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--by
Scott Isler, reprinted from Musician magazine, May 1986
The scene is pandemonium.
The band starts a song, then stops as over-enthusiastic members
of the youthful audience lunge onto the proscenium.
Security men both receive and dole out red (and black-and-blue)
badges of courage. The bass player risks alienating
the crowd by announcing sternly, "We don't care where
we're playing, we don't like people onstage!" Maybe
his fans would take him more seriously if he didn't look like
a Hare Krishna disciple -- shaven head, orange robe -- wearing
large, dangling earrings of fish. By the encore the
band is well outflanked by security, but these aren't your
pony-tailed, beer-bellied bouncers; in their matching
blazers and red neckties they more resemble a Mafia glee club.
This is not a sweaty hard-core punk dive. This is the
Violent Femmes at New York's Carnegie Hall.
Who the hell are the Violent
Femmes?
"Andrew Carnegie appeared
to our manager at a seance and insisted that we play there,"
Brian Ritchie claims several hours before the event.
The dour-toned but drily humorous bassist prefers tattered
denim jackets and plaid shirts to saffron robes offstage,
though he likes the earrings and the newly-shaved head, a
triennial event. "We realized when we're talking
to our grandchildren and they ask what kind of venues did
we play, we'll be able to tell 'em one venue that probably
will still be around!"
"It's been around for at
least five years," drummer Victor DeLorenzo adds earnestly.
"There's definitely a lot
of good musicians that have been on that stage," Ritchie
says, then pauses. "And we're not some of them."
The Violent Femmes are a trio
from Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- with no apologies. In five
years these former outcasts of the city's music scene have
evolved from ugly ducklings to, if not swans, at least very
popular ducks. Their first album, released in 1983,
has managed to sell 175,000 copies without ever appearing
on Billboard's top 200 chart. Indeed, they
were still chart virgins when their current third album, The
Blind Leading the Naked, suddenly roared into the top
100, selling 100,000 copies in its first four weeks of release.
"The other two were hits,"
Ritchie states defensively, "it just wasn't all at once."
Singer/guitarist Gordon Gano admits being "a little bit
surprised, not shocked" by his group's newfound acceptance.
"I'm ready for almost anything. There did seem
to be signs it would do fairly well. Very much in contrast
to our last record, the record company is like, 'Oh yeah,
we like it, we can work with it!'"
In that case, their record company
had better move fast. The Violent Femmes aren't known
for playing corporate ball. During the making of their
previous album, Ritchie says, "We were getting phone
calls from Slash. They'd say, 'Well, you guys are using
a big drum sound, right? It's real danceable, right?'
We'd say, 'Yeah, it is,' and then just make what we want to."
The members would rather check out jazz shows and avant-garde
theater than their new neighbors on the album charts.
No wonder Warner Bros. eagerly seized the Femmes' first recorded
non-original song -- T. Rex's "Children of the Revolution"
-- for a single: "It sounds the least like us of
anything we've done," Gano laughs.
The irony isn't lost on the group;
they just couldn't care less. Besides, what do you expect
from a three-piece that consists of an acoustic bass guitarist;
a stand-up drummer whose minimal kit includes a washtub;
and a diminutive singer who alternates paeans to Jesus with
the psychotic ravings of a horny teenager? This isn't
quite Foreigner we're dealing with.
Even before they got together,
the individual Femmes had shown a healthy disregard for social
convention. Gano, twenty-two, still looks the part of
a picked-on high school student seething with creativity.
He channeled it into violin and then songwriting while growing
up in Oak Creek, a Milwaukee suburb. Accompanying himself
on guitar, Gano would perform solo or with a friend or brother
on second guitar. Meanwhile, Ritchie was one-half of
an Irish folk music duo, and also playing guitar and bass
with DeLorenzo, then active in an improvisatory theater group.
In 1979 Ritchie's duo shared the stage with Gano at a Milwaukee
variety show; the promoter tipped him off to Gano --"'a
pint-sized Lou Reed imitator,'" Ritchie remembers the
description.
"At first I was really skeptical.
