Unlikely platinum albums don\u2019t come any more unlikely than the Violent Femmes\u2019 self-titled debut: The trio hailed from a city with no national profile (Milwaukee), had a lead songwriter still in his teens, and played acoustic instruments in an era of punk guitars and New Wave synths. But their snappy songs, inspired by alt-rock misfits like Jonathan Richman and suffused with emotional (especially sexual) despair, gradually found an audience. Today, as drummer-novelist Brown notes in this book\u2019s introduction, the opening riff of \u201cBlister in the Sun\u201d is a clap-along staple at baseball games. The chief virtue of Brown\u2019s study\u2014part of the \u201c33 \u2153\u201d series of short books on classic albums\u2014is that it recovers the strangeness of the album\u2019s creation and conception. With little cash or scene credibility, the band couldn\u2019t have recorded the album without a $10,000 loan from drummer Victor DeLorenzo\u2019s father; DeLorenzo\u2019s kit was a spartan contraption featuring a \u201ctranceaphone,\u201d a floor tom capped with a metal bushel basket; unlike most guitar albums, Brian Ritchie\u2019s bass usually delivers the melody line; they scored a gig opening for the Pretenders just by busking outside the venue; their record label rejected them at first but changed its tune after staffers kept playing their tape in the office. Frontman Gordon Gano is hard-pressed to explain the genesis and meaning of the album\u2019s now-iconic lyrics\u2014what does it mean to blister in the sun, anyhow?\u2014but his pleading voice connected with young fans who shared cassette dubs of the album like samizdat. Brown is an unabashed fan\u2014the book closes with him giddily meeting Gano at an Atlanta concert\u2014but it\u2019s the just-the-facts nature of his reportage that best serves the book because the facts are fittingly offbeat.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unlikely platinum albums don\u2019t come any more unlikely than the Violent Femmes\u2019 self-titled debut: The trio hailed from a city with no national profile (Milwaukee), had a lead songwriter still in his teens, and played acoustic instruments in an era of punk guitars and New Wave synths. But their snappy songs, inspired by alt-rock misfits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}