It's hard to know what would have happened if guitarist James "Honeyman" Scott hadn't spotted the Violent Femmes busking out front of Milwaukee's Oriental Theatre in 1981. Right then and there, he invited the trio to open for his band, The Pretenders. But, one thing's certain - the raw punk/folk/rock/acoustica Gordon Gano subsequently wrote, recorded, and sang on seminal Violent Femmes tracks like "Add it Up," "Blister in the Sun," and "Kiss Off" have become indelible fixtures in the American music canon.
But what if Gano, one of popular music's most distinguished songwriters, composed music for other artists? Say luminaries such as PJ Harvey, Lou Reed, John Cale, Frank Black, Martha Wainwright, They Might Be Giants, Mary Lou Lord, or Linda Perry? What would the results sound like? Well, that's where Gano's phenomenal new album, Hitting the Ground comes in, but more on that later.
Long before there was violence or femmes or all-star collaborations, there was Gordon Gano, born in New York City to a large, artistically-inclined family of eight children. His father was an American Baptist minister, and both parents and several siblings either played music and/or acted. "Some of my earliest memories," Gano says, "involved music being played live or on records in my house. On occasion the whole family would sing together." His earliest influences include roots music by artists such as Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, the Carter Family, and Robert Johnson.
During Gordon's influential adolescent years, ages 10-20, the Ganos moved to the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. By the age of 12 Gordon was writing songs on guitar and starting to play the violin. Though he wasn't active in drama, it is noteworthy that Gano auditioned for a role in the film Ordinary People, the same suicidal teen part for which Timothy Hutton won an Oscar.
Gano was an excellent, if idiosyncratic, student who made the National Honor Society at the same time he insisted on wearing a bathrobe every Monday to school. "The bathrobe was my very passive protest against going to school," Gano says. "I didn't enjoy school and it made this statement like, 'You got me out of bed for this?'" Much to the homecoming queen's-and the entire football team's-dismay, Gordon was voted high school homecoming king.
By senior year Gordon was performing in local clubs and cafés. An early show at the Metropole featured Gano sharing a bill with Paul Cebar and Jonathan Richman, a show that a young, local musician named Brian Ritchie just happened to catch. Gordon would later invite Ritchie to join him on a song for his National Honor Society's induction ceremony. While the administration expected a turgid ballad, Gano and Ritchie opted for the more raucous "Gimmie the Car," complete with the lines "come on Dad, gimmie the car/I'm gonna pick her up/I'm gonna get her drunk/I'm gonna get her high/I'm gonna make her cry." Gordon was suspended from school and stripped of his NHS membership. As Gano now recalls, "I never did return my National Honor Society pin."
The Honor Society's loss was the world's gain. A month later Gano, Ritchie, and drummer Victor De Lorenzo formed the Violent Femmes and played their first gig at a Milwaukee coffee house. After the serendipitous Pretenders gig, the unsigned Femmes went on to blow away NYC with two legendary 1982 shows at the Bottom Line and CBGB's opening for Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Written while Gano was still a teenager, the Femmes' seminal 1983 eponymous debut on Slash (which Rhino is now reissuing to mark the band's 20th anniversay) was the first album to ever go platinum in the US without charting in Billboard, and is now approaching triple platinum status. Though it never stopped selling, it sells better today than it did 10 years ago like a true international phenomenon. "Blister in the Sun" is the most recurrent song in the history of alternative rock radio, and one of the number one songs in the format according to radio station callout research. CD-Now calls Violent Femmes "Best of Genre." Which begs the question: which genre does thrashing, throbbing acoustic country/rock/folk carrying Gano's jittery, angst-filled voice fit into? Wherever it may lie, the now-platinum disc succinctly managed to articulate the eternal frustrations of hundreds of thousands of puberty-stricken youths who at the slightest opportunity still reflexively chant the following lines: one fuck/I guess it's something to do with luck/but I waited my whole life for just one…Day/after day/I get angry…"
While Gano's 20-year-career as the Violent Femmes frontman and songwriter on eight full-length releases (including the seminal folk and country-inflected Hallowed Ground from 1985, and 1986's innovative Blind Leading the Naked produced by ex-Talking Heads Jerry Harrison) is well-documented, Gano's solo work on innumerable side projects is not.
