**THE MAKING OF VIOLENT FEMMES (Self-Titled) - featuring gordon Gano, Brian Ritchie and victor DeLorenzo**

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Violent Femmes formed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1981 by Brian Ritchie, Victor DeLorenzo and Gordon Gano. Ritchie and DeLorenzo had been playing as a rhythm section before Gano joined as the singer and primary songwriter. After having trouble booking gigs around town, they began playing acoustically on the street, where they were discovered by James Honeyman-Scott of The Pretenders. The Pretenders were playing a show in Milwaukee that night and invited Violent Femmes to open for them. After Shake Records became interested in releasing an album, they booked studio time with producer Mark Van Hecke. When the label deal fell through unexpectedly, they still kept the studio time with the help of a loan from DeLorenzo’s father. Eventually, Slash Records heard the recordings and released their self-titled debut album in 1983.

In this episode, for the 40th anniversary, Gordon Gano, Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of Violent Femmes.

Gordon Gano: Hey, this voice is Gordon Gano's voice. That's me and I play in a band called Violent Femmes, and we're talking about the first album that we recorded, which came out 40 years ago. Well, I started writing songs and then didn't stop when I was about, probably about 13 or maybe 14, and then 15 is when I think I started being at someplace with my writing that some of the songs on the Violent Femmes first album were written when I was 15. It certainly was therapeutic in that I remember times thinking, let's say the week was done for school and after the weekend, it's gonna start up again. And I wasn't happy about it and there may be no plans of anything on the weekend or anything that I was excited about. But I thought, “If I write a song that I think is really great, then I've really done something.” So I really had a drive with writing songs and so that did make me feel a sense of some accomplishment, and it certainly has turned out that way. Because a lot of songs on Violent Femmes’ first album were probably written during a weekend where I thought, “If I write one good song, I'll feel like I did something this weekend.” You know that I felt good about and it was, what an investment in my future, I had. I started to feel like that's what it was going to be. I even knew that then that that's like a 15 year old telling people that, all it's gonna do is make me feel bad if somebody just nods and smiles and I know they don't really get it, so I'll just keep it to myself. And just thought, “I'm going to make records and I'm going to be in a band.” I felt like this is what I was going to do, but I thought, “No one's going to really believe me that I'm really going to do this.”

My plan was to go to New York City. That's where I was born, and getting into all the punk rock stuff that was happening, and I had visited an older brother in New York City and just felt like it was a transformative experience and really confirmed for me that playing in a rock band or a punk band or doing my own songs, that that's what I wanted to do. And I'd made that trip when I was 15. And then I started doing that a little bit, and that's where Brian Richie had seen me, heard me play, and then at some point he introduced himself to me.

Brian Ritchie: I'm Brian Ritchie, well, myself and Victor DeLorenzo, who was the original drummer for the band and who plays on the album. We played in a lot of bands in the early Milwaukee punk and new wave kind of scene. And we just had a rhythm section that would play with pretty much anybody. But we also played in psychedelic bands, jazz bands, we didn't really care. We were just up for a new musical adventure any day. Gordon, I met when he was still in high school. I was a few years older than Gordon, but it was, you know, significant in a cultural sense because he was living with his parents, I was out on my own. I was a full-fledged bohemian (laughs) professional musician and he was like a kid. And he had never been in a band before. So it was really interesting because Victor and I were quite experienced and Gordon had never played with a rhythm section before. So having us who were pretty good, he was lucky.

Victor DeLorenzo: Hello, the voice you're hearing is the voice of Victor DeLorenzo. Well, the whole introduction I had to Brian Ritchie was through a friend named Jerry Fortier. We were at a bar one night in Milwaukee and Jerry said to me, “Hey, there's a friend of mine outside, his name is Brian Ritchie. He's a bass player and I think you should meet him, I think you guys might get along and maybe play some music together.” So when I went outside, I met this cocky young kid named Brian Ritchie, and I liked the pizzazz that he had. And I figured, “Well, if he speaks this well and he's this interesting, maybe the music is gonna follow suit and it will be fun to play some music with him.” So I think maybe a week or so later we got together and started playing as a rhythm section. And that continued for a while and we were lending our talents out to different people in the Milwaukee area. Brian came over one afternoon and said, “Hey, let's go tonight and see this guy, his name is Gordon Gano, he's playing with his brother and I think you'll like him because he's kind of like a pint size Lou Reed imitator.” And I said, “Oh, okay, that sounds intriguing.” So he went to go see Gordon and he was very interesting to watch. Had a number of good songs already. And we decided after the show in talking with Gordon, that we would get together and we would play some music, the three of us, and see what would happen.

Gordon Gano: So it was a very spontaneous kind of time when we first started playing together. And then we really liked it, so we were going to play just in the summer of 1981. I had graduated that year from high school. As I recall, both Brian and Victor were planning on moving to Minneapolis and joining some friends and having a band there. So they told me that this was fun, but it was only going to be for the summer of 1981 and then Violent Femmes were going to be no more by the time it was the fall (laughs).

Victor DeLorenzo: Brian and I had already decided that we were going to move up to Minneapolis because I had some friends up there that were getting some music activities together. So Brian and I were gonna move up there and, and see if we could find our fame and fortune there. But after we started playing with Gordon, we realized that it was probably a good idea to stay and keep working with Gordon.

Gordon Gano: And we really liked how we were sounding. So then we decided to make more of a go of it as a band. But we did a little rehearsing and then we felt, well, we were ready to play and then we couldn't find any place that would let us play. We tried and we tried. So that's when we started playing out on the street. We only found out some years later, there's a word for it called busking. But we had no knowledge of that. And in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and particularly at that time, maybe still to this day, but certainly then there was nobody doing that. Nobody was out playing music on the street. And we were doing that because we couldn't find any place to play that would let us play.

Brian Ritchie: Well, we were attempting to audition at a club called Century Hall. We walked in there and we walked up to the manager's office and said, “Hey, we'd like to audition.” And he said, “Oh, well just give me a tape, I don't really wanna listen to you right now.” And we said, “Oh, well, we're auditioning for a live gig, so how about if we play for you?” “There's only the three of you, we don't book trios, we only book quartets.” So he was brushing us off. We left pretty discouraged, so we decided to go play on the street, and we noticed that the Pretenders name was on the marquee of a theater.

Gordon Gano: We thought, “It was a sold out show, there's going to be a line going down and around the block for the Oriental Theater where they were going to play.” And we thought, “We can come and play for the most people and they won't run away from us like people always did when we played on the street.” Anybody that we might have known from any kind of a rock or punk world, or people that may have played in bands with Brian or Victor as well, they'd cross the street and walk and pretend they didn't see us. It wasn't a cool thing to do, it was like the most uncool thing. And then we thought, “People aren't going to be able to run away from us because they'll be in line to see the Pretenders and they'll be trapped! So we'll be able to have the most people we've ever played for and they're going to be forced to have to listen to us.”

Brian Ritchie: So we set up outside the theater and started playing. And James Honeyman-Scott was on a break from soundcheck and he walked past and he listened to us for a while. We didn't know who he was. We just saw somebody looking at us. And then that guy disappeared and came back with a bunch of people, including, we saw Chrissie Hynde, who we did recognize, and then we realized that they were the Pretenders.

