Violent Femmes Commodore Review Second Night

Well, that was even more fun! (See my review of the first night here). 

Good news: I was able to shake aside some of myself and dance for the second night of the Violent Femmes two-gig stand in Vancouver. I did shoot a bit of vid, especially of "Never Tell," and tried to take a few good photos of Gordon Gano, who was slightly lacking from my documentation the previous night, filmed only from a distance... but it turns out the best photograph of the night is actually this one, of a girl receiving water squirts from security (I kinda preferred the IDLES guards' method of passing actual cups into the crowd, but this had a certain efficiency to it. Personally, with my weird swallowing mechanism, I am not prepared to avail myself of this experience): 

Femmes-wise, the band seemed to cook a bit more on Sunday, to make some more daring flourishes, musically. It might just be in my head, but Brian's maelstrom of a bass solo for "Never Tell" seemed longer and more forceful tonight. The mid-song, quasi-improvisatory cacophony in "Gimme the Car" seemed more cacophonous, more edgy. Gordon Gano's surprisingly funky guitar riffs on "To the Kill" seemed to go a little bit further. There seemed to be more barbeque-playing during "Black Girls" and I'm guessing if you took the evening's epics like "Confessions" and timed them from night to night, tonight's were a smidgen longer than the night before's. 

I mean, that's how it seemed, anyhow. I was thinking, as I swayed to "Confessions," that it is very nearly a blues song; it's certainly a kind of gateway drug, helping to widen the door for me to let lot of other music into my life in subsequent years. It helped translate the blues a bit for me into a language I spoke in ways the Stones or Zep or Aerosmith, in just replicating the blues, did not. I owe this song a bit of a debt, really. It holds up really, really well.

Got thinking that it also makes really great use of the pronoun "it." "It" is a word that can easily be taken for granted, but here the Femmes load choruses of the song with veritable commands, punctuated in some cases with flashing lights, to "hack hack hack it apart" and to "do do do do it" and to "pay pay pay it tonight," while at no point clearly indicating what "it" is, leaving it entirely to the emotions, lusts and intuitions of the listener. It's a revolutionary "it," a dangerous "it," a profoundly ADOLESCENT "it," but whatever else one might say about that "it," it is an interesting "it" to contemplate. I have surely never spent so much time musing on what an "it" could be in the context of any other song. 

And of course, these choruses got a lot of scream-alongs from tonight's audience, though we seemed less inclined to sing along than Saturday's crowd, whatever that means (there was not as much pogoing to "Jesus Walking on the Water," either).  

But anyhow, besides taking a few pictures and letting my mind wander about song meanings, I also just shut my brain down and danced, especially throughout "Add It Up," for example. When will the chance come again? 'I think a lot of us are still reeling from the COVID experience of two years with nearly no live music, and eager to make up for lost gigs, especially since we now know how fragile such experiences can be. 

But I can remember the year or so of my life where "Add It Up" was the most transgressive, nasty, horny little anthem in my record collection. Most horny anthems, at least of the sort teenagers in the suburbs were likely to be exposed to, are fucking awful (try KISS' "Lick It Up," say), but the fraught, acne-scarred, refreshingly direct angstiness of this song really does make it a classic, and even if it's been 40 years since it really spoke to me -- you can't beat hearing that song through the ears of a teenager -- it still connects, if I let it. It was, maybe, a bit better before the world realized, circa Reality Bites, that we weren't somehow special in our love for this song -- before we clued into how many of us it was speaking to, back when we imagined, as individual listeners, that it was only us that had a personal relationship to it. 

But there's no denying that it's a great song.  

A digression: have you seen Jennifer Lynch's film Surveillance, produced by her Dad, David? They make good use of "Add It Up." Hugh Dillon is involved in the scene and sings along to the song on a car radio, in the context of a great, twisted serial killer movie that gets far too little love and attention (it will also be very fun for Bill Pullman fans, who gives a performance on par with those in Lost Highway and, say, Bright Angel). Highly recommended, with a trigger warning for scenes of eroticized murder and deep perversity. It's kind of funny to contemplate "Add It Up" as Dad rock if you were listening to it when you actually were 14, but that's sort of what it becomes in this film! 

Anyhow, there was, definitely, an element of nostalgia for me on both nights, a chance to appreciate this music live that I did not have when I was 14 and living in the suburbs. I enjoyed revisiting the feelings I felt then, remembering how much I loved these two albums. I have no idea how much the members of this band enjoy social time together -- I saw no great sense of strained relationships, but also no great sense of non-musical rapport; but they are definitely on the same page when it comes to making sure their audience is having fun. 

 

I also realized something -- I had commented that Gordon Gano-wise, banjo > fiddle, but I neglected to mention that guitar> all else; there were some great solos on both nights, but it took seeing them a second time to really appreciate them.

The funniest bit of stage business, meanwhile, was actually down to an error of Gano's. On Saturday, Gano had performed, by way of introducing "Hallowed Ground," a ritual of "flipping the record," complete by hand gestures, which he followed by briefly commenting on the strangeness of the way the song begins. Whereupon he recited the opening, spoken verse:

The prophet is a fool and the spiritual man is mad
For the multitude of thine iniquity
And the great hatred...

Incidentally, this is from Hosea 9:7, and there are apparently two thoughts as to what this means, discussed on this Biblical hermeneutics page, from which I quote: 

1. "Because you sin so much, and hate God, you think his prophets are foolish, that the men he has inspired are insane."
2. "In your sin and hatred of God, all your prophets are foolish, and the men who seem inspired are actually insane."

Regardless of which scriptural interpretation he intends, on the second night, Gano forgot to do the routine about flipping the record in the first set, which prefaced the reference to Hosea. Instead, rather bizarrely, he launched into the "spiritual man is mad" recitation just before before "Prove My  Love" (the first song on their debut's second side). Then he grinned -- "wrong song!" -- and explained that he was thinking about flipping the other record over. 

I hope you are following this; I am sure that even with Gano and Ritchie trying to explain his mistake, some people in the Sunday crowd were puzzled. Brian threw in something about the days when you could stack records, whereby side 1 of Hallowed Ground could in fact lead to side two of the self-titled debut, when the next record fell, but I'm not sure if that would help much to audience members under 40. Do kids today ever wonder why some double albums from the 1970s then have sides 1 and side 4 on opposite sides of the first record, and sides 2 and 3 on the second? It's because you could listen to a double album on the changer, sides 1-2-3-4, only changing the stack once; you listen to side 1, then the tone arm goes back and the second record falls, then when that finishes, you flip both over, to be dropped one at a time. Surely someone has examined some double albums of the past and wondered what the hell we were thinking. It was not very good for records, but it was the only way of listening to records without having to get up to change anything.     

Come to think of it, I may even have listened to the first two Violent Femmes records that way myself, back when -- I did have a stackable turntable, in my parents' old console TV setup, and I recall that was still using it that way through when I got into Double Nickels on the Dime, which came out the same year as Hallowed Ground.  I know for sure I stacked those Minutemen discs; I might easily have stacked my two Femmes records, as well.

I digress again. Anyhow, the band launched into side two of their debut, and the set continued without further kerfuffle. Come the encore, Brian Ritchie went a bit further in his Commodore Love on the second night, saying that it was the venue they have played most often of any in the world. Again, "Ugly" got omitted. It was still an amazing night. 

At one point, Gordon invited us to raise hands: "How many people were here last night, too?" Then he pointed into the pit: "I recognize you!"

He was not pointing at me, but you know what? I recognized the guy he was pointing at, too!

Thanks, Violent Femmes! Great nights, both of them!