My best friend when I was 16 was a guy named Dave, and he had a family friend who was a freshman at the university in my town. So on weekends Dave and I used to go to this guy's dorm and see if we could blend in at parties, trying to meet college girls by pretending we were college guys. If it sounds like we were operators, bear in mind that neither of us had ever been on a date. I'm pretty sure I'd never so much as held a girl's hand. I think we had the courage to try because the chance of success seemed so remote. There was also the beer.
One weekend at some party we wound up talking to two girls who seemed to find us amusing. I'm not sure if I understood then the distinction between "laughing at" and "laughing with," but the important thing was they were standing there near us, chuckling once in a while. Eventually they asked if we'd like to go back to their room to hang out. What a question! They were on the other side of the elevators and we followed them down and filed in and sat on the floor as one of them went to the stereo to put on a record. She handed me the album cover and it looked strange, an antiquated photograph of a young girl on a creaky porch peering into a window, presumably at something forbidden.
My recall of hearing the record is fuzzy but I remember the reaction of our hosts. This music transformed them completely. They became unhinged, shouting lyrics to each other and dancing across the floor as we sat motionless and confused. It was, frankly, terrifying. I felt completely unmoored, awkwardly wondering what to do in the face of such extreme behavior. It quickly became clear to us that we were extraneous, that the only reason we all went back to their room was so they could put on this one particular record. We were in way over our heads. Around the third or fourth song we mumbled something about having to go and slipped out, embarrassed and confused, without so much as a wave goodbye. What was this music that inspired such ecstasy?
Violent Femmes, of course, the self-titled debut, with lead singer Gordon Gano as the creepy but strangely alluring backdoor man. Gano was Jonathan Richman with an unsteady moral compass, sharing Jo Jo's love of the Velvet Underground, 1950s rockabilly, and romanticized teenage life, but instead of looking for someone to care about his eyes were drawn to your pants. The instantly catchy tunes and clever songs were fused with an original and complimentary production, a bare-bones acoustic minimalism, all played on 10 steel strings and a single snare drum. It was one the finest debuts of the 80s, eventually going platinum and developing a long life in fraternity houses and on the stands of college pep bands, well outside of what would seem its natural habitat.
Violent Femmes was such a perfect expression of geeky teenage angst and lust that there was no way to follow it, and the band never really tried. They soon after released Hallowed Ground, a very good album with a markedly different focus, but failed to build any real momentum through the rest 80s. Albums still come out every three years or so and Violent Femmes is still a tour draw with a cult of fans, but no other album has had near the impact of the debut.
Permanent Record is the band's third best-of since 1991. This definitely beats the 1993 compilation Add It Up for both consistency and track selection, although both inexplicably omit "Prove My Love". That's the problem with a hits comp from a band known mostly for one album: you can only repeat so many songs from the catalog's biggest seller. Six of the 17 songs here are from the debut, including a live version of "Good Feeling" as a bonus track. All of these, of course, are great.
From Hallowed Ground, "Black Girls" is still fun, with Gano's sharpest sneer and a sax solo by John Zorn to match. "Jesus Walking on the Water" and "Country Death Song" (unfortunately a live version) reflect Gano's upbringing as the son of a Baptist minister who obviously listened to a whole bunch of Hank Sr. "American Music" presents a kinder and gentler Violent Femmes, too many drugs and home alone on the night of the prom but with a quintessential melody and chords to keep the outlook shiny and the appeal universal. Beyond these songs there's a marked dip in quality, a few OK songs but ultimately too many lackluster melodies swaddled in generic rock production. Still, they've earned the right to keep going, and they had a moment most bands would kill for. All those happy shouts from drunken kids add up to a lot.