Victor DeLorenzo: And they're sitting on a car, leaning them up against a car, and they're listening to us. So we get to this one point in our repertoire, this song called “Girl Trouble” with the famous refrain, “Girl trouble, I've got girl trouble up my ass.” So anyway, when it gets to that part of the song, Chrissie Hynde just starts laughing. She just can't get over it, she's just having the best time. So we get through with the song and she comes up to us and says, “Hi, my name's Chris. Do you guys want a gig tonight?” And we look at each other like, “Yeah, of course we'd love a gig tonight. Where?” And she goes, “Here.” We said, “On the stage at the Oriental here?” And she goes, “Yeah!” So that night we went from playing for a handful of people outside the theater to playing on the main stage to a packed house that were there to see the Pretenders.

Gordon Gano: So our plan of playing for the line didn't work out, but we certainly played for the most people because we played, I'm forgetting now what the Oriental Theater holds, two or three thousand, something of that nature, I think at that time. And we were introduced and whatever number of thousands of people, they all started booing.

Brian Ritchie: Their manager, whose name was Dave, came up on stage and said, “Pretenders will be up shortly.” And the audience goes “Yeah!” “But first Milwaukee's own Violent Femmes!” Massive chorus of boos! Everybody was booing us. They did not want to hear us. They didn't know who we were, but they definitely didn't want to hear us. Especially when he said that we were from Milwaukee. He probably thought that that was gonna help us but it hurt us because Milwaukeans are very self-deprecating and have an inferiority complex. So they thought, “Wow, if this band's from Milwaukee, they can't possibly be good.”

Gordon Gano: And yet we look on the side of the stage and the Pretenders are cheering us along and just like they were so into it. And we thought we were really good and the fact that nobody agreed with us didn't seem to bother us too much because we were convinced we were good. And then it's like nobody thinks we're any good and they want us to go away, “Oh, oh, the Pretenders think we're great, you know?” So it's like, “Yeah, that's what we think.” It was just this magical day and night and it certainly was very exciting for us and really just confirmed a lot of the things that we felt already.

Victor DeLorenzo: True story. Of course, the next day we were back on the street.

Gordon Gano: We had made a demo with Mark Van Hecke, who had a little home studio, something to record. And he was somebody that Victor DeLorenzo had done work with theater projects. I think Mark had scored music for the theater and, and he was interested and excited about what we were doing. And on a trip he made to New York, he got this demo tape to every place that he could think of. And it was Alan Betrock who responded positively, I don't think anybody else did. And he was the founder of Shake, which started, I believe, as a magazine and then became a small indie label as well, putting out music in the world of the kind of stuff that we were doing also.

Victor DeLorenzo: And he came out to Milwaukee to see us and he wanted to invest money in the band so we could make the record. I had booked time at the studio. Right after I did that, Alan unfortunately had some big health problems come up, so he had to drop out and save the money for his health bills and he had to pull out. So I was in panic mode and it fell on me being the oldest to make this still work cause we didn't want to lose the little deposit that we had put down. So I approached my father, and my father, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to lend me and consequently the band, $10,000 to make the record. And my father being the human being that he was, decided that, that he would take a chance on me and consequently Violent Femmes. And that's why we have that first record.

Brian Ritchie: We were nothing but a bunch of reprobates and almost like homeless people, so we had no credit, credit rating (laughs). So luckily Victor's father stepped in to help us out that way.

Gordon Gano: It was Victor's father who lent the money so that we could still go ahead and make this recording with Mark Van Hecke producing. And one thing I'd like to say that I think is amazing, as I mentioned, Mark Van Hecke working on it, Glen Lorbiecki was the engineer, and he might be the only person in the history of music that has this distinction. His claim is that our album was the only record he ever engineered. He'd never recorded any other album. We didn't know that when he was the house engineer at the studio, but I guess he had never done an album before. And then after that, he got out of the business. So he only did one album ever as an engineer. And it's this Violent Femmes first album, multi-platinum album. Even with the money we had, it really wasn't enough to get, you know, the studio, things would take a little more time than we thought they would and all of this. And so there were times where in order to get it done and get it done how we wanted it done, we would book, I don't know, an hour, a couple of hours at night and go in and then he would stay with us all the way through the night, even though we just paid for an hour or two, he'd stay with us until the morning. He thought that people would start arriving at the studio so we'd have to, when it was daylight, we had to like scramble out of there and pretend like we weren't there working all night. And he did that for us.

Victor DeLorenzo: So we're cutting tracks and I would notice after a while we'd come in and, “Wasn't there a reverb unit there in that rack? It's gone.” “Oh, oh. Um, it's being fixed.” “Okay.” Then we'd come in again, “Wasn't there a compressor that was over there in that rack? Where did that go?” “Oh well, um…” What they didn't want to tell us what Glen Lorbiecki, our engineer, who was really the janitor, what he told us is, “I just wanna be honest with you guys, but the studio is going into receivership.” So that's why we'd show up and bits of equipment had been sold off just to try and keep the studio open for another few weeks or what have you. So eventually we finished recording with Glen, and then we brought in a friend of ours, John Tanner, to mix the album proper with us. And that's the record that you can hear today.

Gordon Gano: That's what we got all around, which eventually was put out exactly as we had recorded it with Slash there was a little bit of positive feedback from some other place where there was a producer who had had a lot of big success, who said that they would've considered it to be a demo tape. We made the whole album, “Now we're going to go and do it the right way and record it, you know, correctly.” And that would've just destroyed it, taken away all that magic. So I'm so glad we just stuck to, “No, this is it.” And that was before we had the deal with Slash, it was just, “No, this is it. It really is it. And we're not going to rerecord these songs in some other way with even if somebody's telling us this is the way you really do it.”

Brian Ritchie: That's the first album. We did that ourselves with no record company anything. And then eventually we sent it around to more labels and Slash was the only label that was willing to put it out, but they weren't willing to pay for it. They just said they would put it out and hopefully it would recoup. Of course, it went to recoup tens of thousands of times (laughs), but they didn't know what to make of it.

Victor DeLorenzo: So thank you again, Dad. It wasn't for you, there would be no Violent Femmes record.

“Blister in the Sun”

Gordon Gano: I have very clear memories of writing “Blister in the Sun” because, it's so strange, I had met somebody at a poetry reading and she must have called me or told me that she was going to start a band. And she had heard, I said that I played guitar, and this is before Violent Femmes, before there was a Violent Femmes band and I had never been in a band. And she said she was having some musicians get together and she wanted to have a band and she wanted it to be something like the Plasmatics. And I thought maybe it'd be good if I showed up and volunteered a song which would be for her to sing. So either I had written it specifically for this or it was the last thing that I had written and I thought, “This would be good. I'll take this last thing that I just wrote.” And so it was going to be “Blister in the Sun” that I was going to say, “Here, you wanna do this song?” And then must have got a phone call that it was called off and never saw her again, heard from somebody that, passing on gossip from over 40 years ago, saying that she joined a cult and went to Canada (laughs). That was and I don't even, wouldn't even know her name now or anything. But the writing of “Blister in the Sun,” I was thinking of even having a woman sing the song initially as the song. But I'm glad it didn't go that way. I'm glad it didn't, didn't wind up there.

Brian Ritchie: He wrote it for somebody else to sing. In a band that Gordon was auditioning for but didn't make it into the band or something like that (laughs). So he thought she would sing it, and I think maybe she had big hands is this story, I'm not sure. He tells a few different stories.

