The Alternative Number Ones: The Jesus And Mary Chain’s “Blues From A Gun”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

"Cool" is a subjective thing with no fixed definition, but at least to me, no band has ever sounded cooler than the Jesus And Mary Chain. The Scottish group made its name by writing downcast bubblegum jams and then hiding their hooks in layers of screeching feedback, which is a cool thing to do. But the Mary Chain got even cooler when they got rid of the feedback and found different approaches to their seething but starry-eyed garage rock. For their third album, 1989's Automatic, Jim and William Reid, the two brothers behind the Jesus And Mary Chain, did almost everything on their own, replacing human bassists and drummers with sequencers and drum machines. In the process, they connected their own music, however unintentionally, to the things that were happening in rap, industrial, and acid house around the same time. See? Fucking cool.

Critics did not like Automatic when it came out, but the album gave the Jesus And Mary Chain their only #1 hit on the Billboard Modern Rock charts. I didn't know anything about the album's divided reputation when I bought a used cassette copy of Automatic for three or four bucks a few years later. I was 12 years old, and I don't think I'd ever heard the band. I bought the record because I could afford it and because the Jesus And Mary Chain were on the Lollapalooza '92 tour -- playing the main stage between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and probably feeling hopelessly out of place. (I didn't get to go to Lollapalooza until 1995, but I obsessively kept track of those early lineups.)

To me, Automatic sounded like the coolest shit in the world. Jim Reid sang like he was sighing and snarling at the same damn time. William Reid played big, nasty glam-rock riffs and then slathered reverb all over them. The brothers surrounded that stuff with clicking drum tracks and blaring keyboards, sounds that reveled in their artificiality. The songs sounded like oldies-radio jams that had been giving cold, dystopian cybernetic makeovers. My parents were convinced that the band's name was somehow sacrilegious, which made me like them more. The whole package was just enormously appealing. More than 30 years later, I can confidently say that 12-year-old me was exactly right. Automatic goes hard.

The critics who didn't like Automatic mostly wrote about how the Jesus And Mary Chain had gotten away from the things that made them special. The corroded Phil Spector sound of their debut LP Psychocandy was all gone. But when I heard Psychocandy years later, I was slightly bummed that it didn't sound more like Automatic. Automatic was a record that could've only come out during a specific moment, and nothing since then has captured that sound. "Blues From The Gun," the Automatic single that became the Jesus And Mary Chain's only Modern Rock chart-topper, isn't the record's best song, and it was fully gone from radio rotation by the time I started paying attention. Still, I can just imagine how its throbbing, menacing swagger must've registered on the radio at the very end of the '80s.

Jim and William Reid grew up together in East Kilbride, a suburb outside Glasgow, and they were teenagers during the great British punk explosion of 1977. (William is three years older than Jim.) The brothers were directly inspired by punk, but they took their time to get a proper band together and to start releasing music. For years, the Reid brothers lived together, working on songs and figuring out their aesthetic while collecting welfare money. They went through a few different names -- the Poppy Seeds, Death Of Joey -- before settling on the Jesus And Mary Chain. Supposedly, they flipped a coin to determine which brother would get to be the lead singer, and Jim won. But the Reid brothers never liked giving straight interview answers, so you've got to take every biographical detail with a grain of salt.

Eventually, the Reid brothers found a couple of bandmates -- bassist Douglas Hart and drummer Murray Dalglish -- and recorded some demos at home. Dalglish would stand behind his kit, which only had two pieces, a snare and a floor tom. The band's early style was heavily indebted to the Velvet Underground in all sorts of obvious ways, but it was just as informed by early-'60s girl groups. Jim Reid delivered his lyrics in a fake American accent, doing his version of the Bob Dylan/Lou Reed talk-sing thing. (There's some Marc Bolan in there, too, but Bolan was also doing Dylan, so it all connects.) Like the Velvet Underground, the Jesus And Mary Chain were basically coating pop songs in chaotic avant-garde sludge. In a British moment when most of their pop peers were going for synth-bleeps and clean edges, that made them stand out.

The Jesus And Mary Chain's demos didn't get any early attention, so they moved to London in 1984. That's where the nightclub promoter and future Creation Records founder Alan McGee heard them. McGee, one of the great sensationalist shit-stirrers in British rock history, signed on as the Mary Chain's manager, and he enlisted them as one of the first acts on Creation. McGee was into creating legends, and the JAMC gave him a lot to work with. When they played live, the band usually came out onstage late and then played short 20-minute sets through shatteringly loud walls of feedback. They'd stand there, still and surly, sometimes with their backs to the audience. They would give the crowd nothing, and the crowd would lose its collective mind. Multiple early JAMC shows famously ended with brawls or riots.

Alan McGee promoted the Jesus And Mary Chain as rock 'n' roll originals, a new generation's Sex Pistols. Jim Reid in a 1985 Spin interview: "We have no intention of being the new Sex Pistols. We wouldn’t want to. We’re better than them." He's not wrong. In most of their interviews, the JAMC barely said anything at all, which made them mysterious and which only helped with the persona that McGee was building. When they did talk, they talked a lot of shit about their supposed influences. In 1984, the band released "Upside Down," their debut single, on McGee's Creation label. It slaps.

