The iconic guitar lick that launches the Violent Femmes’ seminal single “Blister in the Sun” has been called a furious salvo, an urgent calling card for two generations of angsty teenagers – even the most identifiable opening riff in pop-music history.

Truth. “Twenty years ago, this huge chain of radio stations did all these tests to determine what song is recognized the fastest and liked the most,” said frontman Gordon Gano. “And No. 1, ahead of every other song in the history of rock and roll – was ‘Blister in the Sun.’”

Nine seconds, 32 picks and full-on music immortality. On the radio. In beer-soaked memories. At sporting events throughout the country.

Those first nine seconds of “Blister in the Sun” are the first nine seconds the Levitt Pavilion crowd will hear on Sunday when the Violent Femmes conclude their two-month nostalgia tour playing their entire debut album from start to finish. And, as all of us who pounded our fists against our basement bedroom walls while wearing headphones larger than Princess Leia’s human hairmuffs well knows, ”Blister in the Sun” is the first song on that now impossibly 40-year-old album.

“It’s still amazing to me that there are people, especially young people, who respond to that song and really like it, even without even knowing the band is Violent Femmes,” said Gano. (And no, he added, that oft-misunderstood song of stained sheets is not about masturbation.)

The lasting appeal of the band’s 1983 debut album, which also includes coming-of-age anthems “Kiss Off,” “Add it Up” and the xylophone-infused “Gone Daddy Gone,” lies in its utter, fierce, youthful honesty. Gano was only 19 when the record came out – meaning he wrote every song on it while he was still in high school back in Milwaukee.

“Until I graduated in 1981, my life was very much structured around school,” said Gano. “We started playing together that first summer out of high school, and I had a part-time job making submarine sandwiches. When I wasn’t working, all my focus was on music. I just had a real passion for writing more and more songs.”

Gano’s original post-graduation plan was to move to New York City, where he was born and lived until 6th grade. “I had an older brother living there, so much of the music that was attracting me at that time was punk rock from New York City,” he said. But then I started playing with (bassist) Brian Richie and Victor de Lorenzo (drums), and everything changed. We were really liking what we were doing, but we couldn’t get any place that would let us play. So we started playing out on the street, and nobody did that in Milwaukee at that time. It wasn’t until years later we found out there was a word for it called busking.”

The boys had nowhere to rehearse. No venues to play. No amps or mics. “But we did have such, I guess, egos,” Gano said with a laugh. “We were just convinced that we were good. Even when everybody would tell us that we weren’t. It didn’t shake us at all. The audience eventually found us, and I guess that’s why we’ve continued to do it for all these decades.”

About that remarkable debut record: Before recording a note, Gano already had written enough songs for two albums. That allowed the band to be smart and strategic about how they were going to be introduced to the world.

“Before we recorded anything, we already had worked out all the songs that are not just on our first album, but on our second album as well,” Gano said of the band’s remarkable follow-up, “Hallowed Ground.”

“It was Brian Ritchie who had the thought, ‘Let’s keep our first album rock, and hold off on all the songs that are more traditional American music, like country and folk and jazz and gospel, for the second record.” That means the untested band had and actually banked upcoming classics like “Country Death Song,” “Jesus Walking on the Water” and “Black Girls.”

“Brian said, ‘Let’s hold off on those for the second album,’” Gano said. “That focused our selection. And I think that that’s a huge part of the popularity of our first album.”

Talk about confidence. Where did that come from?

“We just believed from the start that we were going to make many albums, and that we were going to have a long, successful career,” Gano said. “Even though none of that had happened yet, we were just convinced it was going to be so.”

But the success the teen Femmes sought was not immediately realized. Their debut album did not achieve platinum status until eight years after it was released, making it the first record ever to go platinum in America without ever making the charts. Gano can’t even pinpoint the moment he realized that the band had actually made it.

“That was so gradual,” he said. “But there were a lot of little moments. I remember playing in a small club in Oregon on our first tour and realizing there were people at the show who were singing along to some of our songs. I thought, ‘How is this possible? We’ve never played here before.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, we have an album out and college radio is playing it a lot.’ That was my first sense that, wow, this is reaching people.”

Over the next two decades, the Femmes came to be known as the nerdy, super-cool face of folk punk rock, while Gano firmly established himself as one of the era’s best songwriters. There have been some bumps, notably a 2007 breakup (since settled) over Gano licensing “Blister in the Sun” for use in a Wendy’s commercial. It was the 30th anniversary of the debut record that brought them back together at Coachella.

Gano’s musical odyssey had often crisscrossed Colorado. It was around that 30th anniversary when Colorado’s Jen Korte started her own audacious Violent Femmes tribute band called The Dirty Femmes. When the band was booked to play the 2013 Underground Music Showcase at the Punch Bowl Social,  Gano not only showed up –he  joined in. Not as a singer, though. The band had that covered. He added some bonus fiddle.

“It was such an honor – and they’re also really good,” said Gano. It was so much fun, Gano invited the Dirty Femmes to open for the Violent Femmes a few years later at the Denver Botanic Gardens. He asked Korte to focus on Femmes songs that went deep in the catalog, “and it totally, absolutely worked,” he said.

Gano remembers coming through Denver on the band’s first tour in the early ’80s. Someone told Gano the one place he had to visit was the  Mercury Cafe. He sought it out, “and I just loved it,” he said. “Any chance I got, I’d go to the Mercury Cafe. When the Mercury was in danger of closing in 2020, Gano contributed a song for a virtual fundraising event. (The Mercury was saved when it was purchased by Danny Newman in June 2021). Gano had been asked to help by Tom Hagerman, a member of the Denver band DeVotchKa. Gano later sang on Hagerman’s solo album “Modern Victims,” released under the epic band name The Post Truth Serum.

“I’ve met many different musicians from Denver over the years and have really enjoyed not only the interaction but also playing all different kinds of music with them,” Gano said.

It’s odd and sort of wonderful for Gano to be 40 years removed from producing the quirky, cool record that so perfectly captured the universal, hormonal rush of high-school sexual energy, anger, angst, spirituality and rebellion. He’s not big on numbers, but 40 years sounded like a good time to relive the experience with his fans.

“We just absolutely enjoy playing music for people,” Gano said. “There are people who have been listening to us for as long as we’ve been playing, which is decades now, and then there are other people who have just heard of us, and they have this fresh connection to what we’re doing. Plus, people like anniversaries and round numbers. So it seems like a nice occasion to play.

“The truth is, we play most of the songs on our first album anytime we play a show, and sometimes we have played the album in order – but unannounced – and it’s just really fun. And we think that people are going to really, really enjoy it a lot.”