My Violent Femmes Story

I saw this article in the news about one member of the Violent Femmes suing another, and it gives me a chance to blog my own personal Violent Femmes story.

When I was in college in the early 90’s, my wife (then girlfriend) and some friends (all of them dreadful losers of ambiguous sexual identity, not that there’s anything wrong with that) went to a Violent Femmes concert. I was far and away the squarest person there, and I am surprised to this day that nobody yelled “NARC!” at me while I was there.

During the song “Blister in the Sun” the drummer embarked on a fifteen-minute solo that featured him dropping bells onto the snare drum and whacking the side of the damned thing with what looked like a bamboo penis. I got so bored that I entered a trance-like state from secondhand marijuana smoke where I voyaged across space and time to contact the soul of Beethoven, who told me that he was glad he was deaf so he didn’t have to listen to that crap.

After the concert, we met back up with the losers (including one straight out of Single White Female who perfectly emulated her roommates, down to hair color and boyfriend’s name…really). I mentioned that “the dropping bells on the drum thing was fifteen minutes of my life flushed down the cosmic toilet of wasted time.” My wife agreed with me.

“No way, man, it was deep,” said androgynous girl, a suspected hallucinogen-user.

“Yeah, it really made me think,” said the transvestite. “It’s like music for your soul.”

“You’re way wrong,” said the roommate stalker. “It was deep.”

My buddy, who was typically the sanest one of the bunch (but he later left college to go find himself and ended up working at Pizza Hut, so you make the call about that), looked at me like I had three heads. “That’s real music, man. Didn’t you feel the music?”

That was the exact moment I realized I needed new friends.