Q&A with Violent Femme Gordon Gano

Gordon Gano is one of the few artists you can plausibly call the "voice of a generation." His adenoidal lamentations of sexual longing and teenage apathy made the Violent Femmes one of the 1980s' most popular bands. Hordes of pasty-faced postpunkers took up "Add It Up" as their great angst anthem, screaming along gleefully to Gano's plaintive cry of "Why can't I get just one fuck?" Gano recognized sweet youth for the bitter pill it was, and we loved him for it.

Twenty years later he's still at arm's length from the norm, possessing a healthy disdain of the conventional that has never been tainted by anything so base as nameless anger. Instead, Gano's music is shot through with youthful energy, outsider instrumentation and sly bemusement. His newest release, the soundtrack compilation Hitting the Ground (written for a film of the same name) is a wonderfully varied mix of moods, moving from country to folk to straight-up punk. An impressive roster of guest vocalists?PJ Harvey, John Cale, Frank Black, They Might Be Giants and Lou Reed, among others?gives voice to Gano's unique brand of rebellion.

So I had this incredibly surreal experience last winter where I went to Salt Lake City?

?that's always surreal.

Oh and it got weirder. I went to a monster truck rally, which is surreal enough, but at intermission they blasted music over these huge speakers while showing highlights of the trucks ramming into one another, all to the tune of "Blister in the Sun." And everyone in the place stood up and was dancing and singing along. All these suburban Middle Americans and their kids, singing along to "Blister in the Sun."

Well, we're big in Middle America. We do the farm tour, we're out there playing all across the country and getting a great response. Salt Lake loves us. A tour manager with like decades of experience once said, "Your band is like the first band ever to exist that actually likes to be and play in Salt Lake City. What's wrong with you? You actually like it." But you know, we'd go see the free organ concerts in the Tabernacle. But I guess not every rock band enjoys that sort of thing.

The experience was rather unsettling for me, because I had always identified that song with my preteen angst and my outsider esthetic.

Did you have to reevaluate your feelings for the song?

Well, in the end I just reevaluated myself. I guess I've been an elitist. Even the average Joe recognizes a good song when he hears it. It was actually rather endearing. So tell me how you got involved with this new soundtrack project.

There was a little musical I had written that was at the Knitting Factory and some friends of the filmmaker's were in it. He told me that he was a fan of my work with the Violent Femmes and he got me a script of the film he was working on. It began with the idea that I would write a theme song, "Hitting the Ground," then maybe a song for the middle and then a song for the end credits, you know, a reprise, and do scoring and write some instrumentals. I did that, which was an interesting experience. Then the director kept seeing places where songs would work and I thought what the hell. I enjoyed the process. There's a song called "Run," where a lot of people are running. It got to be that loose with the themes. I just wrote the best songs that I could, but it's all background music and not necessarily tied directly to what was happening in the script.

That's a really different process for you, working off other people's material rather than starting from scratch?

I'm not sure when it changed for me, where prior, when I was writing songs as a teenager and from there, songs would have to be inspired by something I was thinking about and working on myself. I would have been not only hesitant, I would have rebelled against working on something that was another person's work. But then at a certain point I started to enjoy that sort of thing and I still do. You know, this is the task, and steer it this way or that way. Then again, the songs stand apart from the film as their own thing. It was nice to have a specific task and reason to, say, write a Christmas song. Before this, I was in the loop for writing some songs for cartoons and I really enjoyed that too, although every one of them was rejected. But I still thought it was great, because it was so specific. "Here's the script, here's the mood, here's the plot and character and now write the song in two days." I was very happy with what I did, even though none of them made it. But hey, maybe it was politics or maybe somebody didn't agree with my take on these songs.

Were they subversive or something?

Oh no, of course not! They were nice. They were geared toward kids, but adults would have liked them too. Ah well. But that was a time when I realized I could write for something specific and actually like it. So even though I got rejected it was still a good thing.

And I imagine writing songs for your musical was a similar experience, having to write for specific tones and moods.

Yeah, and I really enjoyed that. I grew up hearing musicals all the time?my parents were and still are involved in theater, and my mother had been on Broadway in a musical. They both acted, and my father directed musicals in the community theater. So I grew up hearing like mid- to late-60s stuff, and still one of my all-time favorites is Man of La Mancha. For some reason I really related to that as a five-year-old?my mother said I could sing it from start to finish. I still go to see things on Broadway, things that are huge, successful musicals, but to me they're extremely flawed. A lot of the big musicals of the last 10 years don't do anything for me.

You seem to have found quite a lot of people willing to be involved with this soundtrack. Were you writing the songs with those particular vocalists in mind?

No, but with one exception. I was just writing the songs to be writing the songs, some of the choices weren't even made between male or female vocalists. I was writing the songs not knowing if maybe I would be singing them. Except for the John Cale song, which I wrote on a piano, making my attempt to write in his style. That was how I was approaching writing it, and the unbelievably fantastic thing was to ultimately have him do the song for real and to do it much better than my poor facsimile of John Cale playing the song. So that worked perfectly. I knew what I was attempting with that one.

I'm surprised to hear you didn't write specifically for the vocalists, because it's eerie how perfectly the songs suit them.

I know. I feel like if you like what these vocalists do, it makes sense that they're doing these songs. What's weird wis that there were other people asked and some, always politely, but some said no thank-you. And I'm so glad they did, because with everybody that's involved it's like?how could it be anybody else?

Maybe you should send thank-you notes to everybody who said no.

Exactly. "Thank you for not participating." But that would be rather cheeky, wouldn't it? It would seem like a chip on the shoulder or something, but it's really sincere. I'm very, very happy for every person that said no thank-you.

And the Violent Femmes are touring this fall?

Looks like it. We have to keep the folks in Salt Lake happy, after all.

Gordon Gano and special guests play Thurs., Sept. 26, at Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 533-2111.