Violent Femmes “Add It Up”

Hitting Random on the iTunes list . . .

I was recently back in my hometown, to attend a dinner thrown in honor of, among other folks, my Dad.

He was being inducted in the Newburyport High School Sports Wall Of Fame, for his over 30 years of coaching basketball and baseball. And in the course of the days leading up to this event, I had lots of funny flashbacks to those many, many years of high school sports.

I started going to my Dad’s practices when I was in the third grade. I’d run the sprints and shoot the free throws and collected the baseballs. By 6th grade, I was running drills with the team, and even taking batting practice against High School players.

I entered High School as not necessarily the best athlete, but certainly one of the best trained players in the school. So I found my place on teams, and though socially awkward, comfortably knew the rhythms of the gym and the locker room and the nomadic, tribal nature of a traveling team.

I remember being on a bus, going somewhere, to some game, in some time, on some dark winter evening. We always had the cheerleaders with us in those days. And while I was deadly serious about basketball, there were those who (gasp!) found the whole adventure to be more of a social outing.

The girls always brought a boom box, and would bring the latest “cool” record on a home-taped cassette. And do I clearly remember hearing The Violent Femmes “Add It Up.”

My Dad is an old Rock N Roll guy. He loves Elvis and The Beatles. We had Dave Clark Five records and Buddy Holly on 45. So I know when that famous shuffle kicked in, he might have actually even tuned in to the groove the Femmes laid down.

But did he whip around from the front of the bus, when the song hit its famous refrain:

Why can’t I get, just one Fuck?
Why can’t I get, just one Fuck?

No need to explain the details---boom boxes were not welcome on the bus for the rest of the season.

Up until that point, all the music that I listened to, I listened to because that’s what my Dad liked. I didn’t have an older sibling who was bringing home the latest cool thing. We had Elvis and The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five and Buddy Holly, and up until that point, that was good enough for me.

But at age 14, on a bus crossing Cape Ann, I can pinpoint the moment where I realized that I wasn’t always going to like what my Dad liked, and he wasn’t always going to get what I Got.



See a live version of “Add It Up”

Buy the self-titled Violent Femmes album.