THE DEPTH OF THE VIOLENT FEMMES:

Yeah, yeah, minister (Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 2002)

In 1979, when Gordon Gano was 15 years old, he got on a plane. He'd never done that before. He travelled from his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Los Angeles. He'd never been there before. He was booked into a nice hotel. He'd never stayed in one before. He ordered a hamburger from room service and was taken aback when it came with a flower on the tray. And then he was summoned to another room where he shook hands with a sandy-haired man he had seen in a few movies. The man's name was Robert Redford, and Gano was auditioning for the role of the suicidal teenager in Ordinary People.

"I remember Robert Redford asked me, 'What do you want to do with your life?' And I'm thinking, well, if somebody's at the point where they're auditioning for Robert Redford, they're going to say, 'I want to act in movies, maybe yours, right now.' But I'd been writing all these songs, so I said, 'Well, I like acting, but what I really want to do is play music and make records and tour."

A guy called Timothy Hutton got the part. He won an Academy Award for it. Redford may be interested to know that the kid who missed out went on to fulfil his own ambition.

Gano was not your average teenager. For a few months in high school, he would turn up every Monday morning wearing a bath robe, just for the hell of it. At one school ceremony, where students were asked to perform on stage, Gano decided to play guitar and sing his own composition, entitled Gimme the Car. By the time he got out the lines "I'm gonna pick her up, I'm gonna get her drunk, I'm gonna make her cry, I'm gonna get her high," Gano found himself suspended from attending classes.

If the teachers had listened more closely to a line further along in the song, they may have understood the pint-sized teenager a little better. The line went like this: "How do I explain personal pain?" That's the question Gano's been trying to answer for more than 20 years with the Violent Femmes.

Don't you really need to move past teen angst when you're pushing forty? Posted by Stephen Judd at January 17, 2003 7:27 PM