreamed fugitive visions of evil going-ons in a rural South that was as foreign to him as it was to that other prophet of a bad moon rising, John Fogerty. It makes no sense to romanticize the guy. He was just a kid with a vivid imagination who liked Blondie. He wasn’t one of his characters, although he shared their taste for self-destruction. He wasn’t a myth. He didn’t die in the back seat of a 1952 Cadillac like Hank Williams. He was living with his mom. There’s something commonplace and domestic and touching about that.

The Gun Club’s debut album, 1981’s Fire of Love, is a revelation. Its primitive rhythms, raw sound and dark poetry spell out a vision of a savage, timeless America, one you won’t find on any roadmap. “Sex Beat” and “She’s Like Heroin to Me” are the standouts, carnal and dangerous. “Sex Beat” is a primal blast of feral punk blues that hits you straight where you live. A simple guitar riff and jungle drums propel Pierce’s shot-to-the-solar plexus vocals—when he sings “so you can move, move!” then follows it up with that “Sex beat… go!” it’s as exciting as hearing some long gone wild man in a Southern juke joint of the imagination. “She’s Like Heroin to Me” is all propulsion and slide guitar; it’s surprisingly melodic and is about a woman as seductive and addictive as a strong narcotic—she may be the only woman in the world that comes with a needle and a spoon. And Pierce, as always, is a live wire—the man’s frantic vocals shoot off sparks.

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