Something 4 The Weekend # 156

Violent Femmes: Violent Femmes: "To The Kill" [mp3]

One hundred and fifty-six editions of S4TW, and this is the first time I've streamed the Femmes...amazing...

Now, I don't know how it was/is by you, but in Milwaukee, we always simply called 'em "The Femmes" and never "Violent Femmes" or even "The Violent Femmes". We called 'em "The Femmes" because they were a Milwaukee band, homegrown, familiar...

I don't know how it was/is by you, but in Milwaukee the Violent Femmes were pretty much legendary, at least among the hipper kids and the college crowds...Going from coffee house gigs and streetcorner busking to opening for The Pretenders at The Oriental on one fateful night in 1981, and from there they pretty much ruled the city for the next two to three years...

At least that's how I remembered it - I was a year or three too young to catch a full, first-hand account of the Femmes...By the time my friends and I were travelling into the city from the suburbs, the Femmes weren't busking anymore, and they were certainly too mighty for coffee houses and the smaller clubs around town...By the time I was old enough to see the Femmes, they were headlining the Oriental themselves, riling up 1000+ of the faithful, and that's a pretty impressive number for a band like Violent Femmes in a city the size and temperment of Milwaukee...By the time me and my friends started going to shows in Milwaukee, the Femmes were hanging out and recording in NYC, and starting to tour internationally...I seem to recall they "conquered" New Zealand and/or Australia on one short tour, and later on, from 85 to 87 when I was living on the east side of Milwaukee, I "ran into" bassist Brian Ritchie from time to time (well, four times, by my reckoning), including once at Lisa's Pizzaria where he recognized me enough to say "hello".

I sound like such a fucking fanboy!

But I don't know how it was by you...I don't know how much the Femmes meant to the typical youth in places that aren't Milwaukee, but considering the kind of raw, wild and literate kind of music the three of 'em made, they were loved enough, by enough, to get requested with regularity at our high school dances...And I also seem to recall RP The DJ getting his ass chewed out after spinning "Add It Up", during which he cut the PA as Gordon Gano sang "Why can't I get just one fuck?", leaving a cafeteria of 200-300 kids singing the line by themselves.

"Add It Up" never got played at a dance again, but there was still "Blister In The Sun" and "Kiss Off", "Prove My Love", "Gone Daddy Gone" and even "Good Feeling" during the slow dance romance segments of RP The DJ's 3 hour set. What I'm trying to say is that the Femmes debut album is really fucking good and solid from start to finish, because here we are with "To The Kill", which is perhaps my favorite song on this album. So now I've mentioned seven of the album's ten songs, which I think is a pretty good indication of just how undeniably great and huge this album is, to me, and a few others like me that I know or knew...

Like I said, I don't know how it was or is by you...The critics generally adore Violent Femmes, at least in those early years, those first two or three albums. I tend to respect the field of criticism, but your opinion may vary. I happen to like their weirder, more difficult second album, Hallowed Ground, a bit more, but this debut is certainly the better album, a true object of art, imbued with the magic of the time and place from which it came to be, pretty much perfect in it's completeness of tone and flow from beginning to end. Every song a slayer, and the whole thing still sounds good, like it hasn't aged a day, much less 28 years!

28 years!

I guess "timeless" is just a nicer way of saying "Holy fuck, I'm getting old! The Femmes are getting old!"

Hotcha! Hank

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