Talk:Violent Femmes

message: At one point, the article said, Gordon Gano, Brian Ritchie, and Victor DeLorenzo founded the group and were discovered by James Honeyman-Scott (of The Pretenders) when the band was playing on a street corner in front of the Milwaukee venue that The Pretenders would be playing later that night. Honeyman-Scott heard the Femmes play and brought his band out to hear them. The Femmes were then invited in, to open for the Pretenders. Here's a passage from the Violent Femmes bio on their website: The hometown Milwaukee audience received the Femmes with unanimous booing. However by the end of the set the Femmes had converted approximately 50% of the audience to their cause. Many years later Brian Ritchie encountered Hynde when the Femmes and Pretenders shared the bill at a radio concert. She said, "Oh, you’re still around." This discovery, by the Pretenders, gave a boost to their local reknown, but really didn't give them their big break. It was the release of the album that they'd shopped around, that broke them. For this reason, I added the parenthetical "and subsequently forgotten" to the aforementioned paragraph. I felt it was important to note that it wasn't their discovery by Honeyman-Scott that launched them to stardom, and also that they were, in fact, forgotten by The Pretenders.
--Freekee 05:12, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The Pretenders

message: Can I just ask (out of curiousity), if I'm not understanding something, when this article says that "The debut album went platinum 10 years after its release, the only album ever to achieve platinum status without ever charting in the Billboard Top 200.", when the article about the album says that it charted at 171 on the Billboard 200? Insipid 19:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's definitely a contradiction. I think someone's going to have to do a little Billboard research. -Freekee 03:23, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Question

message: A comments section has been added. BNutzer 07:09, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Why did you create a subpage? This page is already for discussion about the article. -Freekee 15:53, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Okay, I"m moving the comment from there to here, and having the page deleted. -Freekee 04:02, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Talk:Violent_Femmes/Comments]]

message: I gave this article a "Start" rating on the scale because it really needs a better lead paragraph and some pictures would be fantastic. Feel free to change the rating after this is done. 
--Thereen 01:07, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Rating

message: Can anyone put any information on the time they appeared on an episode of the TV show Step by Step and performed "Please do not go"? I remember seeing this but I'm having a hard time verifying this. 06:58, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I doubt if they did. There are several places where the band lists it's TV appearances, and I've never seen that one listed. Do you think they appeared as the Violent Femmes, or was it just them members? -Freekee 03:58, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Step by Step appearance?

message: I saw them at Big Day Out just a week ago (got Brian Ritchie's pick, **joy**), and a friend got a picture of them that should do just fine. He's willing to release it into the public domain, so I'll get him to upload it in a few days with any luck. Cheers. ~Switch t 15:18, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Great!  Jkelly 17:38, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

text: I just got home from their concert in Brisbane tonight and I've put some photos up on my flickr account. Not great quality, but there's a good one of Gordon. I don't really know what the deal is with putting them up, but if anyone wants to put them up for me (or just take a look) they're here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/happy_endings/tags/violentfemmes/ —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 138.130.197.108 (talk) 14:50, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image 

message: Blister in the sun is used in new wendys commercials I guess that should be added on trivia —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.143.200.199 (talk) 02:09, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: An item should never go in the trivia section when it can be added to the text. And this one is already in the History section. -Freekee 04:56, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wendy's Commerical? 

message: Thanks to Frog47 for setting up a discography page for the Femmes. I added studio albums back to the discog section on this article, because I like to have the most basic info there, rather than making people click to another article. That other article, of course, would have the most detailed info. -Freekee 03:37, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discography page 

message: According to the liner notes on the Rhino reissue of Violent Femmes,  it was released in January of 1983. Currently this article lists a November 1982 date. Can someone tell us where that date came from? -Freekee 03:23, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Debut album release date 

message: Could we please stop changing the tense? I realize that almost all of the changes since our big discussion of early last year, have been made by IPs, but I'm going to say it anyway... knock it off! Is/was is not wrong. It sounds kind of dumb, though. So do not be a grammar nazi and change it back. There is broad acceptance of are/were. To forestall further debate, I have suggested that if one uses the proper form "Violent Femmes" (that is, without the "the"), is/was is fine. And if you add the "the" on the beginning (like many people do, including the bandmembers themselves), are/were is acceptable. This policy seems to have been accepted by Wiki editors since that earlier discussion. Changing the article without first discussing it here will be considered edit warring and be reverted. I hate to sound like a jerk about it, but if I don't, it's going to change every few weeks, until people get tired of it, at which point an all-out edit war will begin. Please, let's not go there. -Freekee 03:13, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Freekee. Are/were is the most universally accepted. "Violent Femmes" without "The" is accurate. LightHouseEffect (talk) 22:34, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: is/are

