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Most people probably don’t remember where they were when they first heard “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes. But it’s a safe bet most have a recollection of their first thought when experiencing that acoustic tornado of a song about – well, we’ll let you decide. Most likely that initial sentiment was some form of, “What the hell was that?” and “How can I hear more?!”
Billy Ryan recalls some of the details. “I remember at an early age being on vacation, and a friend said, ‘You’ve got to hear this song,'” says Ryan. “And it was ‘Blister in the Sun.’ Then we heard the whole first record, and we were all kind of in awe.” Billy Ryan and his friends were far from alone in their adoration: that Slash-released, self-titled debut from the Violent Femmes has gone on to sell 1.6 million copies since the beginning of Soundscan [thereforemissing nearly a decade of recorded sales], the first album to go platinum without ever charting on Billboard. Terms like “landmark” and “pioneering” apply, as does the phrase “the beginning of alternative music.” And SPIN has put the record alongside Gang of Four’s Entertainment!, X’sLos Angeles, and Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures in its pantheon of the most influential post-punk ever recorded.
Gordon Gano was the voice and pen at the center of the Violent Femmes’ stark and seething musical storm. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t interested in music, thanks to his Baptist minister father who liked to strum his guitar and sing country songs for his own enjoyment and older siblings with radios and records and guitars of their own. Gano was 15 when he started writing songs. In fact, “Good Feeling,” which ended up onViolent Femmes, was written at 15. “That was my breakout year,” Gordon shares with a laugh. “I was really writing lots and lots of songs.”
A couple of years later, Gano broke out again. He and Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo, collectively the Violent Femmes, got a kick-start when they were discovered performing on a Milwaukee street corner by the Pretenders’ James Honeyman-Scott. The band then burst on the scene, as writer types like to say, inspiring those same writer types to toss around the names of Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers as like-minded comparisons. The words “teenage adolescent angst” also got a lot of ink.
Fast-forward a couple of decades from that debut, across the release of over a half-dozen other Violent Femmes records and Gordon’s gospel side-project, the Mercy Seat. Across wave after wave of Femmes disciples – They Might Be Giants to The Arcade Fire and Ween to the Avett Brothers. Across Billy Ryan and his keyboard-playing brother Brendan starting the Bogmen, a band that favored U2-style dynamics and flights of Talking Heads fancy.
In 2001, Gano and the Ryan brothers found themselves living in the same New York City neighborhood and hanging out in some of the same places. There was a Jerry Harrison connection – he’d produced the Femmes’ The Blind Leading the Naked and the Bogmen’s Life Begins at 40 Million – and both sides mention a laundromat encounter. “Billy and I obviously knew of him and the Violent Femmes’ work,” says Brendan Ryan, adding with a selfdeprecating chuckle, “I doubt he knew of the Bogmen.” Billy adds, “We were fans. And then we started running intoeach other.”
When the three would get together, there was much talk of music and musicians, with discussion topics ranging from Leonard Cohen, Television, and Frank Black to Jackie Mittoo, Jimmy McGriff, and Mose Allison. After Brendan ended up playing keys on Gano’s 2002 solo release Hitting the Ground and between major studio film score projects (Fever Pitch, The Heartbreak Kid), the Ryans started handing off instrumentals to Gordon, who’d come up with lyrics and ideas for the music. Thus began a mailbox-centered collaboration that would last, literally, for years.
It was the performance of the song “Under the Sun,” one of the first joint efforts from Gano and the Ryans (as for whether the “Sun” part was coincidence, subconscious, or intentional – again, we’ll let you decide), at a 9/11 benefit concert that really got things rolling as far as making a record together. Eventually, they’d team up to create close to 40 songs, with 12 making the final cut for the Under the Sun album. Perhaps taking its cue from those wide-reaching music discussions, the record is a parade of styles, with the off-kilter Yiddish-gospel groove of “Oholah Oholibah”careening against the multi-mood, gradually building “Still Suddenly Here,” while “Hired Gun” could pass for altcountry in the GanoRyan world and “Wave and Water” is all Heads-y world-jangle.
“That just came naturally; there wasn’t a plan for that,” says Gano of the record’s variety. “Songs just went in different directions.” Another of the earliest compositions, “Red,” is built around the recurring lines “One day your mother and my mother were hanging up clothes/My mother punched your mother right in the nose/What color blood came out?,” a version of “eenie meenie miney moe” that Gano had learned from his older sister growing up and that had stowed away in his brain all these years. The song, like most of its Under the Sun mates, rocks like a motherpuncher, albeit in a cranked-up Balkan wedding dance kind of way. And throughout, the rhythm section of drummer Frank Ferrer (Guns N’ Roses, Psychedelic Furs) and bassist Lonnie Hillyer (Maggie’s Dream, Bernie Worell) do nothing but impress.
Holding it all together are Gano’s signature voice and lyrical gifts, that one-two punch that made such an impression on a vacationing Billy Ryan. And Gano is thrilled with the results and the collaboration. “The different strengths that we have really come together in a very good way with this record and these songs,” he says. “This is not a side project, because Violent Femmes are over, so it’s not like this is the other thing for connoisseurs or somebody who really wants to dig into it. This is what I’m doing, as far as singing and writing and playing music. This is what I’m doing.”