Gordon Gano: Yeah, I'll explain (laughs). I'll give my viewpoint on the big hands. It's just funny, it's funny but very flattering to be like, as a song, any writer would be like, “Now let's dig deeply into this one sentence and why you chose these words.” And it's like, “Oh, it's so nice that you care, you care this much.” Cause you know, of course I did put a lot of thought, even though it came quickly, there was thought behind it. And the thought there is this, that I wanted to have it not be something cliched like somebody is maybe very dainty and flower-like, or just this kind of idea of like small and delicate and that kind of idea of beauty, which has a real tradition behind it with that. And in songs of, you know, the blonde hair and the blue eyes and all of that sort of thing has been in lots of songs. And so I just thought big hands being like the opposite of the small, delicate, dainty hands that that would be more interesting in the song. And then I also thought that, I do have small, dainty, delicate, beautiful hands, so, I could see a little attraction to the opposite cause I'm attracted to opposites. So, you know, that's where on the personal, the personal idea for me would be like, “Oh, okay, I'm, this is about being attracted to something that's not like me, that's the other.” So that's where all that came from.

Victor DeLorenzo: There's a lot of mystery in that song too. Gordon has given a couple hints about what he thinks the song is about, but I think what's nice about the song is it is open to one's interpretation.

Gordon Gano: I don't know if there's a name for this when writing something down, often, if it's something I'm writing quickly, I used to do it more, but occasionally it might still happen. That if I'm writing, “I,” I write, “A.” Or if it's supposed to be “A,” I write, “I”. And not just in a word with spelling, not like that. But if it's on its own, like if I'm writing, “I went here,” I might write “A went here.” Or if I’m writing “A dog,” I might write, “I dog.” And it's not a constant thing, but it happens. And I think that happened with “Blister in the Sun” and I hear people sing it either way. “Let me go on like…” and then it could be “a blister in the sun” or “I blister in the sun.” And I think I've even sung it a little bit one way and then a little bit the other way. And I like it because they both work. At least they both work for me perfectly fine, either way. I think I usually sing, “Like I blister in the sun,” or you see now it creates doubt in my mind because I thought it one way and then I wrote it down the other way. So now after we've had this in-depth thinking about it, I'll probably never be able to play the song again or sing it, I think I'm done now. That's it, it's just too much. No, it's always fun to play, it's always fun to do. But yeah, lyrically it also has this kind of aliveness to it because I can kind of, it has a couple different ways of that it could go. And the idea that people think it has something to do with masturbation is just incredible to me (laughs).

Brian Ritchie: But he says it's not about masturbation, which most people think it is. But it's probably good that people think that because everybody seems to relate to that as something that's desirable to listen to.

Gordon Gano: Years later, like, I don't know, 20 years afterwards, I was talking to somebody and they said something about the song and then they said, “Oh, you know, and because you know what it's about, you wrote it.” And I'm like, “Well, why don't you tell me what it's about?” And they're like, “Well, you know.” And I was like, “Well, no, you know, what do you think it's about?” And then they said, “Well, you know, you wrote it. It's about masturbation.” I had never heard of that before. And according to this random person that I met, the whole world thinks that that's what the song is about.

Brian Ritchie: We knew that it was a good song to start out with. We started out most of our shows with it. The first time we played it, which was the actual first instant that Gordon and Victor and I played together, we started playing “Blister in the Sun,” and Victor just came up with that drum riff, that “da da” part spontaneously within seconds of playing together. So we were already on a creative role from the moment we started.

Victor DeLorenzo: Well, that was a crowd pleaser from the very beginning. And it's an interesting song in that you have the introduction or the fanfare, Brian on the acoustic bass, and then you have the, what I call stutter flames. And it's funny in that that drum motif is the hook of the song. Now, when you watch a lot of sports on television, they use that song, “Blister in the Sun.” They use that beginning because the audience likes to clap to (makes clapping sound).

Brian Ritchie: “Blister in the Sun” is really simple, but whatever it is, it's catchy and it works.

Gordon Gano: “Blister in the Sun” was never released as a single, ever. As Brian Ritchie, I think has stated is that, “We don't have hits, we have classics” (laughs). Which is, it's true. That the songs that people would think had to have been a hit, they were never on any charts. They were never in that sense a hit were they were never a single. But no one would know that now because of where they're at, especially “Blister in the Sun,” where people know that song and like that song not knowing who did it, who recorded it or anything. They just know that song.

“Kiss Off”

Gordon Gano: Well, “Kiss Off” is a song that I wrote when I was 15, definitely. It was one of my earlier rock kind of songs. I think it was a way of getting out frustration, like a lot of the songs are. And it wasn't somebody writing a song, say about being a teenager, it was a teenager writing the song about what was real and what felt right to them to put in a song. And I think there's something about that that has really communicated to people. And especially to younger people, that it comes from such a authenticity of just really who's this voice and who's writing this.

Victor DeLorenzo: The quality of Gordon's voice really helps to sell the material because he sounds so young and so fragile. Even though some of it is dealing with very adult subject matter and coming from a dark place, he still always has that very young quality about him, which is, something that makes the record even more intriguing.

Brian Ritchie: Well, when I met Gordon, he had quite a few good songs, which include most, I think everything on the first album, most of the songs on Hallowed Ground and a number of songs that kept appearing on all of our recordings until recently. So he was a very prolific songwriter and when I talked to him about it, he said that he was just so bored, like in school, that he would just write songs in study hall or during class and that was his way of keeping mentally occupied. But obviously he was in a zone to have written so many good songs before even the age of 18.

Gordon Gano: “I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record.” Well that's certainly something that I heard either to myself directly or said out loud to the whole class. Cause I remember from the earliest grades, like a little speech from the teacher for just say the first day of third grade and the speech will include, “You’re big third graders now so the behavior that you had as second graders will not be tolerated anymore.” And every year it seemed like some version of that.

Victor DeLorenzo: Fast controlled chaos, interesting lyrics, and really bringing to the forefront the whole punk rock ethos. That's where we really let our punk flag fly.

Brian Ritchie: We sometimes go into these pretty freeform improvs and on the recorded version there's a short one, and that's a really exciting part of the song. We still do very long improvs on “Kiss Off,” sometimes extended, do trades. It's just an open section that can go as long or as short as we want.

Victor DeLorenzo: That was something that was built into the band from the beginning because of Brian and I's love of improvisation. So we would take liberties with the structures from night to night. There wasn't just one set way that we would do it when we were in the middle of one of those long improvisations, we really had to keep our ears open and our eyes wide open to watch each other for cues. So that's something that we just developed over time.

Brian Ritchie: Well, we were always improvising in every band that we were in, so it was natural that we would also do that with Gordon. Gordon hadn't been in a band before, so he didn't have the opportunity, but he picked up real quick. We took him to see Sun Ra’s band, and he had never really heard that kind of music before, but when he saw Sun Ra’s band perform, he said, “Okay, now I understand what you guys are trying to do.” And he liked it a lot so he is now a convert.

Gordon Gano: I had a lot of stuff that I was raised with musically, but one thing that I had almost no interaction with was jazz and all its different forms. And that really started when I was playing with Brian and Victor. Oh and Sun Ra was one of the biggest influences on our band, which most people wouldn't know. But with the approach with the music, the approach with the show, definitely stretching the tonalities, into other areas than pop or rock. Yeah and the rhythms. There are times where early on Brian and Victor would be playing, where I would just, I'd have no idea now where the beat was because they were playing around with it so much from where my experience had been, where it's like I just have to sort of hang in there or wait it out or sometimes really count with a lot of concentration to not get thrown off by what they were doing. But that's part of the excitement of the music.

Brian Ritchie: “Kiss Off” also has the counting section I guess you could call it, which so many people relate to.

