31/08/2026
ON THIS DAY in 1981 - 45 years ago exactly - LA post-punk icons The Gun Club released their debut album 'Fire Of Love' on Ruby Records. The band had formed in late-'79 around the nucleus of frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce and his guitarist friend Kind Congo Powers - who'd already left to join The Cramps by the time of the debut (though he would rejoin later) - and having signed to Ruby Records, a division of Slash, their debut recorded by Tito Larriva (of the Plugz) and Chris D. (frontman of the Flesh Eaters). It quickly became infamous as the first album to fuse the stripped-down sound of punk rock with American roots music, helping to create the punk blues style as well as inspiring countless garage rock musicians, with a 1982 Trouser Press review arguing that the band "have wrought nothing less than a mutation of the blues. [They] extract from the blues those elements (anger, frustration, vivid imagery) most resonant with the disaffections of a modern young white [man]. Songwriter Pierce adds his own cynicism and wildness for a heady and often compelling combination... The Gun Club relies on no strict formulas yet it is undeniably the blues that is being transmuted into a medium for Pierce's dark visions and neuroses." The album has veer cited as an influence by generations of musicians to follow - with songs from 'Fire Of Love' covered by the likes of 16 Horsepower, Japandroids, Kim Salmon and Spencer P. Jones, LA Witch and Juliana Hatfield's band Some Girls - and it remains critically revered to this day, with AllMusic's 5-star retrospective review offering, "The Gun Club's debut is the watermark for all post-punk roots music. This features the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce's swamped-out brand of roiling rock, swaggerific hell-bound blues, and gothic country. With Pierce's wailing high lonesome slide guitar twinned with Ward Dotson's spine-shaking riffs and the solid yet off-the-rails rhythm section of bassist Rob Ritter and drummer Terry Graham, the Gun Club burst out of L.A. in the early '80s with a bone to pick and a mountain to move - and they accomplished both on their debut album. With awesome, stripped to the frame production by the Flesh Eaters' Chris D., Fire of Love blew away all expectations - and with good reason. Nobody has heard music like this before or since... The songs become rock & roll ciphers, erasing themselves as soon as they speak, heading off into the whirlwind of a storm that is so big, so black, and so awful one cannot meditate on anything but its power. 'Fire Of Love' may be just what the doctor ordered, but to cure or kill is anybody's guess".
