Sex Beat

Now that the Don Bolles brouhaha has died down, it's time to look at the one Germs song I ever owned, and go from there.

"Caught in My Eye" appeared on a Slash Records collection (Slash: The Early Sessions) that was released in the 1980s. X and the Blasters were the stars of the collection (two songs each), but it also featured Violent Femmes, Germs...and Gun Club. And therein lies a story:

Jeffrey Lee Pierce - reggae enthusiast, heroin addict, and former president of the Blondie fan club - upheld the confident predictions of many by dying a lonely and fairly depressing death over four years ago, on March 31st, 1997. Pierce's Johnny Thunders-esque holdout in the face of self-wrought bodily deterioration was oddly admirable, yet in no way was the man mistaken for a hero for it. He expired of a brain hemorrhage at a relative's house in Utah, HIV-positive and sick with hepatitis after untold years of drug use, alcoholism and the usual other suspects. Why this event mattered much to anyone lay most prominently in a fantastic record his band The Gun Club recorded 16 years earlier, the masterful Fire Of Love....

What makes Fire Of Love such a brilliant listen long after its time is the fact that this blatant homage to the blues was amplified, energized and kicked into overdrive - yet not in the way that, say, The Yardbirds or Led Zeppelin did it, but in a new style that combined the ghostliness of the original model with a FAST, unwound and supremely energetic beat....

Fire Of Love kicks off with "Sex Beat" -- for most folks this is the Gun Club's most recognizable number, and would have been their "Satisfaction" had they made it to reunion tours 20 or 25 years on. Now, some people have always given poor Jeffrey Lee a hard time for his lyrics, not to mention the fact that he often came across as a fat, sweaty drunk. I won't dispute the latter, nor will I go to great lengths to defend him on the former. However, on Fire Of Love Jeff was immensely successful at transmitting the dark, twisted roots of evil without pasting them to his sleeve like a bad Greil Marcus essay. "Sex Beat" quite simply combines an aggressive, convoluted sexuality with an homage to "the devil's music": rock and roll, or alternately, blues. In the end, the song says, life comes down to a pair of basics: [engaging in sexual intercourse] and dancing (with emphasis on the former). Pierce at times had his lyrics questioned on what now seems laughable 1980s P.C. grounds ­ i.e., he uses the word 'nigger' several times....

I'll stop there and just note that what was "laughable" in 2002 suddenly wasn't so laughable a few years later. Ask Michael Richards.

Complete article here. Never thought of "Sex Beat" as a blues song....

gunclub

Sphere: Related Content