...Made Winners Out of the Violent Femmes
by Cary Baker

They're the first band they can think of in Milwaukee history to be signed by Warner Bros. Well, OK, Warner/Slash, but they still get a computer bar-code on the album cover. Suddenly, everyone in Brew City can say they knew the Violent Femmes when.

When... the city's new wave saloons barely took this semi-acoustic trio seriously enough to book them. Where were their amplifiers? Their synthesizers? A drummer playing a wash basin with brushes? This isn't rock, it's hokum. Worse yet, these... Femmes...didn't always spend their (numerous) nights off sudsing it up in the same establishments.

When...they played in front of the Downer and Oriental theaters, their acoustic instrument cases open like any self-respecting French Quarter bagpipist for spare change. When they couldn't get a wink, not to mention a nod, from the majority of passing streetfaces, it took one James Honeyman Scott to trumpet his "find" and have the Violent Femmes open for the Pretenders at the Oriental that night. The Femmes, who claim they'd never previously listened to the Pretenders, had been serenading ticket-buyers on Farwell Avenue.

Milwaukee knew them, all right. And today, 24 hours before heading east for a tour, the Violent Femmes have vaulted the final hurdle of household legitimacy. P.M. Magazine, TV courier of topics middle-American, is taping a segment on the band, but the crew doesn't have all afternoon. The reporter recalls he "may have said something potentially defamatory to koalas" in an earlier Milwaukee Zoo shoot. "The station's deficient in total adult male koalas, ages 18-34," jabs a crew member as the production van full of Femmes and cameramen wends through a barren city park.

No sweat -- koalas won't go extinct before nightfall. Besides, the Femmes don't need all afternoon to set up or tear down. Gordon Gano brings his acoustic guitar and Telecaster with minimal amp; Brian Ritchie, his amplified acoustic bass guitar; and Victor DeLorenzo, an equally high-tech trap kit, which on an elaborate night might contain a snare, a small bass drum, a cymbal and a tranceaphone (his invention: a metal washtub mounted onto a floor tom).

For on-location atmosphere, the band has tapped a tiny neighborhood shot 'n' beer joint just around the corner from DeLorenzo's house. "They've got the best drink policy in town for musicians," the drummer foams. "You have to have 10 free drinks or they won't let you leave." The Femmes are clearly loyal to the seven Johnson brothers who own the Gordon Park Pub, and not to some of the other club owners in town.

Whether the Violent Femmes are part and parcel of anyone's Milwaukee "scene" doesn't matter much now. Hardcore punks and techno freaks, neo-psychedelics and mutant funksters have all been known to join them onstage. There's even an occasional horn section, formal enough to bear a name (the Horns of Dilemma), informal enough to show up as a threesome or a solo with instruments like sackbut and cornetto.

"We're always putting ourselves in danger," Ritchie says. He's so tired of trendiness that he hasn't cut his hair in a year and dons a chasuble for the TV shoot that makes him look like a white Blood Ulmer. "Most bands have their little song list taped to their monitor, and say, 'This is a tune from our EP...1,2,3,4...." The Femmes rarely if ever board the stage with a set list, preferring to call them out as the spirit strikes.

A lot of this comes from their street-band roots. "We decided to play out on the streets because the idea of busking was attractive to us," DeLorenzo explains. "It got us in touch with really playing instead of hiding behind a shroud of electricity. Besides, none of the clubs wanted to book us at the beginning."

Perhaps because they're so in touch with each other, the Violent Femmes court musical danger. Their use of jazz improvisation as a model makes sense with their repertoire. One night in Madison, DeLorenzo and Gano spontaneously walked off a club stage mid-set, leaving Ritchie to fend for himself on bass for a while. Thank goodness he was well-studied in Mingus. "Rock has gotten so...stagnant," DeLorenzo moans.

The Femmes' sound has been dubbed "punk-folk," further bloating the hyphenated-genre ranks. The band itself neither perpetrates nor decries this horrendous handle. "We didn't want to be called new wave-folk," says the demure Ritchie, who previously played in Plasticland, a psychedelic outfit, "so we figured we'd prefer punk-folk."

What this boils down to is that the Femmes are the newest, and possibly the truest, scholars of both the sanguine and ribald periods of Jonathan Richman. Add an acrid aftertaste from sitting out many a sockhop to an antipathy to the modern world matching that of Jim Skafish or any other rock "outcast." Embellish with a skiffle sound windburned on the diagonally-intersecting Milwaukee streets, and dynamics from a whisper to a scream. The rest is open to suggestion. Got a harmonica? A koto? C'mon up. Wanna rile 'em into writing about you? Outstay your welcome.

Consider a lyric from "To the Kill," on the Femmes' LP: "I ain't no kid, Chicago/I ain't no Al Capone/There's really a Windy City in my bedroom/That bitch took my money and went to Chicago." Perhaps the singer and his companion will meet again on the Astral Plane. No one's betting.

This world -- variously vindictive, euphoric or merely thwarted -- is that of Gordon Gano. The quiet 20-year-old wrote all the band's songs practically out of high school, and he was reportedly expelled from the National Honors Society for performing one of his songs at an awards ceremony. Gano's expressionism previously found an outlet in acting: he auditioned for the guilt-ridden teen played by Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People.

Violent Femmes' 10 songs ooze confession. "Why can't I get just one fuck?" Gano seethes in "Add It Up," the album's most stirring song. "Believe me, there'd be some things I wouldn't miss/I look at your pants and (gasp) I need a kiss." By the song's end, he's looked at her lips and concluded he needs her pants. But wait -- is the singer addressing his mother? He's grown now, and ready for the kill, in this thinly-disguised oedipal fantasy.

"What we're saying is, 'Here's romanticism thrown back in your face without frills or $500 costumes. Here's raw, gut emotion. Can you deal with this?'" exclaims DeLorenzo, at 28 the elder Femme. "Can you warm up to it or will you be totally repulsed? Either reaction is fine with me."

DeLorenzo is an ex-jazz drummer, and he's serious when he talks about the Femmes' "element of free jazz." The band's bon-voyage Milwaukee gig takes place at the Jazz Gallery. (Like the Gordon Park Pub, it's steps from DeLorenzo's house.) The small lounge has knotty-pine walls, a miniscule stage and a backdrop portrait of Charles Mingus.

DeLorenzo says the Violent Femmes are "trying to express something more emotionally volatile than the mass of what's happening in the music scene now, which is packaged to fit onto MTV's playlist."

Will radio ever come around to such bludgeoning, unadulterated honesty?

"It depends whether they want to show any intelligence," notes a dry-lipped Ritchie.

"I'm not going to force this record down anyone's throat," adds DeLorenzo. "I'll simply go out and promote it by playing the best I can every time we perform."

If Violent Femmes becomes this year's black-sheep hit, it will be a tremendous blow to the idea of producer domination. The album's nominal producer is friend and manager Mark Van Hecke of New York, who DeLorenzo had known from his theater days. Van Hecke knew what the Femmes were about, and didn't set out to extract Toto IV from a blister in the sun. They recorded most of it on 8-track in a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin studio capable of 24-track.

"He coaxed us into doing good live performances in the studio," DeLorenzo says. "Sometimes we'd end up doing a song about 20 times. If Brian didn't feel particularly good about a bass part for some reason, we'd do the whole song over; we wouldn't overdub the bass part. It was a very meticulous production in that it succeeded in capturing our spontaneity. We left some mistakes on it -- a track that's perfect can often be lifeless."

Perhaps this modus operandi will apply on the Femmes' second LP. Perhaps not. They plan not to get locked into a concept, nor pandering to an audience by compromising.

"The only thing we'll pander to," DeLorenzo states, "is our own desire to grow and amaze ourselves through our progress. We may not remain totally acoustic."

"The best artists of recent years," Ritchie says -- "The Clash, Talking Heads and Elvis Costello -- went out on a limb. I think we're going to be that way."

But much roadwork looms ahead before the band will see the inside of another recording studio. Ritchie has compiled travel tapes of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Cecil Taylor, John Cale, early Stones, Balinese gamelan, blues and Indian folk music. The Femmes will remain Milwaukee rentpayers, however, and they have a pre-concert compilation cassette of Milwaukee bands to spread the word.

"Milwaukee has the feel of a European village," DeLorenzo says. The city has remained fairly true to its Germanic foundation. And its art community, perhaps due to the city's ideal size, is closer-knit than that of Chicago, ten times as populous and only 100 mile south. Commercial rock radio spearheads nearly every Milwaukee musician's list of grievances, but the station once rated the country's most neanderthal now integrates U2 with Styx. Would a choleric "folk-punk" band down the computers?

"A friend of mind is a d.j. at that station," Ritchie says. "I called him this morning. He said, 'Everybody keeps calling for "Mr. Roboto" and it's driving me crazy.' I told him his association with that radio station is causing his subliminal, spiritual decay."

But will they play the album?

"If not," says one violent Femme. "I'll whack my friend upside the head."

©1983 Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press, Inc.