THERE ARE first albums and then there are first albums. The Violent Femmes announced themselves with the latter variety in 1983, and despite the many fine records produced by the trio over the last 20 years, including The Blind Leading The Naked (1986), New Times (1994) and the current Freak Magnet, they will remain forever famed as authors of that eponymous debut, a repository of panting anthems like Blister In The Sun (the best paean to turkey-choking since Buzzcocks Orgasm Addict ), Add It Up and Gone Daddy Gone .
In a year dominated by Culture Club, Duran Duran, The Police s Synchronicity and David Bowie s Let s Dance, da Femmes (Gordon Gano on vocals and guitar, Brian Ritchie on bass, and Victor DeLorenzo on drums/percussion, later replaced by Guy Hoffman in 1989) brand of sociopathic skiffle sounded like Buddy Holly & The Crickets playing the Velvets songbook with a little help from David Byrne & The Modern Lovers.
The main point of reference of course was the Velvet Underground, Ritchie recalls, reclining in an upstairs lounge in the Herbert Park Hotel. Gordon had never been in a band before. When I discovered him he was just a little kid, maybe 16 or 17 years old and he was playing solo, although he was a little rocker even back in those days. So we just kind of said, Okay, you have some good songs, we know a lot about music, let s join forces , and we created this kind of a sound. And our other rock n roll influence at that time was Gene Vincent & The Bluecaps, but we didn t want to do it in a kind of a corny way like the Stray Cats did. Not to criticise them, they were a good band, but they didn t really take it any further. We wanted the music to always have a timeless quality to it.
The band s second album Hallowed Ground certainly succeeded in that respect, boasting exquisite backwoods dirges like the title tune and I Hear The Rain . John Zorn guested on tenor sax and the back cover band portrait resembled a still from Fargo, but the album s most outstanding feature was Country Death Song , an infanticidal nursery crime which suggested Hank Williams co-writing with William Faulkner.
Y know, Gordon s father, he s a Baptist minister, and he s also an afficionado of country music, Brian points out. He had been playing country music on an amateur level since the 40s or the 50s. He would just sit around the house strumming the guitar doing a lot of those old songs, Hank Williams songs and stuff, so Gordon internalised that music very early.
He was a very prolific writer back in those days, a 15 or 16 year old kid growing up in a Christian family in the suburbs of Milwaukee, just singing about what was happening to him and what was going on in his mind.
And Gano s callow mind could hardly have been immune to the fact that Wisconsin was a serial killer hotspot, with one of the highest suicide and homicide by gun rates in the country. Chrissie Hynde, who was brought up just down the road in Ohio, put the area s grim heritage down to some kind of weird karmic energies from the American burial grounds there . Just as an adolescent Morrissey grew up in the shadow of the Moors Murderers, one can t but speculate that the Femmes had access to equally grisly local lore.
We weren t directly influenced by any of that stuff, Ritchie contends, but the state of Wisconsin not necessarily Milwaukee itself is kind of backwoods in some ways. Like you mentioned an Appalachian feel, I mean we don t go to such an extreme as the Appalachians, but there are some people sort of fucked out in Wisconsin. We had several famous serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer, he s from Milwaukee. It s probable that he attended some of our shows although I wouldn t attribute his actions to having listened to our music because he hung around in gay bars and we used to play in gay bars, so he probably heard it . . . but who knows? Also there was another guy named Ed Gein he made lampshades out of human skin.
The Violent Femmes weren t the only act of that time burrowing under Rockwell s white picket fence. The Gun Club s Fire Of Love, Green On Red s The Killer Inside Me, The Meat Puppets second album . . . there was a murderously agoraphobic atmosphere abroad which would soon be reflected in Tim Hunter s River s Edge, David Lynch s Twin Peaks, and later, the gibbering sexual neuroses of The Pixies and the redneck rage of Nirvana. And while Tipper Gore hasn t tried to pin any high school murder-suicides on the Femmes, they have remained a trophy band for disaffected and dysfunctional Yank youth. Is Freak Magnet a comment on the more obsessive elements of the band s fanbase?
I d say that the majority of the people who listen to us are aware that there s an ironic aspect to it, Brian concludes, and when they come to see us in performance they can see that we re having fun and are very casual. So I don t think that you have the same kind of morbid fascination like somebody like Kurt Cobain would ve had. I think they know that we re musicians and we re playing songs, some of which are sincere and some are tongue in cheek.
The Violent Femmes play Dublin s Olympia on March 10. Freak Magnet is out now on Cooking Vinyl