message: I'm moving the Popular Culture section to the talk page since its mostly trivia.  Please feel free to add things back to the article in a manner that conforms with WP:TRIV.  Here it is:
* The song "Good Feeling" was used in the 1987 B-movie soundtrack of I Was a Teenage Zombie.
*They have been featured as themselves in one episode of the TV show Sabrina, the Teenage Witch: Libby was infatuated with Gordon Gano, and concocted a scheme, a sort of love spell, to win his affections. While under the spell, Gordon serenades Libby with the song "Please Do Not Go", claiming that he wrote the song for her before he even knew she existed.
* In 1991, author Audrey Niffenegger attended a Violent Femmes concert at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. She later incorporated this concert into an episode in her novel, The Time Traveler's Wife. It was at this concert that the ballroom floor collapsed during the Femmes' performance.
* In Juliana Hatfield's 1993 hit song "My Sister", the lyrics included a line sung by the song's protagonist that his/her sister was "the one who would have taken me to my first all-ages show/It was the Violent Femmes and the The Del Fuegos..." Shows of this nature were not uncommon in Boston clubs in the mid-1980s, so it is possible that Hatfield (who would have been in her mid-to-late teens at that time, and who lived in the Boston suburbs) in fact attended such a show.
* In the 1994 TV show My So-Called Life, Angela danced to "Blister in the Sun" in the 17th episode Betrayal.
* In 1994, the song "Color Me Once" was featured in the soundtrack for The Crow.
* In 1996, the band made a guest appearance on the Elliott Murphy album Selling the Gold. Murphy wrote the liner notes for Add It Up (1981-1993).
* The song "Good Feeling" is referred to on the TV show How I Met Your Mother as the "song" of Marshall and Lily. In the episode "Best Prom Ever", the group travels to a high school prom to watch The 88 perform "Good Feeling" after hiring them as the wedding band.
* The songs "Blister in the Sun" and "Blister 2000" were featured in the 1997 John Cusack movie Grosse Pointe Blank as well as Volume 1 of the soundtrack. "Blister 2000" was recorded specifically for the soundtrack.
* The song "Add It Up" was covered by Ethan Hawke in the 1994 film Reality Bites.
* In 1999, their version of I Swear (I Can Change) was featured on the soundtrack for South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.
* In 2004, Their song "Fat" was used in the movie Super Size Me.
* On May 2, 2005, "Blister in the Sun" became the first English-language song ever played on the Irish-language RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta radio station.
* In 2006, "American Music" was featured in the snowboarding film City, Park City.
* In the 2007 film Rocket Science, several Violent Femmes songs were played by a couple, on piano and cello.
* In the 2007 independent film Glue, the main character Lucas and his friend "Nacho" are both fans of the band, listening to their music throughout the film. In Lucas' bedroom there is a life-sized poster of the Violent Femmes.
* In 2008, "Blister in the Sun" was used in the trailer for the Greg Mottola comedy Adventureland.
* The song "Add It Up" is used in the 2008 film Surveillance.
Gobonobo T C 19:54, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moving Trivia Section to Talk Page 

message: The way I always heard it, the Violent Femmes were from Waukesha.  No sources are given in the article for the bits that speak of them as from Milwaukee, but I could easily see, given the geography and cultural dynamics of the area, that a punk band from Waukesha would be doing most of their shows in Milwaukee.  Am I crazy here? —chaos5023 (talk) 00:31, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Now that you mention it, I seem to recall hearing Waukesha a lot. But the band page says, "originally formed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin." I know they got their start on the streets and in the coffeehouses and clubs of Milwaukee. "Gano was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated from Rufus King High School." DeLorenzo "grew up in Racine, Wisconsin and has lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, since." -Freekee (talk) 02:59, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Milwaukee or Waukesha? 

message: I was researching the release date of REM's Murmur, when I came across this article that included an account of how Violent Femmes formed.  I'm not asserting the story's authenticity.  I just think it stands in opposition to what the main article states, and it's an interesting story to boot.  I am excerpting (untouched) the article as I found it in Access World News:
:"R.E.M .'S ROCK 'N' ROLL IS RAISING EYEBROWS
:Lexington Herald-Leader (KY) - Monday, July 11, 1983
:Author: Gary Graff Knight-Ridder News Service
:
:..."Speaking of bizarre origins, how about those Violent Femmes?
:
:Songwriter Gordon Gano, 19, met bassist Brian Ritchie the night before Gano was to perform in front of the National Honor Society at his Milwaukee high school. The guitarist-songwriter asked Ritchie to accompany him; Gano dressed in a three-piece suit, Ritchie, now 23, sported torn jeans.
:
:When they arrived at the 9 a.m. assembly, officials told Gano not to play Give Me the Car," an upbeat and slightly lewd song.
:
:So we worked out ahead of time that the first eight bars would be one of my real laid-back songs," recalled Ganos. And then we'd go into O'Give Me the Car.' The place exploded, like for the Beatles, the Who. They threw me out of the Honor Society, and some teachers didn't want me to graduate."
:
:A diploma doesn't really fit Gano's current ambitions, anyway. He and Ritchie found seasoned drummer Victor DeLorenzo, 28, and word-of-mouth brought the Violent Femmes' a plethora of grass roots support."
alainsane (talk) 18:04, 17 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Group origin story from July 11, 1983 

message: How do you pronounce “Femmes“? Judith Holofernes of “Wir sind Helden“ just claimed on	Deutschlandfunk that the French pronunciation “Fam“ (my German phonetic spelling, maybe “Fum“ in English) is wrong and that it should be pronounced “Fems“.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.114.135.39 (talk) 09:44, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation of “Femmes“ 

message: Substituted at 10:00, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: These stripey charts obviously don't work. Really, I have to decode this puzzle to see what Brian Ritchie does? Does that stripe have three colors in it, or two? And the middle one is the dark tan not the light tan? And only two of the five colors are ever reused? And it's intuitive to have "lead vocals, violin, banjo" as a category? And why are some colors but not others duplicated in a person's stripe like a sandwich? And why are some stripes thinner than others? Does that signify something? How many problems does a graphic conceit have to have before we chuck it? Five? Ten? When the legend is almost as big as the chart it's a sign of trouble. Why not just say what they do, especially since it never changes, and the last four guys are all the same? This really is like an illustration in an Ed Tufte book of how not to make a chart. I'm not being snarky but just literal when I say that I filed a copy of this as an example for teaching cartography. (Sorry if I'm supposed to say this somewhere else.)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.117.48.13 (talk) 14:26, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stripey charts