Ramones
Rock / Punk
Everyone knows that, even the poor, blind saps who never loved the band. But the Ramones were many things, and gloriously so, from the moment of their inception in Forest Hills, New York, in 1974, until their final concert, #2,263, in Los Angeles on August 6, 1996.
They were prolific - releasing 21 studio and live albums between 1976 and 1996 - and professional, typically cutting all of the basic tracks for one of those studio LPs in a matter of days. They were stubborn, a marvel of bulldog determination and cast-iron pride in a business greased by negotiation and compromise. And they were fun, rock n' roll's most reliable Great Night Out for nearly a quarter of a century. Which seems like a weird thing to say about about a bunch of guys for whom a show, in 1974 or '75, could be six songs in a quarter of an hour.
But there was one thing you could never, ever say about the Ramones: that they were dumb. In their time, in their brilliantly specialized way, the Ramones - the founding four of Johnny (guitar), Joey (voice), Tommy (drums), and Dee Dee (bass); along with Marky, who spent 15 years and 11 albums behind the drums beginning with "Road To Ruin" and who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the original four; - later followed by CJ, who stepped out of the Marine Corps and into Dee Dee's king-sized sneakers in 1989; and Richie, who kept the beat while Marky was on hiatus between '83 and '87 - were the sharpest band on the planet. Fully evolved as musicians and songwriters. Confident in their power and the importance of what they had.
Ramones - released April 23, 1976; mixed in its entirety in one, continuous ten-hour session, with discreet separation of Johnny's guitar and Dee Dee's bass in each speaker, a nod to the retro-stereo sound of early Beatles LPs. Joey: "I wrote 'Beat On The Brat' about the spoiled brats in Queens. That chord change at the top of the song comes directly from bubblegum songs-'Chewy Chewy,''Yummy Yummy Yummy'-all those good songs, those fun songs . . . we really liked the Bay City Rollers. Their song 'Saturday Night' had a great chant in it, so we wanted a song with a chant in it: 'Hey! Ho! Let's go!''Blitzkrieg Bop' was our 'Saturday Night.'" Johnny: "We couldn't write about love or cars, so we sang about this stuff, like glue sniffing. We thought it was funny. We thought we could get away with anything." Leave Home-released January 10, 1977; recorded six months after Ramones and coproduced by Tommy with Tony Bongiovi. A New Jersey native who had been working in the relative serenity of a studio in Quebec, engineer Ed Stasium arrived for his first day's work on Leave Home without having previously heard a note of Ramones music. "I walked in, turned up the faders," he says, "and thought, What is this?" Stasium: "It was all live. We set up the boys, baffled them off a bit for isolation, put headphones on them, and away we went."
"I Wanna Be Sedated" was the result of an especially gruesome road nightmare, when a makeshift humidifier exploded in Joey's face before showtime at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. He was rushed to a New York burn center-only after finishing the show. "That song was about being on the road too long," he said. "Getting burned like that, bits and pieces from different situations, like being on tour in England at Christmas, when everything shuts down: 'There's nothing to do, nowhere to go/I wanna be sedated.' People didn't use terms like sedatedthen. This was before Prozac."
End Of The Century was not the Ultimate Pop Record Spector truly wanted for the Ramones, even though, according to Stasium, he mixed it three times. It wasn't even classic Spector. On his greatest records, you could hear Spector living in the song, building the recording from the inside out. His stamp on End Of The Centurywas evident only in the cosmetics, not the conception. He loved the idea and sound of the Ramones, but he never connected with the people inside the songs. An awkward nobility pokes through some of the tumult. Fattened with low-end saxes, carnival organ, and what sounds like 30 drum kits, "Do You Remember Rock 'N' Roll Radio?" is one of the few songs enriched-not undone-by Spector's touch.
The Ramones survived the Spector experiment, but at a price. Management and record companies continued to press celebrity producers on the group. Personal tensions between Johnny and Joey, complicated by Dee Dee's state of mind and body, and Marky's new-boy status, threatened their one-for-all vibe. "The turmoil," Johnny says dryly, "was starting." But it was not enough to make them give up. Pleasant Dreams-produced by 10cc's Graham Gouldman, brought in as a paragon of Britpop efficiency after Spector's Wagnerian overspill-was not the low point its cheap, bland cover art suggested. Joey's twisted gripe, "The KKK Took My Baby Away," became a hit in all but name, a stalwart of future Ramones shows with a hammering rhythm in the intro, poached, with love, off "He's A Whore" from Cheap Trick's 1977 debut album.
A return to '70s distortion-torpedo form, Dee Dee and Johnny's "Psycho Therapy" was a high point of Subterranean Jungle, an album marred by the fact that Marky didn't finish it. A ringer was brought in for the last track to be recorded; the drum seat then went, for three years, to Richie Reinhardt, aka Richie Beau, of the New York band The Velveteens. (Marky was back, at Johnny's invitation, in 1987, after a messy exit by Richie and a twoshow stint by Blondie's Clem Burke.) No record of the Ramones' troubled second era was as aptly titled as 1984's Too Tough To Die, produced with sympathy and spark by Tommy Ramone (as T. Erdelyi) and Ed Stasium. Dee Dee and Johnny stepped up to the challenge of HardcoreAmerica-indie-sector warriors such as Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, and the Minutemen-by reminding them who was there first. In July 1989 Johnny got a call from the band's management office: "Dee Dee's leaving." "Dee Dee's leaving was just another obstacle," said Joey. "It was always this way, always something thrown at us. You just gotta press on."
Soon after Dee Dee's departure, a new bassist was found, Long Island-born Christpher Joseph Ward, otherwise known as C.J. With C.J., the band made seven more albums, including three concert souvenirs (Loco Live, Greatest Hits Live, and We're Outta Here) and the "covers" misfire, Acid Eaters. The Ramones' refusal to just dry up and go away meant they were around at the turn of the '90s to see their legacy flourish, and not just read about it from armchairs in the Old Punkers Home. [Joey did not live to see the Ramones inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He died of lymphatic cancer on Easter Sunday, April 15, 2001. Dee Dee made it to the induction ceremony in April 2002-with Johnny, Tommy, and Marky-but died just two months later, on June 5, at his home in Los Angeles.]"I always dwell on the fact that we could have been better," Johnny concedes. "But I feel the Ramones were the most influential American rock band. And that's pretty good. I'm sure a lot of other people think something different, but let them name the bands. You have The Doors and The Beach Boys, great bands. But name the other bands that came out of being influenced by them."
|