FEMMES FIND A WAY TO SPREAD THEIR MESSAGE

The first gig that the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano ever played with bassist Brian Ritchie had the air of history in the making, even though the band’s bizarre moniker hadn’t been picked yet.

It was a morning assembly at Rufus King High School in Milwaukee to present awards for the National Honor Society. Gano--a Homecoming King, son of a Baptist minister and NHS honoree that day--asked Ritchie, whom he’d met the night before at a punk club, to accompany him on a song called “Give Me the Car.”

Even though Gano left blanks where some of the tune’s most profane sentiments should’ve been, not even the worst English student in the school needed to consult a rhyming dictionary to figure out just what Gano was talking about.

His involuntary departure from the Honor Society was swift.

You’d think a smart kid like Gano would’ve learned from experience, but noooooo .

Formed not long after the assembly concert, the Violent Femmes, with drummer Victor DeLorenzo, managed to have themselves ostracized from virtually every significant club in Milwaukee.

The trio was literally playing on the street one day when Chrissie Hynde and the late James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders happened upon the scene and asked the Femmes to open their show that night. Subsequent touring and a contract with Los Angeles’ maverick Slash Records soon brought the band a small but loyal cult following of national dimensions.

Reviews leaned toward raves, but sales were slim on the first two albums. Gano’s often exaggeratedly neurotic--and in some cases, psychotic--stance put off many who weren’t quite sure what level of sincerity or sanity he was working on.

“Particularly during the live shows, it’s not always one song is serious and the next one is purely ironic,” warns Gano.

“A song like ‘Black Girls’ is a good example of seriousness and extreme sarcasm. Sometimes both will be in the same line or same phrase, and one night I’ll feel serious about it and the next night I’ll feel like it’s really ridiculous.”

Rock fans are apparently beginning to get the Femmes’ message.

The trio’s third LP, “The Blind Leading the Naked,” recently climbed all the way up to No. 84 on Billboard magazine’s national sales chart--and the group is moving up on the box-office meter as well, headlining Friday at the Hollywood Palladium and next Sunday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

This encouraging growth doesn’t mean the album is in any danger of going platinum soon.

Still, the success is remarkable in many ways.

Here’s a band that doesn’t have a hit video.

Or a hit single.

Or any single at all, for that matter.

Commercial radio, which has shunned the Femmes, tends to get scared off by little things like the group’s misleading name, the raw and sometimes abrasive sound, and the confrontational lyrics--which tend to dwell quite often in the messy areas of sex, violence and religion.

But the band has found a home on college radio.

“Naked”--in which the Femmes and producer Jerry Harrison (of Talking Heads) have stirred bluegrass, folk, punk and Eastern sounds in with the band’s Lou Reed-derived style--has been the No. 1 record in the college market for over a month.

Still, Gano doesn’t want to wax too enthusiastic about the band’s unexpected commercial upswing: “Right now we may be playing larger places. . . . But it’s not incomprehensible at all for me to think of a year from now maybe playing back in a club for 500 people,” he said. “You never know how things are gonna go, and I don’t think you can get too absorbed with just thinking of success in terms of numbers of people. That can be a real dangerous trap.”

If Gano ever were to set his mind on numbers, it might mean an end to the sorts of songs he so carefreely pens and sings now--songs about teens looking for instant sexual gratification . . . about corrupt police and politicos . . . about fathers who murder their daughters . . . and about Jesus.

The agitated Southern Gothic textures of “Hallowed Ground,” the Femmes’ second album, led many fans to believe that Gano was rarely (if ever) on the level.

Two bluegrass songs of salvation received the same sort of scrutiny as his graphic tales of ruination. Numerous reviews echoed the words of a highly complimentary reviewer for the UCLA Daily Bruin, who enthused at the time: “Rather than resort to theistic hope, the group ridicules religion in ‘Jesus Walking on the Water,’ a satiric singalong gospel number complete with sour violin.”

The only thing was, no ridicule was intended.

Recalled Gano, “I remember when we went to England just after that album had come out, and most journalists that were talking with us would be congratulating us on our wonderful tongue-in-cheek humor in songs like ‘Jesus Walking on the Water’ and ‘It’s Gonna Rain’--that great, real dry sarcasm. They were disappointed when we had to correct them.”

Gano still clings to the faith he grew up in, and in fact occasionally leads a gospel group on the side called the Mercy Seat. His incorporation of overtly spiritually themed songs into the Violent Femmes, meanwhile, has brought about conflicts with the other two band members: Ritchie is frequently quoted in interviews antagonizing Gano and blaming the world’s problems on religion.

“Very early on in our playing together,” Gano explained, “I was informed by one of the gentlemen in the band that they didn’t want to do any gospel--or songs that had something to do with Christianity--because they were so opposed to it they didn’t even want to be on stage having any connection with it, even if they weren’t singing. And at that point, I felt, ‘Well, that’s all right with me; the song’ll be done another place, another time, it’s no big thing.’

“And then a year or two later--speaking of irony--that same band member says, ‘Well, let’s do your gospel songs--they’re your best songs.’ And by then I didn’t want to do it, because I started to feel like people would misinterpret it, and it is sincere. In the context of the other songs we were doing, I just couldn’t see it.”

Gano’s now glad he relented and agreed to the demands of the non-believers in the group to do gospel songs again.

“I’ve never regretted that. If some people misunderstand it, fine. I think it’s important to do songs like that and do ‘em sincerely in a context where people would never expect it.”

No doubt about it, Gano’s eccentric collision of sensibilities places him not only outside of the musical mainstream but the religious and political mainstreams as well. However genial he might normally be, Gano is not the kind of guy apt to be pleased when his faith causes people to automatically brand certain expectations onto him that. . . .

“Actually, you made a pun there when you said people are branding us,” he interrupted, “because People magazine just recently said that the band is all born-again Christians, implying that the lyrics aren’t quite as dirty on the new record or something like that because we’re all born again--which is just really way off.

“People hear ‘Christian’ and in the media context get a certain idea of what that’s supposed to mean. . . . Somebody has said, ‘I don’t understand--you do a song that sounds like you’re anti-Reagan, and then you do another song that sounds like you’re pro-Christian! How can you be both?’ ” At this, Gano cracked up. “I have sympathy for that, but I guess I also have sorrow for that attitude, and other times I can start to feel angry about it.”