In a special interview for the 40th anniversary of the "Violent Femmes" album, bassist and band co-founder Brian Ritchie joined host Kenneth Womack to talk Beatles and more on a bonus episode of “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Violent Femmes, the folk-punk rockers behind such songs as “Blister in the Sun” and “Add it Up,” started out playing coffee houses and busking on the streets of Milwaukee, where in 1981 they got their big break by being asked to open for the Pretenders. Years prior, though, Ritchie was growing up playing jazz and acoustic guitar in a family that thought his interest in music was just “a weird hobby.”
