Fire of Love - the Gun Club

I remember when the Gun Club emerged in the mid 80s out of L.A., as it was a truly exciting time for independent and alternative music. And the Gun Club were a key part of them. I had the good fortune to see them live, at a small, but rather well regarded club in Hoboken, NJ and they had some majestic moments, moments in which they kicked into a great, noisy groove and elevated everyone there. Thinking back, I realize how much I miss them (and various other bands from that golden era).

Here, on their stunning debut, the Gun Club, led by hellbound lead singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce, offer 11 fine tracks of bluesy, countrified music. It makes sense to classify it as "roots punk," that is, as a mix of the underlying elements of rock (i.e., blues, country, rockabilly, African/Carribean voodoo music, etc.) filtered through the rebelliousness of punk. It sounded great back then, and it still sounds great. Highly recommended for listening while driving down a highway, particularly around sunset.

Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To

I was just listening to a bit of the brilliant group, the Spacemen 3, a group, about which, the All Music Guide states the following:

Spacemen 3 were psychedelic in the loosest sense of the word; their guitar explorations were colorfully mind-altering, but not in the sense of the acid rock of the '60s. Instead, the band developed its own minimalistic psychedelia, relying on heavily distorted guitars to clash and produce their own harmonic overtones; frequently, they would lead up to walls of distortion with overamplified acoustic guitars and synths. Often the band would jam on one chord or play a series of songs, all in the same tempo and key. Though this approach was challenging, often bordering on the avant-garde, Spacemen 3 nevertheless gained a dedicated cult following. After releasing several albums in the late '80s, the band fell apart after in 1991.

The Spacemen 3 are a band that liked to play with the textures, generally guitar driven ones, of their songs, resulting in a sort of "trance-like neo-psychedelia." And their songs, and LPs, as the above example demonstrates, simulated an altered state of consciousness associated with drug use. The band, while certainly not the first band of counterculturalists to turn to pharmacueticals for inspiration, were to rock music something like what William S. Burroughs was to literature, with the LP Sound of Confusion being their Junky and, I suppose, Perfect Perscription, the record playing on my CD spinner downstairs, being their Naked Lunch. It should be noted that this recording evokes everything from Lou Reed to gospel to Sun Ra filtered through the MC5.