At 15, Gordon Gano knew he wanted to spend his life playing rock ‘n’ roll.
Yes, yes, a ton of 15-year-olds dreaming of becoming rock stars. But most of them haven’t already written a song like “Kiss Off.”
Violent Femmes singer-songwriter-guitarist Gano still plays a dozen or more of the songs he wrote in high school — and he still enjoys playing them; nobody has a healthier relationship with their back catalog. On Friday, Violent Femmes will perform its entire 1983 debut (and a bunch of other songs) at MGM Music Hall.
“I started writing songs when I was 13,” Gano told the Herald. “I thought they were good at the time then later they would all make me cringe. But there’s a song, at least one song, that I wrote when I was 15 on each of the first four albums… And everything on the first album was written when I was 15 to 17. I think I might have been right around 18 when we recorded it.”
The adolescent energy of the band, its punk sneer and experimental freedom, drives the Femmes 1983 debut. Acoustic instruments played with fury, lyrics that felt like Lou Reed and the Ramones soundtracking “The Breakfast Club” (or should that be “Repo Man?”), the sound remains like nothing else in rock.
Gano and the band couldn’t stand the polished stuff that dominated the radio and it shows on “Violent Femmes.” Call it folk punk, college rock, or alternative, from “Blister in the Sun” to “Add It Up” to “Good Feeling,” the album turned a generation on to music made without sheen, synths, or Top 40 aspirations.
“There’s nothing in the music, nothing in how we recorded it, that we couldn’t have done in the ’70s or the ’60s or even the ’50s,” Gano said. “It gives it, we’d like to think, a timeless quality. It has a certain sound, a certain energy… There’s something about hearing an actual instrument, you’re hearing picks or fingers hitting strings. Things are very natural, very raw.”
At first not even producer Mark Van Hecke got what the band was going for. When he delivered the initial mixes of the LP, they didn’t work.
“We thought, ‘Oh, no, we have to be there,’” Gano said. “They started to sound, I don’t know, more correct for the times, less of that thing we had played… (We didn’t want it) to sound glossier or smoother or make it sound nicer.”
When it arrived in 1983, next to no one bought it. “Violent Femmes” didn’t make it into the Billboard 200 until 1991, when it peaked at No. 171. That same year it went platinum. (If the Billboard calculated high-schoolers passing around dubbed cassettes, it would be triple platinum.)
“It’s the only record that’s ever become a gold record without having been on the Billboard 200,” Gano said (it went gold in 1987, long before that No. 171 peak). “It continues to be popular, absolutely going through, not just older brothers and sisters, but generations. Parents to kids and now through grandparents.”
Now 60, Gano remains in love with the music, with its vitality.
“There’s nothing about going through the motions, that’s unimaginable to me,” he said of playing the songs live. “To me it feels like the intensity is still there.”
For tickets and details, visit vfemmes.com
