Somewhere along the lines, some writer in L.A. missed the real beat. He was looking for the “new sound,” which by 1981, might have no longer been punk rock. He was high on Ludes. He was trying to impress that goth girl in the corner who was… high on Ludes.
But the debut album by Tinseltown’s Gun Club, Fire of Love, which sees 40th anniversary reissue this month via L.A.’s own Blixa Sounds, has the style, force and ecclecticism to wield influence over an entire world of 1980s rock, from punk, to grunge to the Pixies.
And it’s true that we all got brainwashed into thinking it was New York that had the first “punk” scene in America. But around the time you account for Television working with Rolling Stones producer Andy Johns for their debut and Blondie singing “Love is so confusing / There’s no peace of mind”, you realize you’re not exactly dealing with a counterculture here. Without question, the American punk beacon that really held gravity in the style’s early days was Los Angeles, whether it was X and their straight-ahead, physical album titled after their dirty city, The Germs and Pat Smear whom Nirvana would eventually siphon for bass duties, the LA-based label SST administering at the forefront of the movement or ska-punk, to which the city would eventually give enlivened birth in the form of the all-black Fishbone.
The Gun Club dispatch on Fire of Love like a band that’s immersed within a zeitgeist and is trying to construct a document completely commensurate thereof, rather than, say, initiate a “new style,” which might have been more the objective of the music press at this time. Their guitar sound is basically exactly like Pink Flag-era Wire and their groove, when they’re rocking out straight ahead, is a close approximation of the Ramones’ rhythmic DNA. The band is “punk” insofar as they’re loud, they have that Ramones beat and the singer takes a wild, unscrupulous approach to lyricism. This being said, Fire of Love encapsulates an impressive smattering of styles, not least important of which would be the galloping, snare-on-the-upbeat drum pattern of “Preaching the Blues” that was really blatantly ripped off by the U-Men [1] on “Clubs” as well as the Pixies, whom I mention earlier, on “Vamos” [2]. Of course, for all I know, The Gun Club could be ripping it off of somebody before them but I’ve never heard it, suffice it to say.
Other examples of this music branching out into fresh, ventilating territory, stylistically speaking, would be “Jack on Fire,” which unbelievably, mocks Chicago blues with a jazz rhythm section, and “Cold Drink of Water,” which is approximately the opposite, like Weather Report covering Howlin’ Wolf with a Fender Stratocaster. This puppy is a reissue and this pi**ed me off for a couple reasons, of course, one of which would be that I’d prefer to be “cool” and have initially ingested this mutha on vinyl, in its original, unabridged state, the other of which was that I had a little anxiety about discerning what the original closeur was, which I of course eventually learned by looking at the album’s Wikipedia page. You’ll never believe me, but I actually guessed correctly: “Goodbye Johnny” has the patient, slightly melancholy feel of a classic finale (also the “goodbye” in the title should have been a clue, I suppose), with little pockets of energetic entropy seeming to presage the project’s cessation. Fire of Love is a punk album and it’s an exciting, unruly album, but at its core, it’s a rock and roll album, and this same fabric that precluded it from being the trendy “flavor of the week” pick upon its original spawning will help it be a viable, spinnable snapshot of American music for epochs and epochs to come.
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[1] Who in Sam He** are the U-Men? Probably the most important Seattle grunge band before Mudhoney.
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[2] And I think Black Francis and the gang might have had a slight affinity for their own song here seeing as they put it on both of their first two albums.