"Upside Down" didn't make a huge dent in the UK charts, but it sold 50,000 copies and helped build the names of both the Jesus And Mary Chain and Creation Records. Immediately, the band jumped from Creation to Warner's cool-kid imprint Blanco Y Negro. They also replaced Murray Dalglish with new drummer Bobby Gillespie, who was already leading the Creation band Primal Scream. Within a year, the JAMC released Psychocandy, the album that made them a critical noise-rock cause celebre. Opening track "Just Like Honey" builds a dejected symphony out of trebly guitar twinkle-scrapes and the opening drum thwacks from the Ronettes' "Be My Baby." "Just Like Honey" was a minor British chart hit that also did well on American college radio. To this day, it's the Jesus and Mary Chain's most-streamed song.

When the Jesus And Mary Chain arrived, their image seemed fully-formed and carefully crafted -- the feedback, the downbeat hooks, the vacant expressions, the sunglasses, the enormous hollowbody guitars, the hair that stuck up in every direction. But the Reid brothers weren't really into the feedback-terrorist image that Alan McGee helped craft for them. They wanted to achieve mainstream popularity, and they wanted to play shows that didn't end in riots. Soon after the release of Psychocandy, the Jesus And Mary Chain split with McGee, while Bobby Gillespie left to focus on Primal Scream. (Primal Scream's highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 1991's "Movin' On Up," peaked at #2. It's a 10.) The JAMC tried replacing Gillespie with a few different drummers, but they recorded Darklands, their second album, with a drum machine.

Darklands is a big departure from Psychocandy. The songwriting stays in the same lane -- zooted-out rockers with sha-la-la melodies -- but the presentation is all different. The sound is brighter and cleaner, almost to the point where it makes sense alongside the jangly American college rock that was starting to impact the UK charts around that time. Darklands went all the way to #5 on the UK album charts, and one single, "April Skies," went top-10 on the pop charts. Psychocandy and Darklands both went gold in the UK, but Darklands got there a whole lot faster. For a minute, the Jesus And Mary Chain were British pop stars.

In the US, the Jesus And Mary Chain were still mostly a critical concern, which is basically what they'd always be. "April Skies" got college-radio burn, as did the group's 1988 single "Sidewalking." The JAMC definitely got a confidence boost from the reaction to Darklands. They'd been worried about being forever pigeonholed as feedback-addicted noisemakers, and they'd proven that they could thrive without those trappings. Bassist Douglas Hart was technically still in the band when they recorded 1989's Automatic, but from what I can tell, he didn't participate in the recording. Instead, the Reid brothers produced and played almost everything themselves.

Automatic is a blearier record than Darklands, but it's not bleary in the same way as Psychocandy. Rather than the screaming sonic chaos of their first album, the Mary Chain tapped into the mechanized grandeur of the various strains of electronic music that were percolating around that time. In the lockstep squall of Automatic, I hear some echoes of things like Public Enemy and acid house. The Reid brothers were definitely listening to American rap, while William Reid and Douglas Hart were both experimenting with making music for raves. Hart even started an acid house side project called Acid Angels and released a 1988 single called "Speed Speed Ecstasy."

The Jesus And Mary Chain brought Alan Moulder in to engineer and mix Automatic. Moulder's career was just starting, but he was already a master at blending and layering sheets of sound. In the years that followed, he'd become famous for working with shoegaze gods like My Bloody Valentine and Ride. Automatic combined sequenced beats with oceanic waves of guitar, and it must've been a huge influence on those shoegaze bands, who went on to influence so many others.

"Blues From A Gun," the lead single from Automatic, gets a whole lot of mileage out of its combination of precision and distortion. The nasty garage-glam riffs are slathered in reverb and echo, while the programmed drums and synth-bass are bright and clear. Jim Reid gasps out all his lyrics, sounding like the secretly sensitive tough-guy biker kid in a teen movie, and his voice is lifted up by everything roiling around him. The central melodies are strong, and with vastly different production, "Blues From A Gun" could work as an early-'70s bubblegum single. But the stormy sonics owe something to the industrial music that was still an underground phenomenon at the time. A few years later, the Mary Chain and Ministry both played on the same Lollapalooza main stage. I wonder what they thought of each other.

It's a fool's errand to search for too much meaning in Jesus And Mary Chain lyrics, but I might point out that Jim Reid begins "Blues From A Gun" by singing that he doesn't care about the state of his hair. This is a baldfaced lie. The Reid brothers' hair always looked way too cool to be accidental, though I'm sure Jim was sick of people asking about it by 1989. Most of his "Blues From A Gun" lyrics are jangled-up versions of rock 'n' roll cliché, and I mean that in the best way: "Like a cracked-open skaaaah, it helps you to daaaaah! Don't split it! Scrape it! You're screaming automatic paaaain!" I have no idea what any of that means, but it sounds cool, just as it sounds cool when he sings "shake shake shake." As the song ends, Jim repeats the line "I guess that's why I've always got the blues" again and again. It doesn't answer any questions that you might have, but why should it?

