Everlasting Femmes Violent Femmes Bring Their Sound To Spokane

When the Violent Femmes played their first gig in the spring of 1981, they expected to play their last one that fall.

“That was the plan,” frontman Gordon Gano says.

Almost a dozen CDs and two decades later, the Femmes, of course, have not gone away.

In March, the band released its first new studio album since 1994, “Freak Magnet.”

The new CD has that classic Violent Femmes’ sound. In fact, Gano, bassist Brian Ritchie and drummer Guy Hoffman have been playing many of the songs on the album for years.

“It’s really a compilation, in a strange way, of unreleased material,” Gano says. “We were signed to a record label (Elektra) that wouldn’t release anything. We ended up with a lot of songs that were recorded to our satisfaction … The label was interested in songs they felt would be hits.”

And although songs like “Blister in the Sun,” “Add it Up,” “American Music” and “Gone Daddy Gone” are burned into the psyches of a generation, Gano is quick to point out that the band has never had an actual hit.

“We have songs that are so popular, everyone would think they’re a hit,” he says. “There’s a lot of people who really like our music, but it’s never really been the industry.”

It will be a homecoming of sorts for Gano, the youngest of eight kids, when he plays the Opera House on Saturday. His parents, Fay and Norman Gano, have lived here since 1992.

Norman, who’s now largely retired, was Pastor of Visitation at the Spokane Valley Baptist Church. Both parents are active in Spokane’s Civic Theater.

And while Norman prefers to check out his son’s concerts from the balcony, Mom likes to be where the action is.

“Fay used to want to get down in front all the time,” Norman Gano says. “That was before the mosh pits got so strong. But she held her own.”

Says Gordon: “She better not be doing that now … She has her stories about how somebody tried to push her and she whacked them.”

Norman admits that some of the Violent Femmes’ songs aren’t to his liking.

“The ones that get the most popular are the ones we ourselves would not feature as the best,” he says. “I don’t like a certain amount of them. But anybody with kids knows kids do some things you don’t approve of.”

True to the Femmes’ history of defying classification, Gano again mixes the sublime and the absurd on “Freak Magnet.”

One track, “Rejoice & Be Happy,” is a full-out punk-gospel song. Other tunes talk about mermaids and mosh pits and love.

“I love writing songs and there’s really nothing more to be added to it,” Gordon Gano says. “That would include all kinds of songs about all kinds of subjects.”

Twenty years after the clock first ticked on the Violent Femmes, Gano says he now sees no end in sight to the band.

“The way I think about it, my earliest memories involve music,” he says. “So, to me, that’s a part of my life, my interacting with music. I can’t really imagine a time not being involved in that.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: PREVIEW Violent Femmes

The Violent Femmes play Saturday at the Spokane Opera House. Pop-punk band 22-Jacks will open the 8 p.m. show. Tickets are $15 today, $18 Saturday, through G&B (325-SEAT or 1-800-325-SEAT).