You know it’s going to be a good night when the drum kit includes a Weber charcoal grill. That was the first sign that Violent Femmes’ sold-out show at Cain Park (Saturday, August 15), on their 45 Years of Violent Femmes tour, was going to be a wild, and surprisingly still rambunctious live show from a band that’s been kicking out the jams since 1981.
The core trio was led by the one and only Gordon Gano on guitar, violin, and vocals. Gano was back by Brian Ritchie, mostly on that absolutely enormous bass and John Sparrow behind a stripped-down drum kit that included a snare, floor tom, ride cymbal, and the grill. He played standing up the entire night, mostly with brushes. Together, the three, joined throughout the night by various musicians, worked through 21 songs in about 90 minutes, swelling to as many as six players at points as members of the band’s long-running “Horns of Dilemma” collective wandered on and off.
The band hit the ground running, with “Prove My Love” and “Promise” from their eponymous ground-breaking debut album. The night would feature 9 of the 12 songs from that album, proving the band knows exactly what the crowd came for. It wasn’t all a debut album love fest, though. “Country Death Song” Gano on banjo, and a few songs later, “Jesus Walking on the Water” brought out Gano’s violin, which he’d return to more than once before the night was over. “Waiting for the Bus” pulled out a bass saxophone that looked, and sounded, enormous next to everything else happening on stage. Then came the bass-heaviest stretch of the night: “Kiss Off” into “Please Do Not Go,” both anchored by extended Ritchie bass solos, proof that was the rightful one to take take most of the instrumental leads and solos.
CHECK OUT CLEVEROCK’S PHOTO GALLERY FROM THE SHOW!
The middle of the set turned into a mini-retrospective of 1986’s ‘The Blind Leading the Naked,’ due to that record’s 40th anniversary being this year. “No Killing,” a title that doesn’t leave much room for interpretation, its lyrics taking direct aim at police violence, into a genuinely great sax solo on “I Held Her in My Arms,” with a cover of T. Rex’s “Children of the Revolution” were also included. Somewhere around here the band had swelled to five or six people on stage, which raised the obvious question of who all these people were, an answer that would come later on
“Faith” was the show’s quietest moment when Gano sat at a piano and told the crowd there was nothing to be nervous about, like he was just playing in his own living room, with a sly smile. Then Ritchie closed the song out with a story about Little Richard once playing his and Gano’s high school, which was both a touching and cool story.
“Gimme the Car” stretched into a jam, but “Black Girls” was the real jam moment. Sparrow launched into a drum solo, Gano swapped to a violin yet again, and the solo kept building as Sparrow moved over to work the grill itself. Gano snuck off stage for a stretch to let the rhythm section breathe, and Ritchie, still holding it all down on bass formally introduced Sparrow to the crowd with a grinning “you can’t fucking do it” directed at the crowd. By the time it wound back down, Mike Kelly was out front on trombone, and someone was even working the slide.
From there, “Gone Daddy Gone” into “Add It Up,” both of which had the entire crowd singing along. The encore opened with a snippet of Gano singing the old folk tune “Down in the Valley,” by Pete Seeger, before Gano stopped and said he wasn’t sure where that came from. Then the band kicked into the ultimate set staple, “American Music.” The whole sold-out crowd sang the song right back at him as they had many times throughout the night.
Forty-five years in, Violent Femmes aren’t haven’t lost a beat. Anyone at the show saw how well Gano’s voice has held up. Those aren’t easy notes to hit. It’s pretty wild to hear him and have it still sound as good as he ever did. That’s true of the entire band. Close your eyes and you could envision them when they were young Milwaukee punks, playing in seedy dive bars. They’ve been around for 45 years, but they show no signs of weakness or phoning in a performance, and that’s a better trick than a pure nostalgia show could ever pull off.
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