“Promise”
Just as clearly, Talking Heads’ debut album, 1977’s 77, was a precursor of Violent Femmes in presenting not just a singing voice that required adjusting one’s ears but a songwriterly voice, a through-persona, a perspective. David Byrne’s presentation of a person on the autism spectrum, observing feelings and other people as though they were specimens, paved the way for Gano’s presentation of the gnarly yet not truly scary geek.
“I don’t even wanna hear about your confessions,” for instance, recalls Byrne’s “Compassion is a virtue / But I don’t have the time.”
The Kafkaesque existential prisoner of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979) was a variation on the outsider who‘s mainly in danger of hurting himself. Joy Division’s singer-songwriter, Ian Curtis, lived the persona to the point of doing himself in. Gano sounds more bound up than suicidal, but he could convincingly have delivered Curtis’ lines, such as “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come / And take me by the hand / Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures / Of a normal man?”
Perhaps the template in this vein closest to Violent Femmes was the first album by Jonathan Richman’s original band, the Modern Lovers, which included Jerry Harrison before he joined Talking Heads. This album was recorded in 1972 as demos but released in 1976 as an instant indie classic. For fans of that record, people who felt a kinship with Jonathan Richman’s outsider looking in, Violent Femmes not only resonated, it felt like home—the place you belonged. Richman’s “I’m in love with rock and roll / And I’ll be out all night,” “When you get out of the hospital / Let me back into your life,” and (on the album’s expanded 1986 reissue) “I called this number three / Times already today / But I put it, I put my phone, back in place” could easily be sung in the voice of Gano’s “Promise”: “I could rule the pain I could rule the night or would / I ruin my salvation ruin my mind.”
The music here digs into the singer’s emotional and intellectual difficulties right up until a break that could be a Burt Bacharach confection. As throughout Violent Femmes, shifting musical modes go a long way toward conveying hard-to-pin-down inner states.
“To the Kill”
This one, the darkest of the bunch, opens with a breakdown, then coheres into a rhythm that feels like a broken blues, a profoundly uncomfortable search for a groove with a guitar solo that’s more grinding than playing. “I ain’t no kid Chicago / I ain’t no Al Capone / But there’s a windy city in my bedroom alone.” Lou Reed and Metallica could have worked up a convincing version of “To the Kill” on Lulu (2011), their exploration of sexual violence. The link between these two difficult listens is Gano’s repetition of “jack”, as in “jacking around”, and Reed’s repetition of “Jack”, as in the Ripper. Perhaps “To the Kill”, an exploration of sexual misery and potential violence, sees itself in an underground rock tradition but secretly dreams of being heavy metal.
“Gone Daddy Gone”
This one brings the pop, literally. Richie’s manic xylophone and popping bass propel an infectious rhythm that contrasts with the singer’s mourning a lost relationship. “High school smile, oh yes / Where she is now, I can only guess.” Who among the Violent Femmes’ compatriots was employing a xylophone? That instrument, even in the hands of a jazz genius such as Milt Jackson, brings a dose of lounge music. This track dares to go there years before indie musicians started exploring and embracing that brand of cheese.
Old-style albums tend to flag in their penultimate moments. The sequencers place the collection’s weakest track next to the last because, by that point, the committed listener is trapped. Most likely, the album closer will reward patience, wrapping up the proceedings on a high note and compensating for previous lags.
Violent Femmes breaks with that tradition by ramping things up before wrapping them up. “Gone Daddy Gone” is one of the most electrifying recordings on this record and one of the all-time great penultimate tracks.
“Good Feeling”
So, to recap: “Blister in the Sun” is one of the great rock album scene-setting openers, and “Gone Daddy Gone” revs the engine right before the end. Then comes “Good Feeling”, one of the most unexpected and, therefore, most memorable album closers, one you think back to as a model for how an emotional journey should end. After all the twists and turns of the previous tracks, the anger and angst and anxiousness, the trio delivers this comedown, this plea for a respite from bad feeling, melding the Velvet Underground’s lighter side and Jonathan Richman’s melancholy one.
“There’s so many things that I have come to fear,” Gano sings sweetly, soulfully, and resignedly. “Good feeling, won’t you stay with me just a little longer.” He delivers a stunningly elegant violin solo before he and backup singers carry us off with a counterpoint melody rendered as unironic “lah-lah’s”.
If you’ve not been completely won over by the previous nine tracks, if the grinding instrumental passages and adenoidal vocals and claims of being deranged put you off, this sendoff constitutes your payoff. You suspected they weren’t truly bad boys, just horny and wayward and sometimes annoying, and you were right.
The album’s producer, Mark Van Hecke, played piano on this one. He went on to produce a fun pop-rock album by New Jersey’s Ben Vaughn Combo. Like Violent Femmes, that album was originally released on LP and cassette only.
Like personal computers and mobile phones, compact discs had become available to the general public in the early 1980s, but they didn’t become widespread for years. Violent Femmes was reissued on CD in 1987, with two bonus tracks, “Ugly” and ”Gimme the Car”, taken from a single and adding about seven and a half minutes to the running time.
“Ugly”
Violent Femmes is an album in the classic sense. At the risk of seeming preciously purist, even thinking about this recording on CD feels wrong.
This feeling is fitting because the indie-rock subculture had a puritanical aspect. If an artist was perceived as reaching past its fan base, “selling out”, or not delivering its aesthetic—and generally, that meant their original aesthetic—that artist could be shunned. Hence the cult of the debut album. Hence suspiciousness regarding second LPs and artistic growth.
