The Gun Club - Fire of Love
#383
By Craig Fitzgerald
August 31 1981
Gun Club
Fire of Love
Genre: LA Punk
Allen’s Rating: 3 out of 5
Craig's Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Sex Beat
Preaching the Blues
She's Like Heroin To Me
Ghost on the Highway
Back when I first got into rockabilly, I picked up a compilation from the Hootenanny car show/music festival in the late 1990s. For the next five years or so, that single compilation had an exponential effect on the music that I was listening to. I bought records from almost every band on it, and then figured out who was in those bands, and what other projects they were involved in, and who the musicians were that they were inspired by and it was like this never-ending family tree that just led to more and more great music at every turn.
It's similar to how I discovered the Gun Club.
In the mid-2000s, I was doing a lot of reading up on the LA music scene of the late 1970s, and I'd watched stuff like X: The Unheard Music and Penelope Spheris's The Decline of Western Civilization, so I started to obsess a bit about the bands that came out of that time and place. I listened to everything I could from bands like the Blasters, X, the Go-Gos. And in the summer of 1985, I played the Repo Man soundtrack until the tape wore out.
But the Gun Club was a band I wasn't too familiar with until probably 10 years ago. It might have been even later, after I'd read John Doe's excellent book, and maybe they were mentioned there.
Regardless WHEN I first heard it, the first time I played it, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
That opening track, holy shit.
Sex Beat is exactly how rock and roll is supposed to sound. Anybody with even rudimentary guitar, bass, drumming or vocal skills could put a decent cover of that song together in a couple of hours.
That's how this entire record is. These are exceedingly simple songs, played by people who barely knew how to play instruments.
You always hear that kind of thing when famous musicians talk about their early days, but it's mostly bullshit. Pete Townshend was a hell of a banjo player long before the Who ever came along.
But it's 100% true on this record, and you can hear it.
Yeah, it's "punk," I guess, but it's more than that. Like The Blasters -- who got lumped into the punk scene, too -- this is American roots music. There are Robert Johnson covers just like on your favorite Led Zeppelin albums, but they hadn't been studying how blues music worked from the age of 10. This was played by people who had figured out the 1-4-5 chord progression like three weeks before.
This is one- and two-chord Delta blues through a filthy, late-1970s LA filter.
Jeffrey Lee Pierce said they made this record for $2,500 in 48 hours and man, it has that sense of immediacy to it. He hated this record after it came out, but judging by the rest of what this band, and then he as a solo artist put out, this is rightly the thing he should be remembered for. From here on out, the Gun Club was an ever fluctuating collection of musicians that never could really get their shit together. I'm sure some of those gigs were great, and some were terrible, but this record is a knockout from start to finish. My only complaint is that there are a couple of 5:00-plus tracks here that could've been cut down to add other songs, but even those I can't complain about too much. For the Love of Ivy is killer, and it's about twice as long as most of the songs I love to listen to.
If you listen to one thing on this record, make it Sex Beat. You'll find yourself singing it for the rest of your life.
https://open.spotify.com/album/3OrGW7wRB8dIZ8EYrAkkWW?si=iR6ya_CJSnW40eBxHOM5IA
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