Listen: Death Party / The Gun Club GunClubDeathParty.mp3

Did you ever get to see The Gun Club live? I hope so. I was simply taken with Jeffrey Lee Pierce, his guitar playing and especially his voice. Funny thing was, I didn’t notice for at least ten years that he never really sang in key. But his style was so powerful, it worked.

I have many favorite songs by them, and I was bumping into myself trying to decide which one to post. So I’ve settled on ‘Death Party’. It’s probably a more obscure one, and I’ve certainly never seen copies of this 7″, other than the two I own. It also represents their live sound, that raw, jagged, perfectly sloppy groove from beneath hell, as JLP once said. And it’s around the time of my favorite Gun Club lineup, with Kid Congo, Terry Graham and Patricia Morrison. Even though they’re not on this, they delivered a live sound and a recorded one (THE LAS VEGAS STORY) precisely like this record’s.

I recall the time, after they played a local club show in August of ’84, which I made an audio recording of, the only live show I ever recorded in fact, that they all came back to my place to watch a video they had made of that night’s performance on a clumsy video machine the size of an air conditioner, as they were known to be then. In very un-RnR style, we sat and devoured a chocolate cream pie and drank tea. A great memory. Please check out the whole song. It is relentless.