Unlikely platinum albums don’t come any more unlikely than the Violent Femmes’ self-titled debut: The trio hailed from a city with no national profile (Milwaukee), had a lead songwriter still in his teens, and played acoustic instruments in an era of punk guitars and New Wave synths. But their snappy songs, inspired by alt-rock misfits like Jonathan Richman and suffused with emotional (especially sexual) despair, gradually found an audience. Today, as drummer-novelist Brown notes in this book’s introduction, the opening riff of “Blister in the Sun” is a clap-along staple at baseball games. The chief virtue of Brown’s study—part of the “33 ⅓” series of short books on classic albums—is that it recovers the strangeness of the album’s creation and conception. With little cash or scene credibility, the band couldn’t have recorded the album without a $10,000 loan from drummer Victor DeLorenzo’s father; DeLorenzo’s kit was a spartan contraption featuring a “tranceaphone,” a floor tom capped with a metal bushel basket; unlike most guitar albums, Brian Ritchie’s bass usually delivers the melody line; they scored a gig opening for the Pretenders just by busking outside the venue; their record label rejected them at first but changed its tune after staffers kept playing their tape in the office. Frontman Gordon Gano is hard-pressed to explain the genesis and meaning of the album’s now-iconic lyrics—what does it mean to blister in the sun, anyhow?—but his pleading voice connected with young fans who shared cassette dubs of the album like samizdat. Brown is an unabashed fan—the book closes with him giddily meeting Gano at an Atlanta concert—but it’s the just-the-facts nature of his reportage that best serves the book because the facts are fittingly offbeat.