Shaking the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s hand was like holding a cold fish, which was 180 degrees from the intensity of his music. Over a generous handful of albums, Pierce’s band The Gun Club tore pages from Kerouac and grafted onto it a music that sounded like Hank Williams gone electric.
As a genre unto themselves, The Gun Club’s haunted punk blues was born on 1981’s Fire of Love. It is a careening blister of a debut that refracts everything from sun-baked Los Angeles to Elvis. Pierces’ tortured moans on “For the Love of Ivy” illuminate a record that refuses to sound dated.
