PERMANENT VACANCY

AT THE HOTEL LAST RESORT, EVERYBODY IS WELCOME AND NOBODY CAN LEAVE. AHEAD OF THEIR LONG-AWAITED RETURN TO AUSSIE SHORES, VIOLENT FEMMES RINGLEADER GORDON GANO CHECKS US IN FOR A “VISIT”. WORDS BY AVERY JACOBS.

After a storied 40 years of world domination, you’d forgive the Violent Femmes for taking it easy nowadays – preferring to tend to their crops and focus on planning their next family vacation, rather that continue to smash out crash-hot folk-punk opuses and rip it up onstage the world over...

Wait... What’s that? We’ve got the wrong band?

The seminal foursome of fury are still going as hard as they did when “Blister In The Sun” was making the airwaves its little bitch!? Huh!

Okay, so Gordon Gano and co. aren’t the spry youngsters they were in the late ‘90s – they can’t scale amp stacks like monkeys or stagedive into the abyss – but if their tenth album, HotelLastResort, tells us anything, it’s that the Milwaukee monoliths still know how to write a gem of a tune. Before they take their new set of them to local stages in March, we spoke to Gano about what makes HotelLast

Resort a must-suss for any frother of the Femmes.

Here we are: album number ten! Does it feel like this enormous milestone for you?

I like when people mention it, because it makes it seem like this band really did exist. We really did do something, y’know? We made some music over a stretch of time, and we’re still doing it! I think that’s very cool.

Did you ever forsee the band not only reaching its tenth album, but retaining the legacy and relevancy that it has?

Nope! There were different periods of time – first in the mid 1980s, and then again in the late 2000s – when I was certain that the group was over and done with. And then we got over ourselves and started back up again, and it’s always been exhilarating. We’ve had our ups and downs, obviously, but it’s always been the music that got us back together. There’s something special that happens when myself and Brian Richie get into a room together. There have been a few different drummers over the years, but there’s still that recognisable sound when the three of us are playing music together.

How is this album the best reflection of what the Violent Femmes are, and mean, and stand for as a band in 2019?

To be honest, I don’t think about those things. I think Brian might – he thinks more about those kinds of things than I do. I’m always interested in just making the best music that we can in the moment. I don’t know what Brian would say about it, but we used the approach that we’ve almost always used, which is primarily recording live. We think there’s something special that happens when you’re recording like that, with musicians playing off of each other – like we do – consciously and not consciously. We’re always making adjustments in the moment because of what somebody else is doing. We’re constantly evolving. But we’re not purists about it in the studio; we’ll make use of some aspects from one recording and then overdub something from another.

What sorts of tones and styles did you want to explore on HotelLastResort?

I think we wanted to have a little bit of variety between the guitars – even just the simple variety between playing with an electric guitar or an acoustic. And then even the acoustics, I use some different ones just because certain guitars seem to speak better for certain songs, or they’d work better with the way that I was playing. Sometimes I’m using more fingers or focusing on individual notes, and sometimes I want more of that full-on, hard strumming.

So depending on where on the neck I’m playing, or what other people in the band are playing, or what sort of tone I was thinking about… There are so many factors that determine why something fits or sounds better. And that process begins in the studio by having an idea of which guitar you want to start with. Maybe you’ll stay with that one, or maybe you’ll flip it and say, “Okay, how about thisone instead?” And you keep moving through the cycle until you find the guitar that feels right for that song. There were some times [in recording HotelLastResort] where I’d be playing an acoustic guitar, and then at a certain point in the recording, I had this sudden feeling of, “Hold on, I think I should play electric here.” And then we’d switch it. I tend to like that little bit of variety.

But I’ve gotta say, the thing I’m most excited about with the guitars doesn’t have to do with me. It just has to be mentioned that Tom Verlaine [of Television] is playing electric guitar on the track “Hotel Last Resort”. He’s one of my – and I know also one of Brian’s – favourite guitar players. And to have him on that song, the way he’s playing and the sound he’s making… It just had to be Tom Verlaine doing it. And it is! He’s been an inspiration of ours since Brian and I were teenagers, and now he’s playing with us on a track. It’s unbelievable.

Did you have a favourite guitar to mess around on out of the arsenal?

Our studio engineer had a bunch of old Martins, and those were oh so much fun to play with. We’ve always used Maton guitars – the Australian ones, of course – throughout all the years. And they’re great; y’know, they’ve a great company that makes great guitars. It’s kind of hard for me to single out one guitar. I have a Maybelle guitar from the ‘30s, which is really fun and interesting and old-timey sounding… I can’t pick! There’s too many!