Week 75 - Violent Femmes by Violent Femmes
Guest Listener - J.K Rowling
Who’s J.K Rowling when she’s at home?
I write novels and screenplays. For light relief, I get into rows about politics on Twitter.
1. Revolver, The Beatles.
2. Broken English, Marianne Faithful.
3. Changes daily. Yesterday it was White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground. Today it’s Hozier by Hozier
What great album has she never heard before?
Violent Femmes by Violent Femmes
Before we get to Jo, here’s what Martin thinks of Violent Femmes
I was talking to my friend Ben about this album the other day.
“Did you know most of these songs were written by a kid in school?”, I asked.
Like most normal people, he probably assumed that one of the best debut albums ever was written by an adult - someone who had matured and deleted all his teenage drafts. For example, when Kurt Cobain was in high school the best he could come up with was a song about Spam.
Yet Gordon Gano, future lead singer and songwriter for The Violent Femmes, somehow managed to do something incredibly rare - he created the definitive account of being a teenager, by a teenager.
Ben and I talk about this. The sheer madness of writing songs in school, sat at the back of class, or in between homework and football practice. What are the chances of that being any good? If Gano can write Blister in The Sun at school, then how good were his English essays?
“Surely he was the most popular kid in class?” Ben says. “It’s like Ferris Bueller The Album!”
I see where he’s coming from, except he’s wrong. Because everyone loves Ferris and the whole school rallies around him just because he has one bloody day off sick. They even make a film about it.h
No, this isn’t “Ferris Bueller The Album.”
“You’re right, it’s more like an album made by his mate Cameron - the weird one”
I don’t tell Ben he’s wrong again because, frankly, he’ll just keep going with the Ferris Bueller comparisons before probably moving onto Diary Of A Wimpy Kid. So I laugh and just agree.
“Yeah, it’s as if Cameron made an album.”
But it isn’t. Because at least Cameron had Ferris and Ferris is the most popular kid in the world.
Gano, on the other hand, doesn’t have anyone so ends up writing stuff like -
“And I’m so lonely
I just don’t think I can take it anymore
And I’m so lonely
I just don’t know what to do
And I’m so lonely
Feel like I’m gonna crawl away and die
And I’m so lonely
Feel like I’m gonna
Hack hack hack hack it apart”
Fast forward a couple of years in the life of Gordon Gano.
It’s 1981, he’s found a couple of mates, and they’re now busking outside a Pretenders’ gig in Milwaukee - singing those same songs he wrote in school. It doesn’t feel like a launch pad for success but, of course, in this story, it becomes exactly that.
James Honeyman-Scott and Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders walk past the bedraggled trio and are so impressed that, rather than throwing them a couple of dollars, they offer them a slot on their show that night. Within an hour they go from the street corner to playing in front of 2000 people.
It is, without question, the most successful piece of busking ever.
From there, they secure a record deal and in the summer of 1982 go into the studio to record their first album - Violent Femmes. And the best part is they change NOTHING. It’s the same old songs, the same sound they made on the street, and the whole album is largely played out using just an acoustic guitar, an acoustic bass, and a snare drum.
Only on the the 9th song, Gone Daddy Gone, do they make a concession to the fact they’re now in a studio and they’re not busking anymore - they use a Xylophone.
All they needed now was an album cover.
Enter Billie Jo Campbell, a three year old who was walking down the street with her mother in California.
A stranger approaches and asks the mother whether he can photograph the girl for an album cover he’s working on and pays her $100 for the privilege. He then tells the girl to look into a derelict building where he assures her they’ll be loads of animals roaming inside. So, without posing or even really knowing what was going on, she gets on her tip toes and peeks through the window - trying to see what she’s been promised.
After a while, she pulls back from the window -
“There are no animals in there”, she says.
And she’s right, there weren’t. But by that point the photographer had already got what he wanted and he moved on.
Violent Femmes was released in the summer of 1983 to minimal fanfare and poor initial sales. When it was recorded, Gordon Gano was just 18-years-old.
Fast forward to 1989, to my own life.
I’m 18 years old and mooching about The Venue in New Cross, an indie club from a golden age before The Red Hot Chilli Peppers released Give It Away and ruined everything.
During this particular evening, a song comes on I’ve never heard before - a thin, whiny voice asking why he can’t get JUST ONE FUCK! Immediately, it cut through the twee and gothic melodrama that I’d been used to and grabbed my attention.
That voice again - “THERE’’S NOTHING I CAN SAY WHEN I’M IN YOUR THIGHS.”
It was exactly what I wanted - a song about someone who couldn’t get laid and then, when it finally happens, they’re unable to talk. What 18 year old wearing a second hand cardigan can’t relate to that?
After it finished, I approached the DJ.
“What was that song you just played mate?”
“Add it Up by The Violent Femmes”.
Obviously, should a situation like this happen today I could have mainlined Spotify on the way home and listened to it on repeat. But this was 1989, you couldn’t just listen to a song whenever you wanted to. So, faced with the prospect of waiting a whole week for the possibility of hearing it again, I decided to take the only sensible course of action open to me - I went into a record shop the next day and handed over £10.99 for an album on the strength of one song.
It looked amazing, but it sounded even better. The whole thing, from start to finish, blew my head off. That voice, the simplicity of the lyrics and the way it seemed, in places, like a rough draft scattered with annotations and unfinished thoughts.
“Third verse, same as the first.”
“8, I forget what 8 was for.”
Who cares what 8 is for? I didn’t.
Yet for all it’s angst and triviality, there was something else which I admired. It seems weird to focus on it now, but Violent Femmes was released at a time when albums had sides that couldn’t be shuffled or disorganised. You had to get that order right and I’ve always thought, well since 1989, that no one has done it better than them - 2 sides of 5 songs where the first two are fast, the third slows you down, the fourth picks you up, and the fifth provides a finale.
Put simply - you can’t put these 10 songs in any other order and make them better than THIS.
It became a staple, an album I haven’t gone six months without listening to since I found it in 1989. And, during our break this summer, I was horrified to realise that WE hadn’t even done it!
If it wasn’t for JK Rowling I’d probably still be repeatedly punching myself in the face.
Fast forward, one last time, to 1997.
Billie Jo Campbell, the girl on the cover, is now 18 and The Violent Femmes have slowly made it. In various times, in different places, people have found this album that was quietly released in 1983 and it’s now sold millions of copies. Grosse Point Blank, a romantic comedy, rolls it’s credits to Blister in the Sun whilst Minnie Driver and John Cusack drive off into the distance.
The songs have seeped through to a new audience, they’re being played at college parties and Billie Jo Campbell is hearing them for the first time.
How does she feel to be reminded of her 3 year old self and the photograph that she was tricked into? How did she feel when it came back to her as an 18 year old?
It’s tempting to think that she would have been like any other teenager - simultaneously energetic and anxious about what the future holds. If that was true, then maybe she found the same qualities in the album that I did when I was 18, the same account that Gordon Gano wrote when he was in high school.
Who knows? What I do know is that Billie Jo Campbell decided to pursue the best option open to her.
She became a massive fan of The Violent Femmes.
She framed the album cover and put it on her wall.
She used the fact that SHE was the girl on the cover to help boost her confidence and meet boys.
And in 2008, she married one of them.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
So, over to you Jo. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
I’m not quite sure how the Violent Femmes passed me by. I turned 18 the year this album came out, but I was obsessed with The Beatles at the time. Of contemporary bands I really loved, the standouts were the Smiths and the Psychedelic Furs. I loved any band with a great guitarist. I played guitar myself, mostly alone in my bedroom.
It’s possible that I heard the Violent Femmes but I’ve forgotten. They could easily have been part of the informal seminars on alternative music I received from the muso I dated in my late teens. His parents were Dutch and we hung out mostly at his house, because we were allowed to smoke in his attic bedroom. I’ve got happy memories of sunlit wooden rafters and smoke rings and walls covered in black and white pictures he’d clipped out of NME, while the Dead Kennedys, Jah Wobble or the Birthday Party blasted out of the speakers. Setting aside the fact that I had a pair of very long-lived goldfish named after Guggi and Gavin of the Virgin Prunes, I never became a whole-hearted convert of his favourite bands. Much as I adored him, I didn’t share Muso Boyfriend’s attitude to music: his scorn for the accessible and tuneful, the baffling mixture of irony and obsession with which he regarded his favourites, and his conviction that if the herd hates something, it’s almost certainly brilliant.
The NME was Muso Boyfriend’s bible and it took a hard line on nearly anything commercial or popular, talking about bands in the top ten with the kind of contempt most people reserve for child abusers. A few real Gods could be forgiven commercial success, obviously: people like Bowie or the Stones, but the likes of Nik Kershaw might as well have been Thatcher herself as far as NME were concerned
When the Stranglers released ‘Feline’ and it went to number 4 in the album charts, an NME journo went into meltdown, ranting about the fact that people who’d never heard ‘Rattus Norvegicus’ were now calling themselves Stranglers fans. You could almost see the flecks of spittle on the page. (I’d bought ‘Feline.’ I didn’t own ‘Rattus Norvegicus.’) And I still vividly remember an NME interview with Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet, a band I never liked, though I admired Gary’s chutzpah in agreeing to talk to them. The interviewer’s disapproval of Gary and everything he stood for reached a glorious peak with the phrase ‘this whorehouse called success.’ I never made much headway arguing about this sort of thing with Muso Boyfriend, though, so after a bit of snogging I’d cycle home and listen to ‘Rubber Soul.’
My first live gig and my first music festival were both with Muso Boyfriend: Big Country at Dingwalls in Bristol, supporting act: John Cooper Clarke, the punk poet. We spent my 18th birthday at the Elephant Fayre in Cornwall, hitching there from South Wales. I’d told my parents some whopping lie about how we were getting there, probably that Muso Boyfriend’s older brother was driving us. Half an hour of unsuccessful hitching later, it suddenly occurred to me that my parents had said they were going shopping later. This meant they might soon be driving past us, so I kept diving for cover every time a Honda Civic came into view.
We finally got a lift, thank God, so I survived to enjoy my birthday at the Elephant Fayre. We pitched the two-person tent by a marquee full of Rastas selling tea and hot knives and saw the Cure, whom Muso Boyfriend was weirdly keen to hear, in spite of the fact that they’d actually been on Top of the Pops. The only other act I remember well from the Elephant Fayre is Benjamin Zephaniah. He did a poem about having the shit kicked out of him by a policeman. Twenty odd years later, I was on a team with him at a kids’ book quiz at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
I didn’t Google the band or the album before listening, because that felt like cheating, so I knew virtually nothing about them except that this came out in 1983. When I told my friend Euan which album I was going to review he assured me I’d like it, but his favourite album’s by The Cramps, so that wasn’t entirely reassuring.
Wanting to concentrate, I go outside to my writing room in the garden, which has a wooden ceiling. This, unlikely as it may seem, is relevant information.
So I put on the Violent Femmes and hear a catchy acoustic guitar riff and I think, this is great! I’m going to love them! I’ll get a Violent Femmes T-shirt, buy the entire back catalogue and bore everyone rigid with my new obsession!
But then the vocalist kicks in and I have an immediate, visceral response of ‘no, scratch everything, I hate this.’ The change of mood is so abrupt my mind goes blank. I try to analyse why I moved from appreciation to intense dislike in a matter of seconds, but the best I can do is ‘I’ve heard voices like that before.’
By the time I reach track seven, all I can think about is the Toy Dolls’ cover of Nelly the Elephant. I’m not proud. I know this says more about me than the Violent Femmes.
After I’ve listened to the whole album once, I look down at the place where I was supposed to be making notes and all I’ve written is: ‘his upper register sounds like a bee in a plastic cup,’ which the professional writer in me recognizes as ‘not 500 words’. Feeling glum, I postpone a second listen to the following day.
It’s raining next morning and I can’t be bothered to go and find shoes, so I don’t take the album into the writing room, but stay in the kitchen. With minimal enthusiasm, I put on the album again.
This is weird. The vocalist is actually, um… good. Where did the bloke I heard yesterday go? Now I’m not busy hating him, I notice all the great hooks and how they sometimes sound like a manic skiffle band. There’s a nice bit of bluesy slide guitar and an actual xylophone on ‘Gone Daddy Gone’. Plus, when he half talks, half sings, Gordon Gano (I checked the album credits) sounds a bit Lou Reed, and I love Lou Reed. Apart from being the vocalist, Gano also happens to be the guitarist I fell for yesterday.
I can’t understand why he grated on me so much first time round. Beneath my wooden ceiling, he was the Ur-voice of all those NME-approved punky bands I never liked: nasal, whiny and brash. Today, sitting beside my kettle, he’s raw, catchy and soulful.
Only then, staring into a mug of tea, do I have the little epiphany that you, clever reader, saw coming a mile off. Listening to an album that reeks of 1983, in a room that bears a passing resemblance to that attic of long ago, was a mistake. It wasn’t Gordon Gano who was the problem: it was me. I was listening with a ghostly eighteen year old ex-boyfriend at my shoulder, and behind him, a chorus of snarling early eighties NME journalists, all ready to jeer, because even if I like the Violent Femmes, I’ll like them in the wrong way.
So the sun came out and I took the Violent Femmes back across the wet lawn into the writing room, telling myself that it’s not 1983 any more, and this is between me and the Violent Femmes, nobody else. On the third listen, I realized that I loved the album. Before I knew it, I was listening to it over and over again. Only then did I let myself look at their Wikipedia page.
The Violent Femmes, I read, were ‘one of the most successful alternative rock bands of the 1980s, selling over 9 million albums by 2005.’ Yes, the Violent Femmes ended up in that whorehouse called success, and you know what? It only makes me love them more.
Would you listen to it again?
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