In addition to the Violent Femmes, Gano also led a gospel group called the Mercy Seat, wrote and produced songs for Louise Attaque, one of the all-time best-selling French bands, and also played violin for singer/songwriter Ben Vaughn. His other collaborations with an array of artists include An Emotional Fish, Carmaig DeForest, John Kruth, The Heads, Elliott Murphy, and Three Bean Salad. Not insignificantly, Gano has also penned three musicals. Film director David Moore (Hitting the Ground, Polish Spaghetti) just happened to catch one of Gano's musicals entitled "Carmen: The First Two Chapters." Recognizing Gano's extraordinary talent as a songwriter, Moore recruited him to write the soundtrack to his new film Hitting the Ground. The plot is based around the theory of entropy, which in this case manifests itself when a college student photographs a person jumping out of a window, which triggers a copycat sensation that spirals destructively out of control. Gano wrote all the songs and enlisted producer/engineer Warren A. Bruleigh to help with recording and recruiting some of contemporary music's finest artists to interpret Gordon's songs. The results are breathtaking.
Witness PJ Harvey doing her best Gordon Gano on the title track where she charges the mic headfirst complete with multi-octave yelps and an intense distorted guitar attack that knocks everyone else's amplifier off the stage. "I just love the way she plays guitar on that track," Gano says.
It is of historical proportions and great personal significance that Gano was able to recruit both Lou Reed and John Cale for Hitting the Ground. "The one group the Violent Femmes could all agree on, the one band that would have gotten the highest votes from all of us if we had taken a poll," Gano explains, "is the Velvet Underground." And rightly so as throughout their career the Violent Femmes have been favorably compared to the VU.
Reed is actually the only other artist to receive songwriting credit on the album, but Gano really didn't have a choice. "I got 'Catch 'Em In the Act' back and Lou says, 'I took the liberty of changing a few of your lyrics.' Well, if you're going to have somebody change your lyrics…." Gano recounts, "but he improved the song and made it completely his own." For Gano, John Cale's turn at the piano didn't have the references and had to guess what the melody was. They were scared that I wouldn't like it. Miraculously, the melody turned out exactly the way I had done it. They did a great job."
Elsewhere, Linda Perry, of 4 Non-Blondes fame, who also recently produced Pink, does her best Nina Simone take on the stunning torch song, "So It Goes"; singer-songwriter, Mary Lou Lord turns in one of the album's prettiest vocal performances on "Oh Wonder" complete with strings and whispered sweet nothings; Martha Wainwright's (of the same amazing Loudon-Wainwright-III-Kate-McGarrigle-inspired gene pool that spawned her brother Rufus) powerful vocals dance with Gano's voice on the duet "It's Money."
Speaking of gene pools, one of Gordon's plethora of siblings, his sister Cynthia Gayneau, (who uses the traditional spelling of their last name), most appropriately sings the countrified waltz "Merry Christmas Brother." Cynthia, it should be known, has her own label and has released four country CDs of her own. Rounding out the album are two Gano-performed tracks, the up-tempo stomper, "Make it Happen," and Gano's own take of "Hitting the Ground," which allows us first hand glimpse of the differences between his song stylings and the other artists.
When asked to explain the rationale behind his artist selections for Hitting the Ground, Gordon says, "All the artists and their performances sounds like there couldn't have been any other choices. Each one is really the right person to be doing it. They all get the highest marks at what they do, they are each the best at what they do." Just give it a listen, and you'll see exactly what he means and why Gano is not only Hitting the Ground, but hitting the ground running.
Gordon Gano currently lives in New York City and is planning several shows around the Hitting the Ground album. He also has an upcoming tour with the original Violent Femmes line-up, reuniting the band with drummer Victor de Lorenzo for the first time in 9 years, which will coincide with Rhino Records' release of the deluxe 20th anniversary edition of the Violent Femmes' debut album.