Jeffrey Lee Pierce established himself as American post-punk’s Gram Parsons; a musical prodigy undermined by heroin fueled bouts of self-hatred, paranoid jealousy and rage. He used his voice like a slide guitar, cutting through the swampy blues, country, jazz, punk spiced gumbo like a soaring Coltrane solo. Some nights he was everything the records suggested. On others he came across as a dumpy, peroxide bloated Debbie Harry wannabe who couldn’t give two shits about his music as he fingered random, chicken-scratch guitar solos and mumbled non-sequiturs about Jimmy Hendrix, the club’s sound system and El Salvador. In 1983 a Gun Club gig was a hit or miss affair and another great album unlikely.

The Gun Club’s other founder, Kid Congo Powers, had proven his own mojo as Brian Gregory’s replacement in The Cramps. Originally drafted by Lux and Ivy for his dead-on imitations of Gregory’s psychotic noise guitar solos, Kid Congo soon found his own voice. The Cramps began to swing slowly as drummer Nick Knox and Kid Congo established their own telekinetic bond as rock’s premier fuzz drenched rhythm section. Many consider Kid’s three year stint with The Cramps to be the band’s finest hour and the albums Psychedelic Jungle and Smell of Female have been canonical texts for every subsequent psychedelic revival. Kid Congo leaving The Cramps at this point was unlikely.

The unlikely did happen. In the winter of 1984 it was announced – with Lux and Ivy’s enthusiastic blessing – that Kid Congo Powers would be leaving The Cramps and returning to his rightful place in The Gun Club. The only remaining question was whether or not the album would live up the anticipatory hype.

The title, The Las Vegas Story, is a product Pierce’s fascination with the seedy side of America’s brightest cities. Pierce’s Vegas is the seedy, twelve dollar a night motels half a block from the Greyhound terminal where busted gamblers hole up after coming up snake-eyes. It is the Vegas of jaded, forty year old prostitutes turning ten dollar tricks. It is a portrait of America painted by one who considered himself a product of the underside of the American dream. Challenging America’s myth of itself had become both cliche’ and commonplace. Springsteen had already played this for all it was worth and Pierce was walking a very fine line here. But it is Pierce’s own soul tormenting demons and internal contradictions that make the album so damned
compelling. 

“This is the Las Vegas Story, the story of a couple of great…” the opening monologue begins, only to be interrupted by Terry Graham’s variation on the Bo Diddley beat as Pierce and Congo in full force. This is the missing Gun Club song, circa 1981, Pierce and Kid’s original
vision. It is their version of Robert Johnson’s pact with the devil, only in this case he doesn’t leave them unmolested as he waits patiently for the bill to come due. No, this time he walks alongside Jeffrey Lee in various guises, mocking him from the side of the stage and showing no mercy. In the second stanza he sings, “I prayed to Elvis on my knees, to take this thing from around me” we picture the bloated Vegas monstrosity be became in the months before his death. One more verse and chorus before the band brings it down momentarily as we imagine Kid Congo kneeling before his Fender Twin in supplication. The feedback surges, winding slowly at first like a turbine until it is there; full force yet understated, and the listener first realizes that, yes, this is The Gun Club as it was meant to be.

The theme of everlasting torment continues with the second song, “Eternally Is Here,”. The slide guitars make their first appearance here and Jeffrey Lee trades solos with The Blasters Dave Alvin, who fills the role of the obligatory guest appearance from a more popular group. Alvin trades solos again (this time with Kid Congo) on the next song, “The Stranger in Our Town”, a haunting song from the point of view of a necrophile serial killer. Pierce’s voice cracks like an old hillbilly yodeler as he sings the line, “There’s a stranger in our town, pulls out a punks spinal cord, piss and blood on the sidewalk of hearts.” 

The first side ends with what is arguably The Gun Club’s best song, “My Dreams.” Pierce is defiant and accusatory in the opening verses, delivering lines like “Who gave you the right to give out the rights and to intrude upon my dreams and sell out my eyes.” The chorus
approaches poetry as it declares, “You can’t take my dreams, you can’t take my dreams, You can’t take and steal from this body.” Yet, by the end of the song we realize that the defiance is too little too late. The singer’s already been violated, her soul raped repeatedly. One pictures the singer’s shoulders heaving as she cries out, “They were supposed to be my dreams…”

Side Two opens with two covers, Pierce’s interpretation of Pharoah Sanders, “The Master Plan” and Gershwin’s “My Man is Gone Now” from Porgy and Bess. The subtle change of gender hinted at in “My Dreams” is explicit here as Pierce sings perhaps the only straight, traditional blues in the Gun Club’s body of work. Early on, with their version of Johnson’s “Preaching Blues” The Gun Club deconstructed the genre and this gave their blues more
emotional impact than almost white practitioner of the form. Pierce sings a song written by one of the twentieth century’s best known white afficionados straight, accompanied only by piano with almost no variation. Yet the listener can conjure up a whole host of contemporary
images, from the drug addicted prostitute whose pimp is gone to the heartbreak of a lonely drag queen left to fend for herself in a man’s world. The compelling thing is that all of these images are set against Gershwin’s operetta of former slaves set in the post-bellum American South.

The next song is simply called “Bad America”, and is Pierce’s indictment of the nation and culture that birthed him. He sings of “smack rotting places on the water front” and how America “made me warm when you hit me with a nail in my arm.” Yet as the indictment continues one realizes that the singer is blaming everything – especially personal failures of his own making – on his country. With his twisted junkie logic and deferred responsibility Jeffrey
Lee Pierce is full of shit! But this sudden epiphany makes the song no less compelling. Here Pierce finds himself in the company of other great unreliable narrators in
American literary tradition like Salinger’s Caulfield or Yates’ Jernigan. Hedging his bets with a Buffet-like “But I know, it could be my fault” or the twelve-step confessions of the newly sober would completely ruin the effect of the song and possibly the entire album. 

“Moonlight Motel” as said earlier, is told from the point of view of a prostitute contemplating the murder of the pimp or john asleep next to her. Because it follows “Bad
America” the listener has no illusions that the exploited are going to suddenly rise up and kill off the ruling classes. No, another fix will put these proletarian dreams to rest and the workers of the Bad America will continue their complicity in their own exploitation. I doubt Pierce was even conscious of the turn the album was taking at this point and that in his junkie haze he meant Bad
America and Moonlight Motel to be harbingers of a triumphal revolution to come, be it personal, political or both. But we know damn well that Pierce’s Las Vegas will remain as it is. That he came by this truth inadvertantly is what makes The Las Vegas Story such a great album.

The album closes “Give Up The Sun” which seems almost a coda to the whole album. A post card sent from someplace else saying “different town, same old shit.” The setting is a Miami motel room with blue paint peeling from the walls. Fearing overdose and nodding out alone in front of the television set he cries out, “Give Up The Sun, give up the sun” 

Nothin’ but the bleak truth, man.