Gordon Gano: “Kiss Off,” I'm glad about having the counting because I thought it was kind of funny and seemed very real when it got to eight to say, “I forget what eight was for.” And to keep like, because it's every number is for this, for this, for that. And then get to a certain number, “Well I forget what that was for,” and that's actually the way I wrote it. And I really, that gives me pleasure every time singing it to always say with number eight, “I forget what that was for.” “Kiss Off” does sound like it could be somebody counting out pills. That isn't something that I did. I didn't do that. But I'm trying to think when I first wrote it, if that was the thought in my mind, like, this is like, and that would be an aspect of the fantasy of the song or of like a character of the song that's singing this and it's not just me or it's me fantasizing about something, but not something that I'm experiencing or that I will experience. So I mean, that's what it sounds like to me (laughs).

Brian Ritchie: I don't really know how much of Gordon's songs are autobiographical or how much of the persona in his songs are autobiographical. I don't think it's good to interrogate that too much, but Gordon could be writing from a character's point of view with all of these songs or any of them, or autobiographical, I'm just not sure. And I don't think it's even really important to know.

Gordon Gano: Things in “Kiss Off” and things in most every song have different degrees of something that could be from a journal or a diary, and then also fantasy. And things that are not at all from that, but just stuff that I had fun writing and felt like writing and felt like getting into this place of who is this person that's saying “I” in this song. And it's always been a combination of that for me, going from some songs that are completely that, just a made up story, everything in it and others, which I could say, “Okay, well everything is exactly what I thought and felt or experienced.” And then more often, a combination of those two.

“Please Do Not Go”

Brian Ritchie: “Please Do Not Go” has to be the worst reggae song that was ever recorded (laughs). Like it is so lame and yet it works. It's so inauthentic that maybe because it's so inauthentic, we can pull it off.

Victor DeLorenzo: That was almost like a comedy song. We had a few different comedy songs. But it was a song that was fun to play, it showed the diversity we had in our repertoire. Not a particular favorite, but it was okay.

Gordon Gano: I think I had been listening to a lot of Bob Marley and other reggae, and so I always thought of it as a reggae song. And then Brian Ritchie with bass and Victor DeLorenzo with drums, percussion, they did not play it or approach it as a reggae song. And my guitar is setting a beat that one might play, playing a reggae rhythm. So it has a little combination of things, which I think is very interesting going on with it musically.

Brian Ritchie: In that case, reggae is not really so much of a style as it's just a vehicle for the song, which is a pretty straightforward kinda love song.

Gordon Gano: I wasn't with anybody. I think when I wrote that I had never been with anybody, so I wasn't asking somebody not to go (laughs) because there wasn't anybody and there never had been anybody. So yeah, there's certainly a yearning that's in the song, which then there would be a lot of yearning that I felt. So it just wasn't a page from a diary.

Brian Ritchie: It is one of the very few unaccompanied bass solos on any popular commercial song and rock music. So for that alone, the song probably is worth existing just from a bass kind of perspective. But in the early days, we would just do songs and we wouldn't even have an arrangement. So it probably came about by accident. Like we got to that part of the song, we just didn't know what to do. So I started playing a solo and then they said, “Oh that was good, let's keep that.” But I can't remember. I think that's probably what happened though.

Victor DeLorenzo: Well, sometimes there would be a drum feature, sometimes there would be a bass solo, sometimes Gordon would attempt a guitar solo. They were things that either came about just by repetition of the rehearsal or someone had an idea, “Hey, let's just put a solo here just to kind of break this song up a little bit.” So they all were decisions that came quite naturally to three people trying to work on material in a room.

Gordon Gano: And I think the bass solo in “Please Do Not Go,” it really does something to have the other instruments stop entirely, so he's only playing. His bass playing, it is really something incredible. He's covering so much territory and primarily with an acoustic bass guitar, which has a different sound, but also if somebody else plays it, it doesn't sound the same because he has a way of playing, has a way of feeling the beats, and he does so much with it. It's a signature part of the sound of the band, that's for sure.

Brian Ritchie: Well, I wanted to play acoustic bass, but I didn't want to carry around one of those huge upright basses and I saw that there was this instrument, the acoustic bass guitar, which I got from, first I made my own. And when we started out, was playing that and then I got one from Ernie Ball, which is still the best one that's ever been on the market. It's just a great instrument. And gave me a unique sound and it can be played, well I play it kind of in between a bass and a guitar. I serve the function of the bass, but I also do a lot of the solos and I also would play like bass drum parts on it because Victor was using only a snare. So there was a lot of space in the sound, Gordon playing rhythm guitar, Victor playing only a snare, so left a lot of room for the bass, and that's one of the reasons why my style is so aggressive.

I think it's one of the interesting things about this album is exactly how many background vocals there are. They're on almost, I think they're on every song, and it really gives you a feeling of the band rather than some bands that don't have background vocals or just have them on some songs. You don't know if it's a solo artist or a band, but when you hear the players and you hear the singers, you can pretty much feel that it's a band. There's definitely a lot of interplay, especially with Victor's (sings “lie lie lie lie”). He puts a couple little diversions in there.

Victor DeLorenzo: Yeah, I'm singing on most of the Violent Femmes’ material background. Brian is in there occasionally, but I had more of pitch parts (laughs).

Gordon Gano: I think all three of us were challenged by singing with pitch. There was quite some time spent on the background vocals, even though they just sound, hopefully, they just sound like they were just sort of sung out just as we were playing it and doing it just like we would've done live. But I think those were overdubbed and the ones that require the harmony, Victor was, he was better at that than maybe the other two of us. So he's doing the high vocals and he's the one that would've come up with the vocal harmonies.

Victor DeLorenzo: It all came from arranging. For the most part, the way our jobs were doled out in Violent Femmes were Gordon would come in with a song, meaning a set of lyrics, a melody and a chord structure, and then Brian and I would arrange it. We really needed the input of the three of us to create the perfect monster.

“Add It Up”

Gordon Gano: Yeah, “Add It Up.” I'll say one thing that Brian Ritchie, the album is the way it is because of his idea for, we had all the songs that became our second album, Hallowed Ground, has more traditional kinds of songs that are obviously, “This is a country song, this is a gospel song, this is where we're doing more jazz, this is where we're doing…” And we were playing them all when we would play mixed in with all the songs on our first album before we recorded anything. And he had the idea, “Let's keep our first album more streamlined with the material and let's make it be more of a rock album and have it be more of these kind of beats and this approach with these songs. And then we can do the other stuff on another album,” which is what we did. And I'm so glad he had that, like the shape of the whole thing and the form of the whole thing. I don't think it would be quite as popular if it had the gospel tunes and the folk and the country all mixed in. I don't think it would have the same impact in the same way that it grabbed people and still grabs people that are hearing it for the first time.

Victor DeLorenzo: When you listen to the selection on the second album, Hallowed Ground, it's funny to think that all those songs were floating around at the same time. It's just a matter of our decision as to what made the first record and the second record. So a lot of those songs could have swiped positions. Not many people realize that.

Brian Ritchie: Well, we could have released Hallowed Ground first, or we could have put out a double album that had all of the songs, or we could have done a lot of different things. But we decided to put the poppy songs on the first album. We didn't know that we'd be making more than one album so we thought it was a good statement. And we thought it was a good kind of development of what we'd been loving about punk music, about the direct nature of punk music and doing something really simple and paired down. And I remembered I had strips of paper with the names of the songs, and I just kept shuffling them around like cards in a deck until I got to the point where I thought it really had a nice flow to it.