He came out with gloves on playing a guitar which wasn't the
kind you'd buy at Musicland. But once he started playing
I realized the guy had at least charisma, and some of his
songs were really interesting." Intrigued, Ritchie
attended a subsequent performance, introduced himself and
asked Gano to open a show for him. Gano returned the
favor by inviting Ritchie to play with him at a high school
assembly: Violent Femmes Legend Number One. "He
did 'Gimme the Car' [an explosive plaint that flirts with
obscenity] in front of the whole school and it erupted into
a near-riot," Ritchie says. "It was fantastic!"
In June, 1981, after DeLorenzo
got back from a European tour with his theater group, the
three got together for a jam -- "and we never stopped,"
Ritchie says. "We never decided to form a band.
We played many gigs and we were one of the most popular bands
in Milwaukee -- before we realized we even had a band.
That's why we're called Violent Femmes. We didn't think
it was going to be a permanent organization; we thought
we could get away with having the most ridiculous name in
the world, because we wouldn't have to live with it!"
At first the band was acoustic
all the way, not even using microphones at their coffee-house
gigs. Ritchie didn't want the hassle of dragging around
an upright bass -- not like he could afford one anyway --
so he came up with an acoustic bass guitar. DeLorenzo
brushed up on his brush work; he'd been taught by a
40s big-band drummer. The resulting streamlined sound
contrasted nicely with Gano's heavyweight lyrical obsessions.
And the low-power requirement gave rise to Violent Femmes
Legend Number Two:
They were busking for change
from ticket-buyers at a Milwaukee Pretenders concert a couple
of months after forming. Unbeknownst to the Femmes,
the Pretenders were looking for an opening act. That
group's late guitarist James Honeyman Scott caught the Femmes'
al fresco act, and voila! They were
playing in front of the largest, most hostile crowd of their
young career.
The crowds aren't hostile anymore
-- anti-social, yes, but hostile, no. The Femmes recently
returned to the theater where they opened for the Pretenders,
only this time as headliners. In between they signed
to Slash, an indie label with Warner Bros. distribution, and
toured heavily -- criss-crossing the country numerous times,
playing Europe almost as much, making inroads in Australia
and New Zealand. Even MTV has been helpful.
The Violent Femmes' self-titled
first album expanded the cult beyond city limits. The
record's simple production high-lighted the semi-acoustic
arrangements and Gano's whiny vocals that had rock critics
reflexively pulling out Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman
albums for comparison. The band settled the issue to
their own satisfaction when they met Velvets drummer Maureen
Tucker in Phoenix a year ago. (And they couldn't pass
up the chance to have Tucker, whose daughter is a Femmes fan,
sit in with them. She pounded DeLorenzo's tom-tom on
the snappy non-original "Dance, Motherfucker, Dance").
"We asked her if she thought
we sounded like the Velvet Underground," Ritchie recalls.
"She said, 'Oh no, not at all.' And Jonathan Richman
says that he hates us. So we've got disclaimers from
both of the people we're compared to."
The following Hallowed Ground
album must have taken some Femmes followers by surprise.
Gano went back to his folk roots for traditional song forms
which he warped to his purpose. The singer also wrote
a couple of neo-spirituals, "Jesus Walking On the Water"
and "It's Gonna Rain." Those more comfortable
with his teen-rebellion anthems assumed these gospel-flavored
songs were put-ons. They're not.
"It begins to mean more
and more to me," says Gano, whose father is an American
Baptist minister. "Originally somebody in the group
didn't want to do those 'cause they didn't believe in it.
A year or so later the same person said, 'Let's do your gospel
songs, they're your best songs.'"
"At first I said, 'Forget
it. I refuse to do any of this Christian garbage,'"
Ritchie admits. "Then I realized this was a close-minded
attitude. I listen to gospel music myself, and I love
religious art. I realized I was being a hypocrite because
I wouldn't be willing to play something that I would happily
listen to."
"Those songs are part of
Gordon's make-up," DeLorenzo says, "and the idea
behind this band is to indulge ourselves musically and also
to remain real people in doing so. So why not play some
of the songs we think we can do a good job with?"
