Violent Femmes with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (Wisconsin Public Television, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Sherlock episode and a half-hour promotional film on the restoration of the Hotel Del Coronado, KPBS showed an hour-long performance video of the rock band the Violent Femmes playing a sold-out concert with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. The Violent Femmes are a neo-punk band with admixtures of 1950’s-style rock ‘n’ roll and reggae, and though I’ve always loved their name I can’t remember ever having heard anything by them when they first emerged in the mid-1980’s. The current lineup consists of Gordon Gano, lead vocals and acoustic guitar; Brian Ritchie on chitarrón (the bass instrument used by mariachi bands that looks like an oversized guitar and is worn around the neck rather than resting on the floor) and backing vocals, Blaise Garza on saxophones (including a contrabass saxophone, a curious contraption that had to rest inside a rack on the floor; the instrument is almost twice as tall as he is!); and John Sparrow on drums, though instead of playing a normal drum set he thundered away on a large snare drum with wire brushes and occasionally hit a barbecue grill on stage. A band like this needed a symphony orchestra behind them as much as (to borrow the old feminist slogan) a fish needed a bicycle, but the show was appealing and I’m glad I watched it. Most of the songs they played were from their first album, Violent Femmes, originally released in 1984 (with only Gano and Ritchie from the current group and original drummer Vincent De Lorenzo). The concert was held October 6, 2024 to celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary and most of the set list came from it, though they did do a few later songs like “Color Me Once.” The Violent Femmes squeezed 13 songs into an hour-long time slot, including “Add It Up,” “Confessions,” “All I Want,” “Color Me Once,” “Gone, Daddy, Gone” (a 1950’s pastiche on which Ritchie played marimba), “Look Like That,” “I Held Her in My Arms” (another 1950’s-ish song on which Garza played a hot tenor sax solo), “American Music” (on which Gano switched from acoustic guitar to banjo), “Kiss Off,” “Please Do Not Go,” “Gimme the Car” (an adolescent’s plea to his dad to lend him the family car for the night so he can get his girlfriend drunk and high and screw her in it), “Blister in the Sun” (their first single hit and a song that sparked controversy within the band and led to a temporary breakup when, without consulting the others, Gano licensed it to Wendy’s for a commercial 20 years later), and the one ballad, “Good Feeling.” Afterwards Charles looked up YouTube for their song “Black Girl,” from their second album and one which, like much of the material the Violent Femmes performed on the Milwaukee concert, presented Gano as a young man confused about his sexual orientation. The lyrics of “Black Girl” say that he likes Black girls better than white girls, but white guys better than Black guys. I’d already noticed the Violent Femmes’ debt to the Velvet Underground in general and Lou Reed in particular, and I was struck by how much more Gano sounded like Reed in the 1980’s than he does now.