Blister in the Sun

Summer Hard Week 7

My childhood friend called a few months ago and said, “Let’s get tickets to see the Violent Femmes,” and I immediately said yes. This is a band that is forty-five years old, still touring, and still singing teen anthems about being young, stupid, and wanting.

Whatever happens to you in your teenage years, the good, the bad, and the ugly, leaves an indelible scar. There is no other time in your life when you are so hopped up on feelings, your body so flooded with hormones and static, riding the waves of sadness and joy like it’s the most normal thing. Everything at that age is about possibility and sex, or the possibility of sex, but mostly about possibility. You have only a vague idea that everything is still in front of you, that nothing is decided, and somehow you know you can get there if you could just get out of wherever it is you were.

When I was a freshman in high school, an older, cooler punk-rock girl took pity on me and let me stow away in her Volkswagen Bug so I could skip school with her and her crew. Leaving campus as an underclassman was verboten, and I held my breath while lying on the floorboards as we passed through the gates and onto the open road. We’d crank the windows down and light cigarettes, and she’d slide a cassette into the deck, which was often blaring "Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes through tinny speakers mounted in the hollow doors. We set off for somewhere mysterious, like Hermosa Beach and Aardvarks, the thrift and alternative clothing shop where we’d stand in front of the shoe wall, coveting thick-soled creepers shipped in from England or a new pair of eight-eye Doc Martens boots.

I didn’t own the album when I first heard it, so I had never seen the lyrics printed anywhere. This was the analog age, with no way to look anything up, so we just sang along to whatever we thought 18-year-old Gordon Gano was singing, most of it probably wrong, but it didn’t matter. I would print the lyrics here, but they would make little sense. There are many interpretations of the song's meaning, but I don’t think it matters much. To me, that song held the promise of an LA summer that was soon to come, with girls at Rat Beach, blistering in the sun, in the days before sunblock.

The Violent Femmes were not an LA band. They were three guys from Milwaukee who were discovered busking on a street corner outside the Oriental Theatre in 1981, where the Pretenders were playing that night. The band heard them and invited them to play a short acoustic set. That set was enough to get them signed to the iconic punk label Slash Records in Los Angeles, which released their generation-defining eponymous album in 1983.

There is a haunting image of a little girl on the album cover, taken in Laurel Canyon. She wears a flowing ivory dress and is pressed against weathered white shutters, peering through a windowpane. It feels like an old family photograph forgotten in a drawer, and it has always felt like a memory that didn’t really belong to me.

The band was never destined to fill arenas. Their folk-punk sound was distinctly niche, appealing more to those of us who lived out near the edge than to the rest of our peers. But LA radio station KROQ made “Blister in the Sun” an LA anthem throughout the 1980s. The station had changed its identity around 1979, adopting a music style that eventually became “alternative.” But in the early 80s, it leaned heavily into Post-Punk and New Wave, and the Femmes fell somewhere in between.

This is how I found myself at the Bellwether on a Friday night, looking across the Harbor Freeway at the emptying buildings of Downtown Los Angeles. The Bellwether was once a nightclub called Vertigo, and before that, it was Prince’s club, Glam Slam West, with purple-carpeted walls and his love symbol embedded in the dance floor.

Somewhere in the middle of the set, my friend leaned over and reminded me that we used to sit in my parents’ living room, watching new wave videos, including the first music shown on MTV, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and even back then we’d listened to the Violent Femmes together. I hadn’t thought about that in years. Shared memories are strange mirrors someone holds up to you. They validate the history that lives mostly in your head and make our childhood friendships so important.

They played their debut album front to back that night, every song, and something like fifteen hundred people, mostly Gen Xers like me, sang along to every word as if it were still 1983. The songs range from a teenage anthem to aggressive angst. “Kiss Off” is a list of every grievance a teenager might have, daring the world to challenge him. The songs tip further into the dark with “Add It Up,” a transgressive song that still catches me off guard because it was written by a filter-free teenager.

Gordon Gano was eighteen when he wrote nearly every song on that album. Around the same age we were, when we rode around in that Volkswagen Bug. I never spoke again with the girl who made me feel like I belonged in those heady days, but I am grateful for her. Some memories belong only to us and to our interpretation of them.

But other memories carry us forward, especially when someone still stands at the other end of them. I am grateful to my friend for remembering and spending a couple of hours in a room that once belonged to Prince. We were both fifteen again, singing along to our scars.

xAP