In July 1996, Tom Engelshoven of Dutch music magazine Oor described
Jeffrey Lee Pierce as the missing link between
the Eagles and
Kurt Cobain. Four months after
the Gun Club frontman had passed away, the article labeled him as the true victim of what Engelshoven interpreted as "the American disease." Among the symptoms were a strong identification with violence and death and a clear notion of American society being imbued with it.
Pierce's lyrics testified of his awareness of America's earliest history, a nation established at the barrel of a gun. Obsessed with an inevitable apocalyptic destiny, he took his lowlife background as an explanation for a feverish longing for decay. Sex, booze, and drugs all claimed their share in a self-destructive lifestyle, culminating in an early death at the age of 37.
Wildweed was the first of two solo albums
Pierce made in between his
Gun Club albums. Following in the footsteps of remarkable statements like
Miami and
The Las Vegas Story, the material presented here isn't all that different. The violence theme practically drips from the album cover, depicting
Pierce with a dreamy look and a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Standing amidst what could be the last true vestige of an unspoiled, rural America, it's a fair bet that he's ready to shoot anything even slightly disturbing -- upon which he probably will utter one final howl before putting himself "to rest" as well. Plenty of those howls are scattered through
Wildweed, which opens with a strong threesome of "Love and Desperation," "Sex Killer," and "Cleopatra Dreams On." In more than one way, "Love and Desperation" is the twin to
The Fire of Love's "Sex Beat." Apart from the infectious driving beat, one only has to compare the lyrics of the latter ("I, I know your reasons/And I, I know your goals/We can f*ck forever/But you will never get my soul") to the former ("Somebody hurts you, so you hurt me/So I hurt somebody else, who I have never seen/Who hurts somebody else, why on down the road/Who hurts somebody else who goes on home/With you") to conclude that
Pierce's world is one in which love takes a wrong turn most of the time. Halfway through the album things get a little awkward when, during the nursery rhyme of "Hey Juana,"
Pierce starts name-checking a colleague ("Now
Nick the
Cave/He spent all his pay/On a bottle of gin/And a shark without a fin"). Luckily, "The Midnight Promise" makes a beautiful closing piece. Alas, the CD release of
Wildweed adds some extra tracks that appeared on the Love and Desperation 12" instead of the more intriguing experiments with spoken word from the 7" bonus that came with the album or the free jazz of the title track of the
Flamingo EP.