The Violent Femmes treated a Wednesday night crowd at San Antonio’s Espee to run-throughs of its first two albums, demonstrating why the folk-punk act remains extremely influential more than 40 years on.
The band had no opener. Rather, the Femmes played both albums in their entirety with a short intermission in between.
The Femmes started with their second album Hallowed Ground (1984), an ironic collection of hellfire-and-brimstone gospel songs and experimental tracks. The sophomore release’s unexpected detour into the land of Japheth, Shem and Ham was intended to keep people guessing after the pop sensibilities demonstrated on their highly acclaimed 1983 debut album.
Some of the audience was still filing into the outdoor venue when the Femmes launched into “Country Death Song,” a tune lead singer and guitarist Gordon Gano wrote in high school inspired by 19th century murder ballads.
For their performance of Hallowed Ground, the band’s members wore matching shirts featuring the album’s cover art.
The members switched between multiple instruments throughout each set. Bassist and founding member Brian Ritchie mostly played his signature Big Johnson Acoustic Bass — an alternative to the upright — which grounds the Femmes’ DIY folk-punk sound in a lineage of Americana and roots music. But Ritchie also contributed the iconic xylophone for “Gone Daddy Gone” and even busted out a conch shell at one point in the evening.
Complimenting Ritchie’s bass and further adding to the dressed-down folk patina of the band’s sound, drummer John Sparrow stood as he banged a snare with jazz brushes. Jokingly dubbed “The Grill Master” by Ritchie, Sparrow switched from the percussive sounds of snare to beating on a Webber barbecue pit. This is hillbilly music, after all.
The band’s youngest member, Blaise Garza, deftly switched between jazzy solos on his alto sax, a teeny-tiny miniature horn and a mammoth contrabass saxophone that towered over the stage. The resulting effect offered a playfully warped perspective. Every time Garza grabbed the audience’s attention, his saxophone was a different size.
Not to be outdone, frontman Gano often swapped his signature Fender Telecaster Thinline for a banjo or violin.
“Bono can’t play the fiddle like that. Mick Jagger can’t play the fiddle like that,” Ritchie said, gassing up his long-time bandmate.
But Gano’s best instruments are his astringent vocals and acerbic wit, which cemented the band’s sardonic reputation. The Femmes are still cool, and this is why. Bitchy intellect never goes out of style. See: Oscar Wilde and Lou Reed.
Adjunct Femmes members Casper Zack and Todd Joseph added even more multi-instrumentalism to the mix, switching between tiny trombone, cajón and bass.
After a costume change during the brief intermission, the band came back to deliver the goods with its self-titled debut album, ripping right into its most famous song, the opener “Blister in the Sun.” Other eagerly anticipated tracks from the release included “Kiss Off,” “Add It Up” and “Gone Daddy Gone.”
The Espee’s crowd reflected the band’s disparate influences, its clothing styles ranging from battle jackets to Kerrville Folk Festival merch. The rank-and-file seemed to know the words to every song, dutifully shouting the lyrics of “Confessions” back at Gano: “Have we got an army?”
Forty years on, the answer is still ‘yes.’
For an encore, the band deviated from the two-album format, closing the set with “American Music” from 1991’s Why Do Birds Sing?
“Don’t you like American music, baby?” If it sounds like this, we do.