DeLorenzo himself is a non-observant Christian. As
for Ritchie, "I say Sun Ra is the only guy that's making
sense nowadays."
Even Gano, however, was appalled
to discover that Warners was advertising the new Femmes album
with the tagline, "The F-word of the 80s is FAITH."
(The song of that title includes a "faith call"
reminiscent of Country Joe and the Fish's "fish cheer,"
which spelled out another F-word.) More likely the
record company was at wits end trying to summarize an album
that ranges lyrically from outraged politics ("Old Mother
Reagan," "No Killing") to silly love songs
("Special," "Heartache"), and musically
from punk to blues to country-western pastiche to semi-jazzy
introspection.
"We imposed a stylistic
approach upon all the songs on the first album," Ritchie
says. "Then we imposed a philosophy on the second
album. On the third album we threw all our previous
ideas out the window and decided to do each song as an individual
song, the best we could do it." One novel touch
on The Blind Leading The Naked is a strong producer's
hand: Talking Heads' keyboard player (and fellow Milwaukeean)
Jerry Harrison was behind the board. Consequently, DeLorenzo
says, "the sound is a little more palatable."
But Ritchie adds that the group itself made a "conscious
choice" to use tighter arrangements than previously:
"We wanted to give people a lot of ideas to digest.
So we were more into songs as statements of philosophy and
getting lyrics across than we were with the kind of jazz approach
we had previously, which showcased instrumental finesse."
Harrison didn't always get his
way. The album concludes with "Two People,"
a fifty-seven-second fragment Gano wrote when he was fifteen
or sixteen. Gano says that "Jerry Harrison thought,
'Sounds great, but it's too short. You gotta write some
more verses.' I tried to write some other verses, even
though instinctively it didn't feel particularly right.
But when it came right down to it, that one little verse,
just having the song and almost as it began, was right."
The idea of recording "Children
of the Revolution" came from Ritchie, a Marc Bolan fanatic.
"It was just a fluke that we even did it at all,"
the bassist explains. "We listened to it once,
wrote down the chord changes and lyrics, and then never referred
to the original version again."
"I'd never heard it,"
Gano says. "I listened to it and just started laughing,
'cause I couldn't imagine us doing it. The only way
I can sing it is through the idea of sarcasm. 'You won't
fool the children of the revolution' -- that just seems ridiculous
to me."
Spontaneity plays a large part
in the Femmes esthetic. "We basically never rehearse,"
Gano says. "We just learn things onstange.
'Jesus Walking On The Water' I played through once or twice
in the dressing-room right before going onstange."
That anarchic streak ran through
the Noisemakers From Hell, a band (more or less) including
Ritchie and DeLorenzo that played Sunday nights in Milwaukee.
The Noisemakers' free-form appearances, Ritchie says, were
"like being on a psychoanalyst's couch in front of an
audience every week." The group "committed
suicide" at a gig last New Year's Eve. More recently
the Femmes rhythm section invited fellow eccentric Eugene
Chadbourne to Milwaukee, where they rehearsed, recorded and
mixed a "total political album" of social commentary
in four days. "It's a privilege to work with a
guy who's on a mission," Ritchie says. "He
didn't even believe in tuning the guitar....He didn't think
that was relevant." Ritchie tuned it when Chadbourne
wasn't looking.
One explanation for the non-Femmes
activity is that Gano transplanted himself to New York.
He's been keeping busy, too, both reverting to a solo act
and performing with Mercy Seat, a gospel/rock 'n' roll band.
The 900-mile distance between the other Femmes and himself
presents a communications problem, but reflects no musical
diffferences. Besides, Gano says, "it helps me
to play with other people, because the Femmes are my first
band."
The group's open marriage is
appropriate for three rather disparate individuals.
DeLorenzo -- at thirty-one, the Femmes' elder statesperson
-- prefers vests and jackets to the others' wilder garb.
Gano, despite writing virtually all the material, seems a
little self-conscious about his lack of extensive experience.
Ritchie is eager to jam with any peers. All are proud
of how far they've come, even as they're apprehensive about
being poised on the edge of mass acceptance.
"Success is very nice,"
Ritchie affirms, "especially when it's on your own terms."
"Success is so much perspective," Gano feels.
"The Jacksons have to apologize if they only sell five
million and Michael sells fifty million. The kind of
life we have with our group, for some people that's like being
the Stones."
"About the group, I've always
felt on two different planes. One is that it's all so
amazing that we could be doing what we've done -- a band that
has been called, and maybe justly so, a 'weirdo band.'
But for a band from Milwaukee who couldn't even get any gigs
in Milwaukee to get to the point where we got playing this
kind of music -- that's just amazing."
Circumstances have changed, but
the Femmes haven't. They've retained a remarkable degree
of artistic control -- except maybe for the new album's title.
"We wanted to call it I Daresay He Soiled Himself,"
Ritchie says. "When we ran it by Bob Biggs at Slash,
he said, 'Uh, I'll ask Warners but I don't think so.'
When they discussed it they decided they could not sell a
record called I Daresay He Soiled Himself."
They evidently can sell The Blind Leading The
Naked, though, and the Femmes themselves are prepared
for cries of "sell-out" from the pompous.
Typically, they are unconcerned.
"It's not selling out, it's
experimentation," Ritchie maintains. There's certainly
little likelihood of this group getting spoiled: "We're
still using the same exact amps we used when we started --
not the same models, the same amps!"
"Some people would hope
that we don't ever get too popular," Gano says, "'cause
in some ways that'll cheapen it. I don't go along with
that. We've never taken the path of what seems to be
the successful way to go. One girl at a record store
signing we did said, 'That "Revolution" song is
great! You keep doing songs like that, you'll really
be famous!' I was smiling, but I don't think we will."
THE FEMMES MYSTIQUE
The Femmes have come a long way,
baby, since drummer Victor DeLorenzo's kit
consisted entirely of a snare, a cymbal and the unique tranceaphone
-- a tin bucket suspended over a tom. Nowadays DeLorenzo
uses a 20-inch bass drum, 8x12 mounted tom and 6 1/2 x14 wood
snare, all by Gretsch; an 18-inch Paiste crash ride,
16-inch Zildjian crash and two 14-inch Zildjian high-hat cymbals;
Sonor high-hat and double cymbal stands; Yamaha
snare stand; and Drummers Workshop bass-drum pedal.
His sticks are Vic Firths, brushes are Regal Tips. DeLorenzo
also has a Farken floor drum, a Dutch snare (c. 1950) he uses
as a bass drum; a Guatemalan tortoise shell, heard on
the middle eight of "Breakin' Hearts"; and
a Stompatron. Oh, about that tranceaphone: It's
a 14x14 Whitehall floor tom with a Lawson metal bushel basket
overhead, on a Ludwig stand.
Brian Ritchie's
twangy sonic trademark is an Ernie Ball Earthwood acoustic
bass guitar. He also plays a custom guitar made by Milwaukeean
Jim Eanelli -- a Telecaster body with two Danelectro pickups
-- and an electric guitar and electric bass by Maton, an Australian
firm the band discovered on tour down under. Mr. Ritchie
also plays Humanatone nose flutes, Acme slide whistle, a double-necked
German jaw harp, and conches. He's even been known to
pick up a Fender fretless jazz bass (on "Good Friend")
and a Hagstrom eight-string bass. He plays through a
Music Man amp with one twelve-inch JBL speaker or a fifteen
and twelve, "depending on the size of the venue and if
our roadies remember to bring the right gear."
Onstage Gordon Gano
strums a Maton Scorpion guitar, plugged into a Fender Deluxe
Reverb amp. In the studio the Femmes draw on about a
dozen guitars, including Fender, Gibson, Yamaha and Takamine.
Gano's thin-line Telecaster with original pickups and sunburst
finish was stolen in Los Angeles, but producer Jerry Harrison
lent his own -- which he got from Jonathan Richman -- for
the new album's more abrasive moments.
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