Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano revisits band’s debut album as it turns 40

Gordon Gano was still a high school kid when he wrote all the songs on Violent Femmes’ 1983 self-titled debut, an album that captured teen angst with songs such as “Blister In The Sun,” “Add It Up” and “Gone Daddy Gone.”

Raging hormones, unrequited love, seething resentment and unsettling anxiety flowed from his pen, and then there was his voice, so boyish in the midst of it all. It’s that combination, Gano believes, that has allowed the record to endure for four decades now.

“When somebody is a teenager, one doesn’t think about, ‘Oh, I’m a teenager, and this is like some stage I’m going through,’” he says. “They think, ‘I’m grown and this is who I am, and this how things are.’

“Which I think is part of how the album has connected so strongly to a lot of people when they are in their teenage years,” Gano says. “There’s some ring of something authentic about it.”

“It’s not somebody who’s even in their 20s thinking I’ll write a great teen anthem or a teen rock ballad or whatever. Just putting ‘teen’ in it,” Gano says. “It’s like, This is who I am. This is how things are.”

The debut album “Violent Femmes” was released on April 13, 1983, and passed without a lot of notice at first. On its initial release, it didn’t even crack the Billboard 200 album charts. But it became the little album that could, selling steadily, if slowly.

By the time it finally reached the Billboard 200 – in 1991 when it peaked at No. 171 – it had already earned gold and platinum albums. Its songs became staples of college and alternative radio. Today, it’s sold an estimated 3 million copies.

All of which helped nudge the band to play the album in full on a tour that includes seven Southern California concerts between May 5 and May 13. The lineup currently includes Gano and original bassist Brian Ritchie with John Sparrow, who replaced original drummer Victor DeLorenzo, and multi-instrumentalist Blaise Garza.

“I’m not a big anniversary guy,” Gano says, noting that the band first played the album in full on its 30th anniversary during its 2013 Coachella set. “But when it was brought up, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s a nice opportunity to maybe commemorate or celebrate and play the album straight through.

“People have always liked the first album and their favorite songs on it, and it’s always been fun to play them.”

Finding the sound

Gano had never played in a band before he joined bassist Ritchie and drummer DeLorenzo to form Violent Femmes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin around the time Gano was graduating from high school in 1981.

“It’s all written when I was 15 to 17 years old and then recorded at 17 or 18,” he says. “Brian, he’s one or two years older than me, and Victor was a little more than that. Both of them had played in lots of bands before with other people, so there was just a whole lot that I didn’t know anything about.

“Victor was in his mid-20s, which I’m sure for him must have been like, ‘Wow, I’m playing with this kid, but it’s sort of good, I think,’” Gano says.

It was good, as their first album would prove, but it was also not exactly in the mainstream of music then. Violent Femmes was a mostly acoustic punk band that incorporated elements of folk, country, blues and rock into their sound.

“I think that also has something to do with the timeless quality,” Gano says of the influences and instrumentation on its debut. “Musically, I’ve heard Brian say that there’s nothing about how we played and how it was recorded that placed it in time.

“It was the start of the ’80s, but it could have been in the ’70s, it could have been in the ’60s,” he says. “It even could have been played and recorded in the ’50s.

“You mentioned the acoustic bass,” Gano continues. “When Brian started playing that, I don’t think he or I knew anybody that was doing it. Then later, people started doing it but still nobody would sound like him with the way he would play.

“And then Victor playing brushes, primarily brushes, with upbeat tunes, and the non-traditional percussion and invented instruments used as percussion,” he says. “Without a kick drum, I think, the whole album. He would play standing up and have just this original setup.”

It was different. Anyone who heard the band playing gigs around Milwaukee could tell that. But in the early days, being different didn’t mean people liked it; that is, until fate delivered an unexpected boost to the band as it was getting started.

Great Scott

A few years prior to the band’s debut album, they were still trying to find their way. And it wasn’t easy.

“We had just started playing together and we couldn’t get any place that would let us play, so we just went out on the street,” Gano says of the time before they’d recorded their debut. “Our experience was that anybody that would be considered our peers would flee us. When we’re playing music, they crossed the street and acted like they didn’t know us because we were so uncool.

So when Violent Femmes saw that the Pretenders had a show in Milwaukee, they decided to go downtown and play for the fans waiting in line for the show.

“We thought, They’re going to be in line, they can’t run away from us,” Gano says. “They’ll have to hear us.”

Turns out, one person liked what he heard: Pretenders’ guitarist James Honeyman-Scott.

“He listened to us for a little while, went back in and brought out the whole band,” Gano says. “Chrissie (Hynde, the Pretenders’ singer-guitarist), she came up to us after a couple of songs. She said, We have an opener we’re touring with, but if you’d like to play two or three songs right before we play we’d like you to do it.”

Within hours, Violent Femmes played the biggest gig of their career up to that point, a surreal experience that, while it didn’t lead to the band being formally discovered or landing a record deal, gave the trio the confidence that it was on the right path.

“That was a magical, magical moment,” Gano says. “It was kind of like we were convinced we were good and nobody would agree with us. Except now the Pretenders agree. They think we’re great.”

College rock graduation

A little less than two years later, the self-titled debut arrived and slowly the band’s rise began. Gano says it wasn’t until the band was on its first big tour, playing a show in Corvallis, Oregon, that he realized people were digging the Femmes’ unique sound.

“I remember we were playing and people were singing along,” he says. “And my thought was, ‘How can people be singing along to this song? We’ve never played here before, so they would never have been able to have heard this song.’

“Then I remember, ‘Oh, yeah, we have an album,’” he says and laughs. “And college radio was the big thing for us. I don’t know if you and I would even be talking now, or the first album would be where it’s at, without it.

“So that’s when it was,” Gano says. “That was like, ‘OK, that’s just another step. We had absolute confidence that this was going to work.”