Violent Femmes

What the hell is the Philly Phanatic? No one knows. From the looks of the beast I wouldn't say it has a single thing to do with baseball. Except the jersey. It is a mascot, that's for sure, and it seems to make those fans unreasonably happy.

I suppose that's all a mascot is supposed to be — an abstraction that makes you unreasonably happy about whatever. So that's how I like to think of the Violent Femmes, as a mascot for alternative rock radio. Their coffee house acoustic rock is too stripped down to resemble the fuzzy feedbackery heard at Lollapalooza, but all the girls and boys in ZERO tees would go bananas if someone played Blister In the Sun. The sound has timeless appeal, youthful but sly and disarmingly sexy. Fully half the songs on their self-titled 1982 debut (Blister In the Sun, Kiss Off, Please Do Not Go, Add It Up, Gone Daddy Gone) were in semi-regular rotation on Q101 throughout the nineties. This I can prove by referring to the unofficial archives: The legendary Cool Stuff tapes.

Chicago's alternative rock station dictated most everything I listened to in high school, and I was a witting participant in their sales-driven musical worldview. Every night I did my homework kneeling on the floor using my bed as a table, my cassette deck within arm's reach on my otherwise unused desk. Whenever, partway through taking the limit as x went to zero, I'd hear the DJ introduce a good song I would depress the two-button record+play combination and preserve the broadcast for posterity. In this way the 17 volumes of Cool Stuff were recorded, documenting the life and times of Q101: Chicago's New Rock Alternative between 1997-2001. Among the events recounted on these tapes is the moment in late 1998 when the station re-christened Metallica as alternative and added them to the schedule (heavily) — Cool Stuff Vol. X is almost entirely Metallica. I've always suspected this programming change came at the insistence of radio personality Erich "Mancow" Muller, who had recently brought his highly-rated morning show to Q101 (Mancow's previous home, Rock 103.5, had a nightly Mandatory Metallica segment). As for the Femmes, Gone Daddy Gone for example can be found on Vol. VIII.

From the beginning the staff rightly decided that the Violent Femmes were a canonical roots-of-alternative band of the 80s. It probably helped that the Femmes hailed from neighboring Milwaukee (the station loudly supported the local scene, cf. their Pumpkins idolatry) and were enjoying new heights in popularity with the grinning aw-shucks 1991 single American Music at the time of Q101's inception.

It was kind of brilliant to take the back-to-basics ethos of punk even further by unplugging, while still attacking the strings with reckless zeal. The songwriting is in the loose limbed inward-looking tradition of the early CBGB scene, like Richard Hell and The Voidoids but without the arty New York pretension. We finally found out what the hell the Femmes were in the late 90s when American folk punk emerged on Plan-It-X Records — featuring such artists as Against Me!, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, and Defiance, Ohio — and the Femmes were recognized as the progenitors of the genre.

As if further reason is needed to love these guys, I point out that VF singer/guitarist Gordon Gano once guest starred on The Adventures of Pete & Pete (as the first substitute math teacher in X=Why?). Other singers of punk and early alternative bands to have done so include Debbie Harry, Michael Stipe, Kate Pierson of the B-52s (the redhead), and New York Dolls singer David Johansen. I should just be writing a daily blog about Pete & Pete.