Now in their 60s, the leaders of folk/punk/rock group the Violent Femmes don’t convey the same kind of angst they did more than 40 years ago when performing classics like “Blister in the Sun” and “Gone Daddy Gone.”
But the band, led by guitarist Gordon Gano and bassist Brian Ritchie, still finds ways to convincingly convey its songs live. During their 90-minute show Saturday night at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights, the trio — which expanded to up to six members at various points — dug into 21 songs, adding flourishes like a piano solo or horns to make them sound fresh. While some tunes sounded like their album counterparts, others took on a renewed life, deepened by the passage of time.
The Milwaukee-formed band was returning to the area nearly three years after an appearance at the now-closed TempleLive Cleveland Masonic. Every idiosyncrasy that helped the Femmes stick out during its 1980s heyday is intact, even if the original lineup changed.
Ritchie mostly plays an oversized acoustic bass and frequently takes the instrumental leads. Drummer John Sparrow’s setup consists of a snare, a floor tom, ride cymbal and a Weber grill, played standing up and mostly with brushes instead of sticks. And Gano plays rudimentary chords, riffs and solos on electric guitar, giving the songs a feeling of simplicity even when they’re not.
With no new music to support, the tour is to celebrate the band’s four-and-a-half decades together (give or take a few years of inactivity). While almost all of the songs from its influential 1983 self-titled debut album were trotted out, the setlist showed the Femmes had a much more varied catalog.
That included the banjo-inflected “Country Death Song,” the 1950s rock and roll of “I Held Her in My Arms” and the blues-rock of “Faith,” with the last two coming from a mini-set of songs highlighting the 1986 album “The Blind Leading the Naked.” Gordon’s fiddle strumming and bowing also propelled takes on “Jesus Walking on the Water” and “Good Feeling.”
The Femmes got looser as the show progressed, with a somewhat stoic Gano, decked out in a flowery night robe, becoming more emotive and engaging. The members jammed out a bit on “Gimme the Car,” “Black Girls” and a cover of T. Rex’s “Children of the Revolution,” with Gano giving his wah-wah pedal a workout.
Not that members of the sold-out, appreciative-but-somewhat-chatty audience cared much. They just wanted to sing along to songs they knew. Luckily there were many, from “Kiss Off” to “Gone Daddy Gone” to show closer “American Music.”
By the time the band got to “Add It Up,” complete with Gano singing/wondering why he can’t have what he desires and give in to his lust, the music hit a fever pitch of sorts. But the vocals were a different story.
Singing a song he wrote in his late teens, he didn’t sound angsty. He still yearned, but there was a resignation. As if now, that’s just how it is.
(Photos below by George Michaels.)
Setlist:
1. Prove My Love
2. Promise
3. Memory
4. Breakin’ Up
5. Country Death Song
6. Waiting for the Bus
7. Blister in the Sun
8. Kiss Off
9. Please Do Not Go
10. Jesus Walking on the Water
11. Good Feeling
12. Old Mother Reagan
13. No Killing
14. I Held Her in My Arms
15. Children of the Revolution
16. Faith
17. Gimme the Car
18. Black Girls
19. Gone Daddy Gone
20. Add It Up
Encore:
21. American Music (with a snippet of Pete Seeger’s “Down in the Valley” as an intro)
Eric Heisig is a freelance writer in Cleveland. He can be reached at eheisig@gmail.com.