Photo by Zack Whitford
Femmes: All Grow’d Up
I can’t not ask Gordon Gano about his small voice cameo in The Rugrats Movie. There’s more pressing matters: the Violent Femmes, in their over 40 years of life as a band, are still at it, embarking on a tour that sees them visit Boston’s Paradise Rock Club on October 15th and 16th. In that time, they’ve released 10 studio albums. Plus, “Blister in the Sun” is a bona fide classic at this point. But what my mind is fixated on – what I simply must ask about – is Gano’s contribution to a star-studded ensemble that provided vocals to a two minute scene in the first cinematic turn for everyone’s favorite cartoon babies. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll remember that Tommy Pickles & co. enter a hospital nursery to try to find Tommy’s newborn brother Dill. A chorus of babies takes over for a song called “This World is Something New to Me.” In addition to Gano, this ensemble includes a who’s-who of alternative music: Patti Smith, Lenny Kravitz, Beck, Iggy Pop, most of the B-52s, Phife Dawg, Dawn from En Vogue, and more.
This means that many 90s kids heard Gano’s voice before ever being aware of the Violent Femmes. This was mind-blowing to me. I had to know how that came together. “That was a lot of fun. Though I can’t exactly remember which baby I was. I actually had forgotten which voice was mine. I didn’t recognize my own voice.” He got involved at the request of Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, who did music for The Rugrats.
Gano is pretty nonplussed about the fact that they’ve been a band for over 40 years that it’s easy to forget that they’ve been a band for over 40 years. That’s longevity; they’re basically indie rock royalty at this point. “I was going to do an interview with someone who wanted to talk about the 40th anniversary and my thought was, 40th anniversary of what?!” It doesn’t come off as an apathy towards his life’s work, but more of a case of time flying by. He talks about the Femmes’ lifespan with a humble gratitude; it’s less of “we are an influential alternative band” and moreso “it’s cool that people say we are influential.”
Gano also isn’t surprised that the Femmes’ music keeps drawing in young crowds. Especially on the early albums, when Gano and co. were in their 20s, their music contained a very honest expression of youthful angst. “That’s probably the reason why you and I are talking right now,” he says. “We’ve existed over 40 years because there’s been other generations that have really embraced the music.”
Third Verse, Different From the First
When thinking back on the formation of the Femmes back in the day, Gano never really thought about whether or not the band would still be going strong four decades later. “I don’t think [a teenager] thinks about what is life going to be like in my 50s? I didn’t think about it in terms of anything, including the band.” But at this point, Gano isn’t writing songs about teenage frustrations anymore – no stained sheets, no being strung out to the point it makes your girlfriend cry, no whining about not being able to get any.
One quality that he has retained is a puzzled questioning about the way he’s moving through the world, shown in the humorously meta lines on the title track to Hotel Last Resort: “I don’t change the chords, the chords change themselves.” These are a great example of Gano’s zen-like state of mind after 40 plus years. When asked about whether those lines are an indication of a fluid state of songwriting he’s developed over the years, he says, “I was actually just thinking that. Absolutely. It got to a point where it didn’t matter to me where the chord changed in the song. I wasn’t thinking about it… Almost every verse is making chord changes at different places.”
During the early 80s, the Femmes are often credited as one of the first folk punk bands, incorporating the sped up rhythm & blues influence that informed the Ramones’ sound with acoustic guitars. Gano credits bandmates Brian Ritchie and original drummer Victor DeLorenzo with guiding the intention to focus on acoustic instruments. It was also due to the fact that acoustic instruments were easier to play outdoors: the streets of Milwaukee became the band’s de facto venue after the initially found it hard to get club bookings. “We started out busking in the streets of Milwaukee,” Gano recounts. “No one did that there. And people saw us doing it and thought there was something wrong with us. So there was also a practicality to playing out on the streets.”
Since those humble beginnings, the Femmes have found ways to expand their sound, especially live. For performances, they’ve incorporated an orchestra section called the Horns of Dilemma, which relies on free improvisation to fill out the sound of the Femmes’ songs. “The idea was to have different instruments and different people to join us, just an ever-changing horn section, the attitude of improvisation”. A lot of the time, this section is composed of collaborators and friends of the band, who often don’t know what songs they’ll be playing on. “It’s not just noise. It’s also a concept about the music being approached. The people playing with us might never have heard the song they’re going to play on. You have to have a certain feel for it.”
Even ahead of playing Boston’s Paradise rock club – which has seen all manner of alt and indie rock royalty come through – Gano is unsure if the Femmes have ever played there (after some research, it seems like they may not have; a lot of appearance at the Orpheum and the now-defunct Avalon).
The Violent Femmes play at the Paradise Rock Club on October 15th and 16th with support from Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and Jeff Fielder.