A moment came in the early 1980s when Victor DeLorenzo, drummer for the Milwaukee folk-punk band Violent Femmes, smacked his snare twice, then double-struck again.
You know this beat. You’ve heard it in baseball stadiums, basketball arenas. You’ve heard it in bars, while driving, in TV commercials, in the 1997 John Cusack hit-man comedy Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s one of the most recognizable drumbeats in rock and roll history. All it takes is a few seconds of “Blister in the Sun,” opening track on the band’s 1983 platinum-selling debut album, and you can fire up thousands of people in a crowd.
Thirty years after “Blister” was released, DeLorenzo watched 65,000 Femmes fans in the desert at Coachella sing along and air-drum to this rollicking classic, with... Read More