Gordon Gano: That was just such a good idea he had to approach it that way. That being said, all of that, Brian Ritchie praise coming, I'll give myself a little nod with “Add It Up.” Cause we were rehearsing “Add It Up,” this is before we recorded it and he said, “We shouldn't play this song. I don't wanna play this song.” And I'm thinking, “I think this is one of our best songs and one of the best songs I've written. Why don't you wanna play this song?” He said, “Because it's only two chord changes and it just goes back and forth. The whole song never changes. Like, that's boring, that's not good. I don't think we should do the song.” And I just, I wouldn't stop playing it.

Brian Ritchie: No, that's not true, it's my favorite. I love it. Even because of the fact that it has two chords, cause it goes through so many different sections, even though it's structurally repetitive. So, Victor and I are working a lot of different feels in the rhythm section. Some of them are straight ahead rock and punk, some are more like Latin or jazz. So it's very interesting to listen to it now when I hear it or even when I'm playing it. But the great thing about it is when we do it on stage, that song just rocks. It's just like a runaway train.

Gordon Gano: Then that pushed himself and Victor with the rhythm section to keep making all these shifts and changes in the different sections and the dynamics and the way that they keep shifting and changing through the whole tune. From his point of view, is probably an act of desperation to try to like do something to make this boring song interesting. It's just two chords back and forth for however many minutes it goes on.

Victor DeLorenzo: Long (laughs). Long song to play. Another one of the classics, I mean, there's so many classics on that first album. I think I was a little bit more open-minded and I always responded to the energy. I thought the energy was really good in that song and I like the way that Gordon performed it.

Brian Ritchie: I think it's like our version of “Satisfaction” or it's just a song that defines the band more than “Blister in the Sun.” I would rather people listen to “Add It Up.” It's got a lot of great lyrics. And the arrangement is amazing.

We're not like a groove band. Like a lot of drummers and bass players, they just lock into a groove and it wouldn't matter what the singer was doing, they're just gonna stick with that monotonous groove. We were always trying to play off the lyrics, and one of the things about playing acoustically, and this includes what Victor was playing, is that it really does allow us to back up Gordon and get out of his way and make the vocals the front. A lot of bands drown out the vocals. Like you read the lyric sheet and you're like, “Wow, this guy's Shakespeare. Too bad I can't hear it. There's too many guitars. The cymbals are too loud. That hi-hat is too shrill.” You know, there's always something else in the recordings and you can't hear the vocals. So we thought, “If we had play acoustic, even though we were playing punk, get out of the way of the vocals and let Gordon shine.”

Gordon Gano: I think there's a little bit in there inspired by “Bird is the Word,” just like when I'm going “Oh ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, mo, my mo,” you know? And I remember hearing the first kind of rapping that I ever heard was with Blondie's version, which was probably in there somehow too with me doing this longer talking thing. So there's just so many different influences which just go into the writing and then go into the performing of what we're doing.

Brian Ritchie: And this is one of the interesting things about Gordon's songwriting. You've got “Blister in the Sun,” which has so few words that may as well be a haiku. And then you have something like “Add It Up,” which is practically a precursor to rap or something where there's so many words. He didn't have a formula. He was working a lot of different angles. Gordon was really into the punk scene. His favorite was Johnny Thunders. He was also into Bob Dylan, he was into Johnny Cash, he was into Hank Williams. We were all into all that stuff and more. He had also been singing in church a lot because his father was a minister. Some of the openness of the lyrics was creeping his, well, the people in his father's church did not like some of the lyrics, like once the band became known and didn't like some of the subject matter, but his parents always backed him. So he had the freedom and he had support from his family, even though they probably didn't really like having some of that stuff come out.

Gordon Gano: I know one thing about it that my mother was not happy about, that one of the first things that was written up on the band or on the album said that “Add It Up” was a song about me smoking pot with my mom. So that's another way of thinking about this song. Except I had never thought of that. I never did that, and she never did that. She was not happy about having it in print that this song's about me smoking pot with her. But somebody, that's how they took the song or they took part of the song to be that. Brian has pointed out to me, Brian Ritchie, that he said that if you're writing “mama” in a way that's sort of, you know, the blues way of writing it or in the tradition it's spelled, “m-a-m-a.” And I think I had written it out as “m-o-m-m-a” or something like that so that you see “mom” and then “mama.” Yeah that's a mistake on my part. So I think that's got people thinking it really is his mom he's talking about.

Victor DeLorenzo: As performers, what we wanted to give to the audience was a little bit of heaven and a little bit of hell. So the observations that Gordon would make as a young man having to deal with religion or sex or the dark nature of humanity was probably being fed by his interest in groups like the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, James Chance, the Ramones, all different kinds of people that were coming up to the punk ranks at that time. So Gordon is very intelligent and a very good songwriter. So he was incorporating a lot of things that were affecting him at that time as a young man growing up in America.

Brian Ritchie: Obviously Gordon's songwriting was pretty radical at the time because in general, like if you look at the songwriters such as Mick Jagger or whoever, whatever kind of boring stuff was happening, Aerosmith, whatever. They're all trying to be really cool and they're trying to convince you that they are cool. And Gordon wasn't trying to do that. He was just putting out his, either his autobiographical stuff, his fantasies, and it's kind of hard to tell the difference because the persona in some of the fantasy songs is quite similar to his real persona in the autobiographical songs.

“Confessions”

Brian Ritchie: Well, you can hear that it sounds a lot like “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan. So we related it that way, but the lyrics are obviously way different. It had that kind of waltz type characteristic or a 6/8 kind of feel. So it's kind of a bluesy feel in a sense. So we just played it freely like that.

Gordon Gano: I don't know if it was in my head, but the beginning of it to me sounds like it could be in some musical. I grew up hearing a lot of musicals. My mother had been in a musical on Broadway in the 1950s, and my father directed musicals and they did musicals. They were often doing them together. And so I grew up hearing the musicals of the periods from like the forties through the sixties. So to me, the beginning of that might have been in my head like almost like, “People worry, what are they worrying about today?” Maybe a little more up tempo and different arrangement, but it probably came out of hearing so many of that period of musicals. I think that “Confessions” is more of a flight of fancy.

“I'm so lonely,” well, certainly I was lonely, you know. So it just, it's this, you know, a mix. There's a blurring of things, like there's a character there, but then it's also me in some way. It's me too. And yet then it's not, and I think I wrote that song and I wrote probably, you know, to some degree, every song with that kind of consciousness, with the writing.

Brian Ritchie: Because of the way the lyrics are structured, it creates incredible peaks and valleys including the militaristic side of some of the lyrics where it's very punchy. Another song that has a good arrangement.

Victor DeLorenzo: I got to play sit down drum set on that particular piece. So that was something different, as opposed to most of the other songs where I was doing the standup routine where I had my Gretsch snare drum, the trancephone and one cymbal. But I got to sit down on a four piece, Gretsch drum set, and I had two cymbals and a hi-hat. So that definitely had a more of an aggressive sound. And also the freak out is, is really nice in the center of that piece, I really like that.

Brian Ritchie: Victor is the reason why we were able to have such dynamics because of his jazz background, his brushwork. And most rock drummers have loud or louder, that's their two settings. But Victor would frequently make the music more exciting by making it quieter, which is actually pretty radical. It's a common thing in classical music or in a lot of music around the world, has this idea that you can make the music quiet and that draws people in. But not much in rock music. So Victor was great that way.

Gordon Gano: Victor DeLorenzo playing primarily with brushes, even with fast rock songs, he's playing with brushes, which is so unusual that one time I was playing with a drummer that told me that it couldn't be done, or he just refused. He wouldn't play with brushes on a rock song that wasn't a ballad. I think coming out of playing out on the street with just having Victor bring a snare drum and some brushes and then developing this other instrument that he called the trancephone.

