999,880: The Gun Club — She's Like Heroin To Me

Eventually, all genres pass their expiration dates. Jazz is just an excuse for Wynton Marsalis to complain about The Kids Today; Stevie Ray Vaughn started playing The Blues; and Reggae is more about Natty Light than Natty Dreads. Rockabilly, I’m pretty sure, is on permanent display at the Smithsonian, between Archie Bunker’s chair and Rick James’ crack pipe. (Exceptions noted and understood.)

Oh, sure. People still play Rockabilly, but that's just because it’s become a bit of a punk rock graveyard. Too tired to be angry? Too many bad tattoos? Nothing left in the old imagination? Try Rockabilly. It doesn’t take a whole lot to look good in the Rockabilly game. Grab yourself an upright bassist and some Murray’s Hair Cream and you, too, can be a star. (Again, exceptions noted and understood.)

The last time anyone took Rockabilly to a level that really cooked was in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when no one outside of record store nerds had actually heard any Rockabilly in 20 years. These record store nerds formed forceful, fun, Punk/Rockabilly (Psychobilly? Punkabilly? Shit, I don’t know. Grab the nearest guy who looks like the Fonz and ask him.) bands like The Cramps and The Gun Club.

While The Cramps were more of the Horror-worship and Garage Rock variety, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club, revved up a more traditionalist ramp, albeit one more focused on sex and drugs than the pleasures of driving a suped-up car with a fine young lady of upstanding moral character. His stroke of genius was in combining the two in “She’s Like Heroin To Me.”

It doesn’t sound like she’s heroin to him, though, as the song careens around the room with EchoPlexes sending reverberations of manic slide-guitar sound effects willy-nilly. She seems to be more like cocaine to him, considering how anxious and ill-at-ease he is. It’s like he’s just gonna take a seat and grind his teeth down to their infected roots at any second.

Rock’n’Roll isn’t a genre of poets (Again, exceptions noted and understood), so let’s give the man some leeway. We know what he means. She blows his mind and fucks him over, but he keeps crawling back, and he’ll be damned if he can figure out why. All she can give him is only enough to make him feel normal anymore, but it’s a sad normal, not normal normal. He’ll take it. He’ll take anything he can get.