But what’s a band supposed to do when they have perfectly realized their mission, wedded concept, feeling, and execution the first time out?
“Ugly”, the A-side of Violent Femmes’s follow-up single, pretty much defines “bonus track”. In retrospect, it confirms that the Violent Femmes drew from the power-pop-punk of the Ramones and the Buzzcocks and the wayward protopunk of Dylan, Reed, and Richman. It also confirms that the Violent Femmes functioned as a quasi-folk group, pulling challenging sounds out of acoustic instruments. Going electric, as here, but not having much to say, they basically take up two minutes of your time. The more conventional their approach, the less interesting their music.
Of course, while the Violent Femmes couldn’t stay in their high school cul de sac and keep recording the same album, they could have made choices that sustained the debut’s momentum. However, that first album proved the proverbial tough act to follow.
Their second album,1984’s Hallowed Ground, was a dicier affair. The standout tracks, such as “Country Death Song” and “It’s Gonna Rain”, were outstanding and sounded like great fun on college radio. Some songs appeared to be leftovers from the first album, which would’ve been fine, except that the numerous religious references on the second album indicated a different concept.
Opinions differed as to just how ironic the overtly religious songs were. Did Gano really believe in the Judaeo-Christian god and all that biblical stuff, or was he just familiar with it as a matter of upbringing and subtly lampooning it? If he was being ironic, did that mean he’d been ironic on Violent Femmes? Modern art is supposed to be about complication, and postmodern art is supposed to complicate matters through self-referentiality and knowing, freewheeling appropriation, but was Hallowed Ground modern, postmodern, or just confused and confusing?
To make matters worse—really worse, even then, but especially now—the album included “Black Girls”. On the title track to the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls (1978), Mick Jagger had vulgarly sung the praises of Black women’s sexuality and pissed people off for doing so, and now Gano committed the same offense. “Black Girls”, plopped toward the end of side two, felt like a weak leftover from the first record, extended instrumentally to fill the second album and extending its concept to the breaking point.
Those who hung on for Hallowed Ground might have bailed by 1986’s The Blind Leading the Naked, which was produced by the Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison and included a cover of T. Rex’s “Children of the Revolution”. The album was touted as doing for politics what Hallowed Ground had done for religion and Violent Femmes had done for sex, but the bids for radio play felt calculatedly far from the spirit of the first two records. The band broke up temporarily in 1987.
“Gimme the Car”
The B-side of “Ugly”, this song, again electric, comes across as a hamfisted parody of everything that made the first album so insightful. Where the album depicted, this track overstates and, despite the singer’s vehicular request, goes nowhere. No wonder even lovers of the first album—people who felt like they’d found their holy grail—didn’t bother to buy the single. It was more of the same and yet less.
That sense of diminishing returns helps explain why mapping roads into Violent Femmes isn’t hard, but roads out from it prove more elusive. If you’re wondering who was influenced by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, for example, you need look no further than Interpol. But who sounds like Violent Femmes? You have to trace out that influence indirectly.
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong took something from Gordon Gano’s sneer. In fact, Violent Femmes could be the missing link between the Buzzcocks and Green Day. Amanda Palmer, especially as a take-no-prisoners ukulele player, took something from the album’s fuck-you attitude. Indeed, Palmer’s partner in the Dresden Dolls, Brian Viglione, played drums with the Violent Femmes in 2013-15. Palmer’s compatriot Ben Folds owes a debt to Gano, as do Clem Snide’s Eef Barzelay and Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo. Here’s a weird possibility: Might Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (1988), with its ringing acoustic-guitar riff, be a cousin of “Blister in the Sun”?
As hard to detect as musical echoes are visuals inspired by Violent Femmes’ iconic album cover. But then, has it become iconic? Or is it just that when you enter a Rough Trade record store, that art may greet you from the “Rough Trade Essentials” section?
To be sure, thinking about the first album leaves you visualizing the cover photo by Ron Hugo. Thankfully, package designer Jeff Price chose not to illustrate the band name directly. If the Violent Femmes had been a metal band on a major label, we might have been looking at scantily clad women beating up the musicians.
Instead, a young femme in a white dress leans to look in a window at a decrepit building. A bit of dangling greenery shows signs of life. The violence may be life itself, whatever’s going through the girl’s mind, or her simple activity.
The prominence of the image anticipates the handling of cover imagery in the CD era when the reduced format meant covers couldn’t be too subtle or detailed. Still, this shot has a delicacy and poetic evocativeness that would not always be present on CD-era graphics. Music visuals—cover art, videos—were about to become much more in-your-face. In its calm beauty and subtlety but the suggestion of incipient turmoil, the cover of Violent Femmes, like the music it represents, feels like the drawing in of breath.
To commemorate the album’s fortieth anniversary, the band has performed the album in its entirety. The 21 May 2023 livestream from Denver’s Levitt Pavilion indicated that they’re still crazy about these songs after all these years. They added horns to “Add It Up” and “Confessions”, and Gano played a bonafide electric-guitar solo on “To the Kill”, but otherwise, the album sounded pretty much the same, which is pretty much what devotees might have hoped for.
As in the best theatrical performances, the Violent Femmes revisited their material in the moment with spirit and conviction. For the devotees in the audience, it was easy to relax and appreciate the album’s flow, its treasures and pleasures, with a mix of nostalgia and gratitude. But what if the band had been, say, 40 years younger and offering their brand-new debut album? Only individual listeners can say whether the material would have spoken to them with the power it once burst out with and still retains in its atoms.