Victor DeLorenzo: Well the trancephone is a folk art instrument that Brian and I and Jerry Fortier invented. So I took this metal bushel basket, turned it over on its bottom, and put it on top of the floor tom, and then I played this contraption, and you could scrape the top with the bottom of the brush, or you could play the side of the trancephone or the top. So I could get different kinds of sounds out of this one thing. And when I started using this in conjunction with the snare drum, I had my own little kind of a percussive orchestra that I could haul around easily. And because of the way I divided the beat up onto the drum itself, I could suggest the idea of a drum set. Even though of course there was no drum set.

“Prove My Love”

Victor DeLorenzo: Well, it starts with a drum introduction so that's nice. Good energy. I love the background vocals. It's a good sing along song and it always would pick people up when we would throw it into the set. No matter where we would play it, people would really get excited when we'd start playing that song.

Brian Ritchie: Well that's a really poppy song and we equated it to kind of sixties pop music.

Gordon Gano: “Prove My Love,” I think I wrote it, I was listening to a lot of Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers. That would've been my favorite group for a certain stretch of time. And they had songs that “Prove My Love,” they could have done a great version of. So it was just having fun writing a song like that, just kind of playful. Some of the lyrics hopefully come across as being a little playful.

Brian Ritchie: Funny story is that when we first started rehearsing it with Gordon, we got to the point where the guitar solo happens. And, you know, we had been doing a verbal walkthrough the song and said, “Okay, we'll do one verse and we'll do another verse. Then you play the guitar solo, and then we'll do another verse.” And we got to the guitar solo and he didn't do anything. I said, “This is the space for the guitar solo.” He says, “I don't know, I never played a guitar solo before, I don't know what to do” (laughs). So we showed him what to do and that was literally the first time Gordon played a guitar solo. So I remember that as a fun moment. It was really nice to be there, you know, in such an early stage in someone's musical development.

Gordon Gano: I remember the first time that we had a rehearsal of some sort, Brian telling me, “Now here's a good spot, take a guitar solo.” And I was just like, “What are you talking about? I've never played a solo in my life,” kind of thing. And he's like, “Well, here's how you do it.”

Brian Ritchie: He has the ability to play essentially rhythm guitar solos that are really interesting. More interesting than having somebody wanking away on the guitar like Eric Clapton does.

Gordon Gano: That guitar solo came from playing out on the street where it's a rhythm guitar solo because single notes weren't going to, from an acoustic guitar, it was going to make the sound disappear rather than having a solo that is able to be heard. So that's where that came from, is just trying to play full chords and do something rhythmically that can still make it so somebody could hear it during an instrumental section.

Victor DeLorenzo: “Third verse, same as the first.” Well, I think the influence was from Herman’s Hermits. I think it was the song, (sings) “I’m Henry VIII I am, Henry VIII I am I am.” But I think that was the influence rather than the Ramones.

Brian Ritchie: Well that would've been from Herman's Hermits. And if the Ramones did it, maybe it was that. But yeah, we were aware of that Herman's Hermits kind of reference, and Gordon certainly would've been the one who came up with that.

Gordon Gano: When I did that, I got that from the Ramones, and then it was years later I heard this sixties group, which was a very popular song, and I was like, “Wow, the Ramones, I'm sure got it from this other song. That's great. And I wonder if they, where did they get it from? Maybe there's even an earlier one!” It doesn't feel very serious or deep to me as a song. But at the end going out, it's sort of playing around with, I guess, some cliches from songs about climbing a mountain, crossing an ocean. I just had fun putting that stuff in. I had somebody just in the last year tell me something about that song, “Prove My Love,” and saying, “I'll do anything and I'll be it all.” And that means actually, in reality, that means I'll do the dishes, I'll take out the garbage. That's the important stuff, not climbing a mountain or crossing an ocean.

“Promise”

Gordon Gano: “Promise,” now that's a song we enjoy playing and we play live almost all the time, but it's certainly not a song people would often ever bring up to me or mention. I think people like it okay, but I don't think it's like a big song for most anybody, but we enjoy playing it. I'm still surprised I wrote that with my certain basic abilities with the guitar, and there's just constant fast chord changes going on. That was pretty, pretty extreme for me to be writing that or even attempting that. But there's a definite pattern that's going there and it's sort of this blues kind of thing, but there's sort of like these riffs that are on these chord changes that go very quickly.

Brian Ritchie: The riff is quite similar to maybe like a Velvet Underground or Lou Reed kind of riff. And I've often wondered if, what's the name of the White Stripes song? (sings the riff from “Seven Nation Army”) It's almost the same as the “Promise” riff. And I know that Jack White liked the Femmes so I wonder if he was inspired by that riff.

Gordon Gano: I would be nervous speaking to any girl I might have had some interest in to the point of probably not speaking to them. So yeah, there was probably a lot of that wound up inside me. So probably a combination of things I really felt, and also knowing I'm writing a song and having fun writing a song.

Brian Ritchie: Yeah he was pretty nervous and jittery. He was only 18 years old when we started, so he was very young, he was finding his way. And sometimes it was a character, I think, and sometimes it was him. But the nervous aspect is definitely is him (laughs).

Victor DeLorenzo: Well he was quite cool and calm, but when you get on stage, he would get more aggravated. And also the three of us were playing characters. I mean, from time to time, I would be the manic drummer, Brian would be the consummate musician, and Gordon would be the singer with the heart on his sleeve, somewhat whiny. I think Rolling Stone, when the first album came out in the review, they said that “Gordon's voice could empty a room faster than a methane explosion.”

Gordon Gano: When we used to do it live, it had a lot more of the spoken word section. In the middle of the song, he's doing some spoken word, but we used to do like a very long version that had a lot more words, so we simplified it for the recording. There was some editing, which I am so glad for myself, not in the recording studio, but before then in the writing. Because I had a whole long section of promise that went into what I probably imagined to be some kind of poetry and probably was inspired by Patti Smith, but with nothing of the talent or inspiration of what I was writing. And I am so glad I somehow realized that and got that taken out before we recorded to keep it a tighter song and not just have it meander and go into like, just having one thought go to another. And I do recall something about a palm tree or lemons or something that (laughs). So it's really good it's not in the song anymore.

“To the Kill”

Gordon Gano: “To the Kill” is (laughs), that is the song. Absolutely that is the least popular on our first album. There's no question for me. And yeah, it is a little feeling of when we play it, people are waiting for, you know, this to be done and then we get to the next song that they really want to hear. But I think we've always enjoyed playing it. Just the way we kind of, we arranged it.

Brian Ritchie: There are sections in there where we really go out. The way the rhythm almost falls apart or it's just implied and where nobody's actually playing it. And then it snaps back into the verse. The bass being intermittent during some of the improvs was I was flipping the toggle switch, which is something that I probably got from Pete Townsend from the Who. Cause it (makes rhythmic sound) “guh guh guh guh,” that kind of thing. But you don't usually do it on bass so that would've been my particular innovation.

Victor DeLorenzo: That was us thinking on our feet. I mean that's the way we played some of those songs that were so wide open to improvisation. You had to really depend on your other members of the trio to work as a unit with you. And in that way we had the power to go wherever we wanted.

