Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 16:04:29 EDT
From: GaryPig@aol.com
To: audities@smoe.org
Subject: Re: Johnny Ramone dead; R.I.P.
Message-ID: <15d.3fdd7840.2e8334cd@aol.com>


When I first interviewed the band (Spring of 77) and asked the dreaded 
"influences" question, Johnny instantly started rhapsodizing all over Elvis'
vintage 
Ed Sullivision appearances (and this was well BEFORE the VCR age ...which
led 
me to think, hmm, these guys sure ain't teenagers, lobotomied or otherwise 
;-)


One more reason why the Ramones were so cool -- they were not only
thoroughly unphotogenic, they were also superannuated even at the start of
their career.


To my eyes and ears the Ramones were the logical descendants of 
Kasenetz-Katz,


Interesting. Back in the 80s, long before the Ramones became a familiar
staple of American TV commercials and sports arenas, I once described them
to someone who had never heard their music as sounding like Motorhead
covering the Archies, with a cabdriver plucked at random off of the streets
of New York City doing the singing rather than Lemmy Kilmister.


 though the leather jackets (not to mention being branded with the damnable 
"punk" tag) certainly restricted their career trajectory in N. America.


I don't think that either factor really restricted their career trajectory.
It was doomed to sputter regardless of their genre tag or their choice of
outerwear. America just was not ready for the Ramones in the seventies.

Speaking as someone who was a fairly typical American teenager during the
Carter years, I can tell you that the Ramones were, at best, a
dimly-understood and never-heard mystery to even those of us who considered
ourselves serious rock fans out in leafy suburbia. I can remember looking at
pictures of their albums in the Columbia House mail-order catalog and
thinking, "What the hell planet are these guys from, anyway?" Unless you
lived in close proximity to NYC or LA, you probably didn't know punk from a
hole in the ground. Heck, after seeing Elvis Costello for the first time on
*Saturday Night Live*, we thought that *he* was supposed to be punk.

Most people from my era, upon hearing the Ramones for the first time, didn't
"get it". If you'd had nothing but a steady diet of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zep,
and Boston throughout your adolescence (or, conversely, Donna Summer, the
Bee Gees, and K.C. and the Sunshine Band), the Ramones probably weren't
gonna translate in your world, even if you were one of the lucky few to be
exposed to them.

(My best friend in high school, who first saw the Ramones in '78 and became
an immediate convert through the auspices of an extraordinarily cool older
brother who was going to college at Columbia University in NYC, bought a
t-shirt that had the cover of the first Ramones album on it. Whenever he'd
wear it to school, people would ask him in the hallway if the Ramones were
"like Sha Na Na or something".)

I have no problem with the Ramones being considered to be the ur-band of
punk. No, they weren't into bondage gear, radical politics, or spitting on
people, but those things didn't necessarily translate into punkhood on our
side of the ocean, anyway. The Ramones supplied punk with its two basic
ingredients: The stripped-down ramalama sound and the outsider image. The
former is everywhere nowadays, of course, but the latter is a big reason why
the band endured. Back in the seventies, rock stars were supposed to be
distant, godlike superheroes worshipped by us confused misfit teenagers.
What was wonderful about the Ramones was that they were an even bigger bunch
of confused misfits than their fans -- and the fact that they were so
goofy-looking was the icing on the cake. Their carnival-geek anthem
"Pinhead" ("Gabba gabba, we accept you, one of us") was as pure a manifesto
as any band ever gave.


Perhaps had someone closer to the middle of the road only covered one of the

band's early melodic gems over here and knocked the edges off a teeny tiny 
bit, a la Linda R. and that other Elvis' "Alison" at the time, it could have
been 
quite a different story.


Linda Ronstadt would've been the *last* person in the world to cover a
Ramones song. She notoriously once fled a Ramones show with her hands over
her ears, protesting to a reporter, "I like power, but this music is so
constricted that I can only call it 'hemorrhoid music'." Further proof that,
aside from starting her career by covering a Mike Nesmith song and later
appearing on an episode of *The Simpsons*, Linda Ronstadt has all the cool
factor of Eydie Gorme or Liza Minelli.


  It SHOULD have been a different story.


It *was* a different story, Gary ... eventually. Witness Green Day and all
the other hugely-popular Ramones clones that followed in their wake. There
is no shortage of stripped-down ramalama within the Diskmans and iPods worn
in high school hallways today -- witness the success of the Warped Tour, for
one. The only shame is that it took too long for the world to come around to
the Ramones' way of thinking for the band to really reap the fruits of their
belated success. 



Gregory Sager
(proud to sport five Ramones shows' worth of hearing loss)