Song of the Day 4/16: The Gun, “Race With the Devil”
The notion that the devil has all the best tunes didn’t start with rock and roll. It goes all the way back to the 18th century, when Anglican cleric George Whitefield responded to criticism of the Methodists using popular melodies for their hymns by asking, “Why should the devil have all the best tunes?”
Though rock and roll was condemned as the devil’s music from the first, it wasn’t until later that bands began to openly embrace satanic imagery. One of the first was The Gun, a late-’60s British trio that featured brothers Paul and Adrian Gurvitz on bass and guitar. They recorded two albums for CBS in the days when British blues-rock was getting louder and heavier, but on the devil-invoking front they were ahead of their time.
“Race With the Devil” surrounds a killer guitar riff with every goth-metal cliche about the devil. It almost sounds like a Spinal Tap song, but they weren’t yet cliches when the Gun did it in 1968. At that point Black Sabbath was still going by the name Earth.
The lead track on the band’s eponymous first album, it made the top ten on the UK singles charts, but that would be the band’s high-water mark. Neither that album nor its successor sold well and the Gun disbanded, though Adrian Gurvitz went on to a long career as a songwriter and producer. Fun fact: The album cover was the first designed by Roger Dean, who went on to a long career creating fantasy-scapes for other bands, most notably Yes.
In 1977 Black Oak Arkansas, whose glory days were already behind them, made “Race With the Devil” the title track of their 10th studio LP. Believe it or not, Jim Dandy Mangrum still tours with another lineup of BOA.