Gordon Gano: Before we recorded it and before there was a band, Violent Femmes, I played that song solo with an acoustic guitar at a talent night competition at a disco where I like to go to dance in Milwaukee. And I got second place (laughs). I think everybody was so shocked cause I think everyone else did like a karaoke kind of thing and then I just pulled out a guitar and just did that song. Cause for me that song always felt like, and I don't think we really went there with how we played it and probably wasn't in Brian Ritchie or Victor DeLorenzo's mind at all with doing it, but in my mind I was thinking of that song like a Prince song. So that's just going on in my head. I'm thinking of it going like in a Prince direction.

Brian Ritchie: That's one of the very few songs where we almost try to be a little bit funky (laughs) in our dorky white way. But it's a little bit funky. And I think that came out because Gordon was hanging around like in discos and stuff. Yeah he was trying to be funky and you can hear that a little bit in the music.

Victor DeLorenzo: It's not just learning the songs and playing the songs. That was never the intent of Violent Femmes. We were always trying to get ideas across, whether it be a darker song like “To the Kill” or something like “Please Do Not Go,” they come from different worlds, is how we would interpret them. And all those different worlds made up Gordon's notebook, which was, he famously had this notebook where he had tons of lyrics, probably has still some lyrics in there that we never did anything with. Yeah that’s pretty much the whole ideology behind recording anything in that first album.

“Gone Daddy Gone”

Victor DeLorenzo: It's a little odd, it's taken on more of a creepy notion now (laughs).

Brian Ritchie: (laughs) He was a teenager, so what else would he be writing about? I think it's remarkable that such a popular song was basically built around the xylophone riff.

Gordon Gano: Very inspired for Brian to play the xylophone on that or the xylophone/marimba. I think a xylophone. Anyway, yeah, it was just a great way to approach doing the song.

Brian Ritchie: Well sometimes we would go play on the street as a trio. There were many other times when Gordon and I would just do it cause Victor was the most domesticated person at the time, so he had some other life. Whereas Gordon and I would sometimes just go as a duo. And one night I didn't have my bass, but I had a xylophone, so we were playing, it was actually, we were playing across the street from the same theater where we were discovered by the Pretenders. And he said, “Well I have this song, it's kind of like in D minor. I'm just starting to work on it.” So that was “Gone Daddy Gone.” And so I had the xylophone and we just worked it up that night.

Victor DeLorenzo: I recall that when we were rehearsing it, we were talking about adding the other percussion elements and the background vocals and trying to piece it together rather than trying to do it live, which we couldn't because Brian, of course was, was doubling on the solo instrument, the xylophone, and also playing bass so he couldn't do them both at once. And that was exciting to me because I liked the idea of multi-track recording.

Brian Ritchie: Sometimes we would play it with just the xylophone, the guitar, and the drums. Sometimes we would have somebody else play, sometimes Mark Van Hecke, our producer, would play bass and it became more of a thing. I was really inspired by Brian Jones cause of the work he had done with the Stones on marimba and, and xylophone. So Brian Jones and John Cale were my big models of being people who are multi-instrumentalists and bringing exotic instrumentation into the mix. And that was my big thing on that album was the xylophone on “Gone Daddy Gone.”

I was just improvising a solo and Mark Van Hecke, who was the producer, he said, “You can't just improvise all the time, sometimes you have to compose something.” So he asked me to actually write a solo. So I thought about it and I realized that I had whatever amount of bars, like I don't know if it's 16 or whatever it is. And I did construct the solo. So even now I play it the same. And even when Gnarls Barkley did a cover of it, they said that they were really drawn to it by the xylophone part and they copied it, they copied the sound, but it was a keyboard. So I wish they would've used the real xylophone, but it was great for them to revive the song.

Gordon Gano: The only kick drum like thing is on “Gone Daddy Gone,” which is one of the only songs I think that we did overdubs on. On any of the instruments, which has I think it's just a marching bass drum that's playing through there. That's a scotch marching bass drum that's keeping the beat. And I'm playing brushes on the Gretsch snare drum and the trancephone and I think there's a crash cymbal involved as well.

Brian Ritchie: But it is kind of a pastiche of a lot of different things, including if you listen to the section where we trade back and forth, that's a direct quote from “Re-Make/Re-Model” by Roxy Music. So we mixed a whole lot of stuff together on that song, including Muddy Waters. It's one of the least original songs that we've ever done. So I wouldn't point to it as a great accomplishment, but it was a fun way of mixing a whole lot of different elements.

Gordon Gano: Oh another thing in that song is that there was coming out of playing live, I think I just improvised one time, some lines that I had heard. I know it's a Willie Dixon written song, but I had probably heard Muddy Waters’ version of doing it before even Willie Dixon. And I put those lines in there and it was just kind of my way of like a little lyric improv and it worked. And I really liked it so kept doing it. And then when we were going to record, I asked our manager and producer Mark Van Hecke about, you know, “Is this gonna be any issue here? Because this is actually from another song.” And he told me, “No, no, it's fine. Not a problem at all.” Well of course it was years later, it’s like, you know, it's like, “Great well I joined the category of, in this respect, with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin,” you know, I'm sure many others. And I was just like, “Well, I wanted to do right by this, but I was given the worst, just the absolute worst, disastrous advice,” and I just believed it. Anyway so we made good with that, you know, got that straightened out. So I'll usually, when I sing the song now, I don't even have that in because I don't feel like that's really part of the song. That was just something I put in as an extra thing that was fun. But it's there on the first album and now it's been credited. So I've actually co-written a song with one of the greatest blues writers of all time, Willie Dixon. We've, we've wrote a song together (laughs).

Brian Ritchie: Our record company was supposed to be a very hip and with it record company, but they did not understand or they couldn't conceive of a single that didn't have a full drum set. So that's the reason why they chose “Gone Daddy Gone” as the single because there's also, we over dubbed a bass drum on that. As weird as it is, it's still, it's there. So they said, “Oh well this song has a full sound.”

Victor DeLorenzo: I think for them they were going by something maybe that they would think more normal or something that could be commercial that had a fuller sound. Probably Slash was thinking with “Gone Daddy Gone” that they'd have a better chance of getting on the radio with it.

Brian Ritchie: So somehow they had this really, you know, actually idiotic viewpoint that a song couldn't be a single if it didn't have conventional instrumentation.

“Good Feeling”

Gordon Gano: “Good Feeling” was kind of a big production with us, having a violin and a little bit of a piano, some keyboard. I think that's the only little bit on the whole record that has another musician, other than the three of us, and playing a little bit of a keyboard.

Brian Ritchie: So this is the closest to a studio constructed arrangement that we, that and “Gone Daddy Gone,” those are the only two that were kind of constructed in the studio using overdubs to have better arrangements than what we could do live at that point.

Victor DeLorenzo: Mark Van Hecke plays beautiful piano on it and the atmosphere in that recording really suits the song. I think that was very successful. It just has a melancholy to it, that is not completely sad. There's almost a longing for memories of a better time.

Brian Ritchie: We thought of it as like a very Velvet Underground-type song. People said that we sounded a lot like the Velvet Underground, which we were, didn't really sound like it, but in this case it was a song like some of the Velvet Underground ballads were. So it has that same kind of wasted, kind of frail, maybe messed up on drugs kind of feeling to it. In fact, that's what the good feeling probably is. “Good Feeling, why can't you stay with me long” is like drugs wearing off. So it can also be interpreted, like my mother, that was her favorite song and she would've never thought about the drug connotation, but she probably just heard it as a love song.

Gordon Gano: “Good Feeling,” that song I've had some people tell me is their favorite song of all time, which is such an honor. You know, people in my family have said that's their favorite song, of songs that I've done in, in my family. So, you know, I feel really good about the song.

