corrente

As our cultured readers surely know by now, the world lost a giant yesterday. Johnny Ramone, founding member of the world's greatest punk band, The Ramones, died yesterday of prostate cancer. As my friend Mark put it, there are now more surviving Beatles than Ramones.

I'll leave Johnny's biography to others. Who was the rock critic who began his review of Road to Ruin, "Have the Ramones ever written a bad song? No. Then how come they aren't rich?" That was exactly the way I felt in 1978. I could not believe I owned 4 albums by a band even most of my friends wouldn't listen to, and yet I loved every single song. I not only loved every song--I knew every song was objectively great. Every single goddam one. And yet they weren't famous! It blew my mind.

It may be hard for younger whippersnappers to comprehend just how bad music was in the mid-70s. Disco. Country rock. Jazz rock. ELO. ELP. Steve Miller Band. Toto. Music with a dial tone. I can't even bring myself to commit to writing the crap I listened to and pretended to like. Then, one day in 1977, I was introduced to a scruffy student whose dorm room still stands out in my memory for its utter squalor, even by dorm room standards. He was wearing a filthy t-shirt emblazoned, "Richard Hell and the Voidoids." I was there because I was looking for some, um, alternative to the pap music played at our college pub, and I'd heard about this punk stuff. In short order I was toddling back to my room lugging a dozen albums on labels I'd never heard of, by bands whose names seemed like an invitation to a club whose only requirement was an ability to share an inside joke: Talking Heads, Blondie. The Voidoids. Television. The Blockheads. And 3 albums by a bunch of misfits called The Ramones.

Everyone has, I imagine, their own list of songs that caused the world to stand still. On that day, I added a song called "Blitzkrieg Bop" to mine. In some real ways I imagine it was like Vaclav Havel felt listening to Zappa in Prague. It was about fun, but it was more than about fun. It was about subversion, but it was about more than subversion. It was nostalgia and antinostalgia. It was agitprop that was antiprop. It was intelligent stupidity. It was music that said: this is what you always wanted to hear, even if you never thought of it in a million years. It was like great oral sex, fun and passionate, naughty and innocent all at the same time. Compared to the stupefying banalities of "Fly Like an Eagle," songs like "We're a Happy Family"--
Sitting here in Queens
Eating refried beans
We're in all the magazines
Gulping down thorazines
We ain't got no friends
Our troubles never end
No Christmas cards to send
Daddy likes men
were like a bomb going off, a sensibility that mocked itself as much as it mocked the insane culture it found itself trapped in, making both criticism and self-importance equally impossible. All that was stolid henceforth melted into air.

I remember going to my first Ramones concert, in 1978, at Asbury Park. A preppie in a sea of black leather, I was like some Beatlemaniac teen bopper; I remember my girlfriend looking at me bemusedly like I had been possessed by some demented person. Well, gabba gabba, sweetheart. Shortly thereafter they came to my college, where I got to see Johnny from about 6 feet away, power chording through Blitzkrieg Bop and 24 other songs with barely a pause, Joey looming over the mike like some ectomorphic freak of nature and Dee Dee slashing away at his bass. I was a supplicant at the Church of the Everlasting Pinhead, baptized anew.

And, like a zillion other untalented kids in the years to come, it was soon after that that I bought my first guitar.
 
The second to last time I saw them was at University of Washington student union building, in 1985 or so. By then, the frat boy nitwits had picked up on them and the floor was jammed with these bozos, who were all being "punk" and spitting on the band. Finally Dee Dee jumped into the crowd and started using his bass as a baseball bat, injecting new meaning into "Beat on the Brat." The band was largely in decline by then, with no album to match the glorious first four. By then I knew, too, that Johnny was a hardcore Reaganite, but this only made watching them roast Ronnie in "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" that much more engrossing. A credit to his politics, Johnny was a guy who put business first.

I actually met Johnny once, on 8th Street in the Village, back in the Road to Ruin years. I was walking down the street when he materialized around the corner, sullenly hunched over, wearing his trademark jeans, jacket and shirt. Not wanting to blow the moment, I nodded in acknowledgement and said simply, "Hey."

To which he replied, "Hey."

Now, with the Boys from Forest Hills gone, I wish I had added, "Thanks."

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Why Is It Always This Way? I'm gonna miss those guys.