"Blues From The Gun" turned out to be the last Modern Rock chart-topper of the '80s and the first of the '90s, which feels weirdly appropriate. The Jesus And Mary Chain helped set the table for a lot of the sounds that blew up in the '90s, but they seemed increasingly out of step from the decade's alt-rock zeitgeist as that zeitgeist took shape. The Mary Chain did make more Modern Rock hits. The band followed "Blues From A Gun" with "Head On," an even-better song that peaked at #2. Today, "Head On" is by far the most popular track from Automatic, for reasons that probably have everything to do with the Pixies' cover of that song. The song also fucking rules, so that probably helps its reputation, too. ("Head On" is a 10. The Pixies' 1991 recorded-live version peaked at #6. It's a 9.)

Critics were vocally dismissive of the drum-machine sounds on Automatic, so maybe that's why the Jesus And Mary Chain went back to using a live drummer on their next album, 1992's Honey's Dead. By that time, Douglas Hart had left the band, so the JAMC was just Jim and William Reid, along with whatever other musicians they had along with them at any given moment. By rights, Honey's Dead probably should sound like a step back after the sonic squall of Automatic, but that's not how it strikes me. Instead, the JAMC came off brighter and more energetic than ever before. The lightly blasphemous album opener "Reverence" became their second and final top-10 hit in the UK, while the beyond-cool power-pop banger "Far Gone And Out" peaked at #3 on the Modern Rock chart. (It's a 10.)

The Jesus And Mary Chain reportedly had a miserable time on the 1992 Lollapalooza tour, as many of their tourmates -- Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ice Cube -- were establishing themselves as kings of the new decade. (A couple of them will eventually appear in this column.) The Reid brothers, increasingly adrift and constantly bickering with one another, toyed around with the idea of making an acoustic record. That's not quite the direction that they ended up going with 1994's Stoned And Dethroned, but the record does have some appealing country overtones.

"Sometimes Always," the lead single from Stoned And Dethroned, is an absolutely lovely duet between Jim Reid and Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, who was dating William at the time. (Mazzy Star's highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1993's "Fade Into You," peaked at #3. It's a 10.) "Sometimes Always" is a grand Nashville-style breakup-to-reconciliation story, but both Hope Sandoval and Jim Reid sound exquisitely bored. I don't know why that contrast works so well, but it absolutely does. The song goes insanely hard, and it became the Jesus And Mary Chain's only Hot 100 hit, though it only just barely made that chart, peaking at #96. On the Modern Rock chart, "Sometimes Always" reached #4. (It's yet another 10.)

As the '90s went on, the Jesus And Mary Chain became more and more drunk, fractious, and dysfunctional. The Reid brothers simply weren't getting along, and their juice was just about gone. They parted ways from Blanco Y Negro and released one last album, 1998's Munki, on Sub Pop. The summer after I graduated from high school, I saw them play a half-empty 9:30 Club while touring behind that record. They sounded fucking awesome, but they already came off like relics from a bygone age. A month or two after I saw them, Jim Reid got so drunk at an LA show that he could barely stand, and William stormed offstage after a few songs. This was the end. In 1999, the Jesus And Mary Chain confirmed that they'd broken up. Both Jim and William Reid started their own projects, and neither set the world on fire.

It didn't take long for the Jesus And Mary Chain's reputation to come back around. The JAMC's druggy cool was an obvious influence on the garage-rock revivalists of the early '00s; the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in particular came off as a full-on Jesus And Mary Chain tribute act. In 2003, Sofia Coppola used "Just Like Honey" to soundtrack the final scene of Lost In Translation -- one of that era's great movie endings -- and all of hipster America seemingly decided that the Mary Chain were cool again. The JAMC reunited to play Coachella in 2007, and Scarlett Johansson came out to sing "Just Like Honey" with them.

The reunited Jesus And Mary Chain have proven surprisingly durable. They came out with an album called Damage And Joy in 2017, and I remember liking it pretty well. Today -- this very morning -- through some beautiful cosmic synchronicity, the Jesus And Mary Chain announced another post reunion album called Glasgow Eyes. They also dropped first single "jamcod." (That's as in "Jesus And Mary Chain Overdose," not as in "Jam Cod," which would be funny but not really cool.) The new song is another banger, and it brings back some of the pulsing drum-machine ferocity of Automatic.

I've long held that there are still no bad Jesus And Mary Chain songs, and this morning gives even more evidence to support that claim. Once upon a time, the Jesus And Mary Chain were my platonic ideal of "cool rock band." Glasgow Eyes will come out around the 40th anniversary of "Upside Down," the Mary Chain's first single. It's tough to maintain a sense of cool for that long, but Jim and William Reid are doing about as well as anyone possibly could.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: The Jesus And Mary Chain always liked releasing multiple different versions of their singles with multiple bonus tracks; it's one of the reasons that they've released a bunch of B-side collections. On some versions of the "Blues From A Gun" single, one of the B-sides was a gorgeous, stripped-back cover of the Temptations' "My Girl." Here it is: