1986 Songs: I Held Her in My Arms

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it’s quite interesting how “six degrees” things can be. If you watched yesterday’s 1986 video for “Guitars, Cadillacs” by Dwight Yoakam, you might have seen a marquee with today’s featured act on it. A weird combination, but here they are on back-to-back days as well as that marquee. Let’s go back 40 years for another song that you’ve never heard. I Held Her in My Arms - Violent Femmes First, a warning: the video might make you dizzy. It’s very disjointed, so you might want to listen and not watch. (I picked the video because it’s a different mix of the song than what appeared on the album.) Then the name. There are no women in the band and no violent people. But heck, with all the good punk names taken by 1982, what do you do? And truthfully, the Femmes aren’t all that punk. Their cover of “Children of the Revolution” on this album was pretty stomping compared to the T Rex original, but they had gospel songs and country songs and R&B flavor to things. Their first album was the first and, to date, only album to be certified platinum for a million sales without EVER making the Billboard “top 200” album chart. How’d they do that? Word of mouth, just like I learned about them. Back then, I thought this album was pretty lame. Compared to the sparse production of their first two albums, I thought Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads (who produced them because both Harrison and the Femmes are from Milwaukee) WAYYYYYY overproduced this album. That’s what 40 years of reflection will do. I really like it now. So if you go back and see that glimpse of the marquee with the Violent Femmes AND Dwight Yoakam on it in Yoakam’s video, you’ll see that I’m weird, but I wasn’t the only one back then. I Held Her in My Arms Written by Gordon Gano Recorded by Violent Femmes From The Blind Leading the Naked, 1986 Or if I just wanted to: