Sideways Daddy Sideways Maneuver

I couldn't escape all this nostalgia for the Milwaukee music scene of the 1980's without acknowledging the Violent Femmes...Sure, the other bands I've posted about (Sacred Order, Crusties, Die Kreuzen) were harder varieties of Punk music, but in their way, the Femmes may have been more subversive than any of 'em...Plus, they were much more musical, and much more sophisticated lyrically...

There was never any mistake that Gordon Gano's religious upbringing brought a certain kind of fervor to the Violent Femmes sound and performance, and I remember their early shows often taking the flavor of a gospel revival, with the trio leading intense chants of "Fuck Harold Breier! Fuck Mayor Maier!", which was the Milwaukee equivalent of chanting "Fuck Tha Police!" cuz Harold Breier was the city's Chief Of Police and Henry Maier was the city's mayor, and here's the inside scoop on that...

Breier had been Police Chief from 1964 to 1984, and Maier had been Mayor from 1960 to 1988, and over the years, Breier proved to be a rather gruff, hardnosed man leading a department rife with racism and corruption...I'm not sure Breier himself was corrupt, but he certainly tended to look the other way when his officers did bad, illegal shit...

Like beating the crap out of, and sexually assaulting, Wendy O Williams of The Plasmatics, after a show in the city...There are supposedly pictures of a cop fingering Ms. Williams while she is pinned to the ground by several other cops, though I have never seen these pictures...However, there really are mugshots of a bloodied and bruised Williams, who was ultimately charged with Obscene Conduct for her dress and lewd stage acts, and Battery of a Police Officer for the subsequent and notorious arrest...

Anyways, this happened in 1981, the same year as Milwaukee cops were accused of beating the crap out of drunken motorcyclist James Schoemperlen and taking his pants, and it was probably these two events, happening so close together, that brought two decades of Breier's brutal department and Maier's blind eye to a boil in Milwaukee...

So it was no surprise that some Milwaukee bands were getting themselves and the fans, the citizens of the city, all riled up...Well, the Violent Femmes were, anyways...Couch Flambeau had a song called "Mayor Maier", but it was about getting a car plowed under by snow, and going to City Hall to bitch about it, so it might not have been exactly the same, except Couch Flambeau were so weird and subversive that maybe it really was the snarky equivalent of "Fuck Tha Police!" or "Fuck Harold Breier! Fuck Mayor Maier!"

Anyways...I might as well use this post as an excuse to do some name-dropping, because, you see, I went through the English program at UW-Milwaukee with Peter Balestrieri, who was a member of The Horns Of Dilemma, who were the horn section that the Femmes oftentimes employed for live performances, and who appeared prominently on their second album, Hallowed Ground...Through him, I met the Femmes on a couple of occasions, and in a roundabout way, he led me to a "movie night" that included Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, another Milwaukee (well, Shorewood) native...

The movie? "Raising Arizona"...Jerry Harrison? Nice guy. Wore a yellow "pimp suit".

Aaaaaanyways...All of this tangential bullshit aside, what I want to finally say is that the ladies loved The Violent Femmes. This was crucial.

Hotcha! Hank