Brian Ritchie: So like I said earlier, people can interpret these things all different ways, and that's one of the songs that can be interpreted many different ways.

Gordon Gano: I chose to take out some other lyrics that were in “Good Feeling” that would've absolutely destroyed and ruined the song. So I'm awfully glad about that, that even, as the age that I was, I was able to make some critical decisions about maybe taking out some of these other words that I've written cause they wouldn't have helped the song at all. It would've been terrible. So I was glad I was able to do a little shaping and realized what was the essential part and what was good for the song and what wasn't.

Victor DeLorenzo: I love the lyric that Gordon wrote and also the finesse that we played that song. So we showed people that we weren't just this bang up folk punk band, we could deliver a ballad in a very satisfying way.

Brian Ritchie: And if you listen to the song from a perspective of playing it, it sounds very simple to the casual listener, but to play it, there are several different tricky sections that Gordon has put in there. So we had to obviously learn those and yet make it flow naturally. This was another one that we added some instrumentation to so Mark Van Hecke plays piano on it and Gordon plays the violin.

Gordon Gano: I'm not sure whose idea that was for playing the violin, but I like that it's there. I like doing that. And I've had people tell me over the years, with my violin playing, that I've inspired them to play violin. And why? Because they see me do it and they go, “Well, I can do that.” You know, I think I've inspired a lot of musicians because it's like, “Well, yes you can, you can do that. This is what I'm doing and just doing my best at it, trying my best.” You know, it's a little shaky, but it's sincere.

Brian Ritchie: It sounds really vulnerable and even musically vulnerable. That song could have been so much slicker. It could have been like one of those really stupid syrupy Fleetwood Mac or whatever type things. And instead, it sounds like we can barely play. It sounds like we're at the end of the night, we're kind of trashed. It's got that torch song feeling to it. So the arrangement helps to reinforce the subject matter and the lyrics. And not by being good musicians, but just by being willing to be bad musicians.

Victor DeLorenzo: Yeah that one's really pretty. I really enjoyed that song. Well, once we had the collection together, it became apparent that that might be a nice way to close out the album., “Good Feeling.”

Brian Ritchie: We knew that we didn't want to make an album with three or four of those songs, but we thought it was a good way to end the album, like send people away feeling kind of wistful and nostalgic.

Gordon Gano: We wanted to end the album with this, with this song, “Good Feeling.” That seemed like obvious to us that this is how it should end.

Well I think we were very happy with the album, but then we knew we had this challenge because we didn't have the label we thought we were going to sign to and was going to put it out. That wasn't happening. So now we still had to find some way to get this out and that took a lot. And finally it was Slash. Slash rejected it and then later Bob Biggs, the president, said he was signing us because he was sick of every day coming into work and hearing the music being played of a band that he turned down. Because the people who worked there just kept playing it cause they loved it. And that's actually how we got signed.

Victor DeLorenzo: Well there was a woman at Slash Records named Anna Statman and she loved Violent Femmes. She's the one that finally sold it to Bob Biggs, the president of the company. The record came out and. It was getting good reviews. There were some that didn't understand the record or weren't comparing it too much to what was happening in modern music at that time.

Brian Ritchie: We knew that the first album was gonna be perceived as a great work of art, but we also knew that that didn't mean anything because the music industry had degraded itself so much, and the pop music of the day was so bad that we thought that even though we made a masterpiece, it might fall on deaf ears or just get a cult audience. Like most of our favorite bands were getting, like our favorite bands were people like Television, Richard Hell, and these were people that were selling dozens of records. You know, it's like we knew that they were great, but we also knew that the masses didn't know about them. And we thought we might suffer the same plight. And in fact, at first it looked that way, but then the word of mouth spread. And gradually, after about, I think seven or eight years, the album became, it entered the charts as a platinum album. Because it had just been selling, you know, some copies this month, the next month, some.

Gordon Gano: There's somebody who, it must have been about 10 years or so, maybe more, afterwards, that I met somewhere who said to me, and they love the first album, and they said, “Tell me what, what does the cover look like? I've never seen it. I've only seen it on cassette tapes that people have made at parties and things. I've never seen the cover. What does it look like?” And that goes again to how people have heard it and just maybe passed it on, even if it's on a cassette tape that somebody made, you know, from the record for somebody to say, “I've never even seen it,” but they knew and loved the first album.

Brian Ritchie: I'm sure it still happens that people send a link to it or something. And yeah, we always relied on word of mouth, more than the commercial music business, to spread the word and it is the best way to spread the word. Anecdotally, we have heard from people that heard about us from their older siblings, or even now sometimes we have upwards of three generations of fans. So you have like the grandmother who was the original fan and then they raised the kid on our music, and then those people have had kids and they're, and they're bringing the grandchildren to the gig. So it's even become like a family heirloom.

Victor DeLorenzo: It has really become something that's handed down from generation to generation. I don't think that's so strange because that record depicts adolescence in such a wonderful, frightening way that it's almost like a template for growing up.

Brian Ritchie: Well in a spiritual sense, that probably was the most unified time in the band recording history, but this would be a common, common to a lot of bands is that, when you're making your first album, we didn't have anything else on our minds. None of us were married, none of us had kids, some of us didn't even have a place to live. We could think of nothing else but music. So when you have the absence of distraction, that creates focus. And I think you can hear that focus on our first album and not to say anything bad about our subsequent recordings, but you can't, you cannot recreate that. We would never again be able to all be relatively in the same place mentally and emotionally and spiritually. So that's probably one of the other things that makes the album so resilient. So I have no problems with our first effort being our best effort or our most renowned effort. We're lucky to have found an audience.

Victor DeLorenzo: I'm still very proud of that first album, as I'm sure Gordon and Brian are. We put our heart and soul into that record and literally there was money on the line. So we had to make good. I'm glad we accomplished the mission (laughs).

Gordon Gano: I still feel good about the record. There's nothing I would change, I wouldn't want to change anything. I think the thing that strikes me with every one of the tracks is that there's an energy there, there's a certain energy that's happening, which of course is the instrumentation and how it's recorded, all these things, but there's just, there seems to be just this thing. There's something that's there. Something that I would just call kind of an energy that's there. So that's another thing too, with this first album, anytime I hear it, I'm usually, for the first moment, I recognize that I'm hearing something I really like. It's like, “I really like this. What is this?” And that's all happening in less than a second, followed by, Wow, that's our band! That's great.” You know, because my first feeling was like, “I really like this. This sounds so good and this is what I like.” And it's like, it's really a nice feeling. And that still happens with the first album.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Violent Femmes. You'll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Violent Femmes (Self-Titled). Thanks for listening!

Credits:

"Blister in the Sun"

"Kiss Off"

"Please Do Not Go"

"Add It Up"

"Confessions"

"Prove My Love"

"Promise"

"To the Kill"

"Gone Daddy Gone" (Gano, Willie Dixon)

"Good Feeling"

Gorno Music Publishing (ASCAP)

℗ 1983 Slash Records

Produced by Mark Van Hecke

Gordon Gano - guitar, violin, lead vocal

Brian Ritchie - acoustic bass guitar, xylophone, electric bass, voals

Victor DeLorenzo - snare drum and trancephone, drum set, scotch marching bass drum, vocals

Engineer - Glen L. Lorbiecki and John Tanner

Recorded at Castle Recording Company, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, July, 1982.

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Heaps of Dirt” by Charlie Don’t Shake from the album, The South Will Take Your Blues Away.

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam