Remembering Jeffrey Lee Pierce: ‘He Was an Exorcist of His Own Demons’

In the 15 years between the 1981 release of the Gun Club’s first album and their frontman’s death in 1996, the bleached-blond rock & roll typhoon known as Jeffrey Lee Pierce touched the lives of Nick Cave, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Lydia Lunch, and countless others. His music could be invigorating and/or mysterious, sometimes at the same time. With the Gun Club and as a solo artist (sometimes billing himself cheekily as Ramblin’ Jeffrey Lee), he recorded revved-up punk, Delta-style blues, brooding folk, and Americana all punctuated by his husky moaning and primal howls. His lyrics could be sharp, emotional, and dreamlike; his artistic vision was both singular and eclectic.

If you were to ask all of the artists he inspired why they liked Pierce’s music, each would give a different answer. “The first time I heard the Gun Club was when I was living in L.A. in maybe 1993 or 1994,” Gahan says via email. “I remember the music being pretty vibrant; it reminded me a lot of when I was a teenager, growing up in east London and living in the punk scene. Then years later, I listened to the [Gun Club’s] Miami album, and it took me back to that feeling. I rediscovered the music and it made me feel vibrant once again.”

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“Jeffery was a dear friend and probably my favorite singer from that period,” Cave says via email. “There was so much soul in his voice, so much anguish, but also so much joyful energy. It’s very beautiful. There is a lot of music from that time that I have stopped listening to as time has moved on, but the Gun Club remain eternally gorgeous. It’s the very best of music.”

“When the Gun Club emerged, it was like the music was veering away from the formulas of punk rock and so-called post-punk and incorporating American blues, and his own kind of messy interpretation was really moving to me,” Jarmusch says on a phone call. “And I love [Gun Club guitarist] Kid Congo Powers as well. I thought it was an inspiring musical entity.”

“He was creating through the disability of his own life, because he had a hard time just existing, which is why he left us so quickly,” Lunch says on a call. “He was involved in too many things to make the pain go away, and I think he was just swallowed up. But in the midst of that, he wrote all these amazing lyrics and these amazing songs.” Using the title of the Gun Club’s “She’s Like Heroin to Me” as an example, Lunch says, “sometimes the songs are like codeine … He was looking for the painkiller in each song and the exorcism that lies within. He was an exorcist of his own demons.”

Starting in 2009, the artists listed above and several others — including Iggy Pop, Primal Scream, the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, Alejandro Escovedo, the Coathangers, and Mark Lanegan — have recorded renditions of the singer-songwriter’s works for an ongoing series of tribute compilations known as the Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project. Rather than emulating Pierce’s anguish and elation, though, each musician has put his or her own stamp on a given song — some of which were unrecorded demos or sketches of lyrics Pierce left behind when he died of a stroke on March 31, 1996, at age 37.

“He was a kind of difficult guy, but he was very kind and very interesting,” says Jarmusch, who remembers seeing the Gun Club in the Eighties and hanging out with Pierce in L.A. and Tokyo. “I loved his stage presence. I particularly love the album Miami, and the later record Mother Juno, very much. The inspiration, for me [in participating in the Sessions Project], was doing a tribute to Jeffrey Lee, who was really an interesting character and musically very valuable.”

The recently released latest volume, The Task Has Overwhelmed Us, finds Gahan plumbing new emotion in the Gun Club’s “Mother of Earth,” Lunch interpreting some of Pierce’s unpublished verses as spoken word over Jarmusch and Jozef van Wissem’s avant-garde blues on “Time Drains Away,” and Pierce’s own voice accompanied by Cave and Warren Ellis on an understated rendition of the beguiling “Yellow Eyes.” The album also features a moving rendition of “Go Tell a Mountain” by Mark Lanegan, and Harry and Cave, who have duetted on songs on previous volumes, singing together on “On the Other Side” — a song Pierce performed live only a few times.

The project originated when the guitarist known as Cypress Grove discovered an intriguing cassette labeled “JLP Songs” while cleaning out his attic in 2006. The British guitarist had first met Pierce in the mid-Eighties, when Pierce moved to England. “We frequented the same public house most evenings,” he says. He was working at a record shop that specialized in jazz and blues at the time, and when a mutual friend introduced him to Pierce, they connected over their shared love of roots music and the blues.

One night, when Cypress Grove was performing at a Labour Party function at the pub, Pierce asked to hang out. Since it was a political function, and Pierce was an American expat, the guitarist said Pierce could only come if he played music with them. Pierce agreed and promptly made up his own lyrics to Them’s “Gloria” on the spot. When the ad-hoc gig was done, Pierce offered to make more music with Cypress Grove, leading to the creation of 1992’s Ramblin’ Jeffrey Lee & Cypress Grove With Willie Love album. “It started off as an album of country murder ballads, then it eventually morphed into a blues album,” the guitarist says. “But while we were still in his country phase, I started recording him on cassette to work my parts out. And that was the tape marked ‘JLP Songs.’ They were just skeleton sketches of ideas.”

Listening to the tape a decade after Pierce’s death, Cypress Grove thought of asking Pierce’s peers, friends, and admirers to record the songs. “I’d like to think that [Jeffrey] would approve,” the guitarist says. “You’ve got to be careful using the music of a person who’s no longer around.” He had remembered that Pierce and Lanegan were friends, so he started with him, reaching out on MySpace. Lanegan replied within half an hour saying he’d love to be involved.

Lanegan, who died in 2022, dedicated a whole chapter of his memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, to Pierce. “An instant chill had run up my spine the moment the man started singing, an exotic, balls-out wail like I’d never heard before, with the intensity of punk but something different, something wholly unique to me,” Lanegan wrote, recalling his first listen to the Gun Club’s debut, Fire of Love. “I thought this was what Creedence Clearwater Revival would’ve sounded like had they played Delta blues in the style of punk rock.” (Lanegan’s rendition of “Go Tell the Mountain” on The Task Has Overwhelmed Us, backed by Cave and Ellis, is the last Lanegan recording that Cypress Grove has for the project.)

The guitarist next got in touch with Gene Temesy, who used to run the Gun Club fan club and worked on Pierce’s 1998 memoir, Go Tell the Mountain. Temesy, along with writer/DJ/musician Phast Phreddie Patterson and Pierce’s sister, Jacqui, who runs Pierce’s estate with their mother, provided him with more unpublished source material. Temesy also linked Cypress Grove up with Cave. “After that, it was kind of easy,” Cypress Grove says. “People were kind of queuing up around the block to get involved.”

The first installment, We Are Only Riders, arrived in 2009 with covers by Cave, Lanegan, Harry, Lunch, Mick Harvey, and others. The second, The Journey Is Long, arrived three years later, and the third, Axels & Sockets, came out in 2014. Each edition contained a mix of covers of songs from Pierce’s and the Gun Club’s catalogs, as well as unreleased compositions. Cypress Grove has been working on The Task Has Overwhelmed Us since the last volume, eventually asking Australian singer-songwriter Suzie Stapleton, who lives in England, for help.

Gahan got involved with this volume when Stapleton, who had gotten in touch with him after he purchased one of her solo albums, approached him about it. He’d already been contemplating a version of “Mother of Earth” for Imposter, the album of covers he was making with the production duo Soulsavers, but they didn’t record it. “A year later, Suzie approached me and suggested doing it and it was too much of a coincidence, so I just had to do it,” he says. “I already knew how I wanted to hear it and what version I wanted to do… Suzie also had a clear picture of what she wanted to do, so she built up a backing track and it was perfect!”

Rather than emulate the Gun Club version of the song, which has country overtones, Gahan and Stapleton rendered it as a piano ballad. “We wanted to take it away from the original version,” Gahan says. “I imagined a gunslinging version of it where I played the guitar, so when Suzie and I joined forces, it really worked out and we were able to build this beautiful song.”

For herself, Stapleton chose to record “Secret Fires,” a track off the Gun Club’s The Las Vegas Story album, because of Pierce’s lyrics. “I love the opening line, ‘Touch me through your screen door/I want to remember you,'” she says on a Zoom from London. “Straight away, you get drawn in. On all his songs, he creates whole worlds in a very short amount of time. I think they’re really evocative and on par with some of the greats.” The Gun Club’s “Secret Fires” is a sparse country & western song dressed in acoustic guitar, swooning steel guitar, and autoharp punctured by Pierce’s warbling voice; Stapleton’s version, which features guitarist Duke Garwood, sounds duskier with its slower pace.

Lunch, who has been involved with the Project since the first volume, didn’t know Pierce well; she’d gigged with the Gun Club once and knew the group’s guitarist, Kid Congo Powers, better than Pierce. She got involved with the Project when Jim Sclavunos, who played drums with her in the no-wave groups Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and 8 Eyed Spy and now plays with Cave as a member of the Bad Seeds, asked if she’d like to participate. For the latest volume, Lunch recorded her spoken-word track, “Time Drains Away,” on the fly in Cypress Grove’s London apartment using lyrics from Phreddie’s collection. “It’s Jeffrey’s words, and I might have edited them a little or added a few lines here and there,” she says. “Any of the tracks I did for these compilations is just a one-take wonder.”

“At first, I thought, ‘Did Jeffrey write that? It sounds very Lydia,'” Jarmusch says. “She kind of owns it.”

Unlike past installments of the Project, The Task Has Overwhelmed Us took Cypress Grove close to a decade to compile. But as overwhelming as that amount of work sounds, he’d still like to do a fifth volume. “I would like to continue with it,” he says. “I would really like to get Jack White.” (White has performed Gun Club tracks throughout his career as a solo artist and with the White Stripes.)

“I’d just like to get Jeffrey’s music out there,” Cypress Grove says. “That, to me, is the whole point. There’s still other material, lyrics, song snippets, and there are so many other songs that haven’t been covered.”

Gahan, too, wants to make sure people remember Pierce. “[His legacy] is in the work and in the songwriting,” he says. “It will take almost a lifetime for people to realize how good he was. His music just felt ahead of its time. He has one of those voices that gives you ‘storytelling,’ and that is very him.

“Personally, I’ve realized that in the moment, [legacy] doesn’t really happen like you intend it to,” he continues, “but you hear it in all these different musicians that are playing his songs. That is the greatest tribute: to have others play your songs. And as an artist, it’s one of the best ways to pay tribute to other people’s music — to do your version of it.”

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