We need some music. The world is having one of its spells - things going bad in the Ukraine - or more accurately, trouble in the Ukraine spilling out... or this local story - about a funeral director with 12 bodies in a storage facility. Great.
And that after Tommy Ramone's death - immediately after my post on the Ramone's. That made for a very irritating coincidence - most of that post was a repost from 2004 - which I put up the week before Johnny Ramone's death. Thankfully, I have no other occult powers, when it comes to music.
On a happier note, Germany won the World Cup - the final was a very well played game, 0-0 until 112 minutes in, but an active and gripping 0-0, well played and closely contested - both teams earned their chances. It was probably a just result - maybe not as obviously as in 2010, when Spain got their deserved victory very late as well - but Germany was the best team in the tournament, the best team in the world. The Cup over all was quite exciting - very evenly matched all the way through, with almost all tight, exciting games in the playoffs. (Brazil's 2 stinkers being the only exceptions.) Having come through a superb, well contested tournament, where almost everyone looked like they deserved to be there, FIFA will probably act quickly to make sure it doesn't happen again - talk about expanding the teams in the field, to 40 or more, has been around - that should bring back the 6-0s and the bus parking of past tournaments. But while it is a mistake to underestimate the cynicism and greed of FIFA, it's best to think on what they get right - the game itself...
And - speaking of sport (and Bastille Day!) - it's also Tour de France time - this year has been a kind of bloodbath, with the top two favorites, Chris Froome and Alberto Contador, forced to pull out, with a broken wrist and broken leg. It's a strange sport to watch on TV (if you have a life), but surprisingly compelling. Strategy and planning (long and short term) and bursts of excitement - I have become semi-addicted to it... though not yet to cycling as a whole.
Enough. Another beautiful day (after a nasty tropical beginning of the week), and time for some random music:
1. The Seeds - 900 Million People Daily (All Making Love)
2. Gene Vincent - Five Days, Five Days
3. The New Pornographers - Centre for the Holy Wars
4. Of Montreal - Hegira Emigre
5. Outkast - Spaghetti Junction
6. Danielson Famille - Ye Olde Battleaxe
7. Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
8. Dinosaur Jr. - There's no Here
9. Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots part 1
10. Buzzcocks - Nothing Left
And video? That Billie Holiday song coming up in the middle rather overpowers the rest of the list... But you can't pass by something of that power:
There's not much that can follow that - live Buzzcocks have a fighting chance:
And end with Of Montreal:
Showing posts with label Ramones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ramones. Show all posts
Friday, July 18, 2014
Friday, July 11, 2014
Hey Ho, Let's Go!
This month's Band of the Month is the Ramones. This post is going to be different - because I have already written it, basically, back in 2004 - reviewing End of the Century and memorializing Johnny Ramone. And really - most of what I would say now, I said then - so I might as well just repost it. (Editing to stress the music, and the autobiography... I've cannibalized these things before, for comments on some of the others bands I've written about - but I can live with that.)
From the movie review:
And from Johnny's memorial:
I can live with that... And so on to a top 10:
1. Blitzkrieg Bop
2. Rockaway Beach
3. Pinhead
4. Cretin Hop
5. I Wanna Be Sedated
6. Teenaged Lobotomy
7. 53rd and 3rd
8. Commando
9. Bonzo Goes to Bitburg
10. Now I wanna Sniff Some Glue
And video: a very great video for I Wanna Be Sedated:
Sniffin some glue in 1974, with that little Sabbath riff in the middle. (And 2 more songs in the 6 minutes of the clip.)
If you have an hour - live in Germany, 1978:
1980 - doing Rock and Roll High School and Rock and Roll Radio:
For a change of pace - a 1988 clip from Regis and Kathy Lee:
And right up to the end:
From the movie review:
Punk: I heard it late, and probably didn't really hear punk for a while - what I heard first were bands like the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello - The Cars, if that counts (and probably it does, in some sense.) I don't know what the first punk song I ever heard was. Probably "Train in Vain" - I knew the Clash was a punk band, heard that - thought, this is not so strange - this is just a bit rougher version of Tom Petty or Neil Young - this is pretty good! And then I heard "Lost in a Supermarket" and thought this is even more so than the last... And then I heard "London Calling" - that's when I realized what people were talking about with punk.
The Ramones I didn't hear until End of the Century came out - "Rock and Roll Radio". I found it to be just about exactly what it was meant to be - those big melodies, the big sound - I loved it, without thinking it was anything but just a great little updating of all those old pop classics you heard on oldies stations. When I was youngr than that, I rather liked bands like The Bay City Rollers, Shawn Cassidy - those cheesy pseudo Rock 'n' Roll teeny bopper bands... The Ramones struck me as making music like that that was, unlike theirs, original (in both the sense that they wrote it and the sense that, even playing this old fashioned sound, they sounded brand new, and completely real), and absolutely legit. None of the calculated crowd -pleasing - the feeling I got from the Ramones was of a bunch of guys who absolutely worshipped the music they were playing and were trying to express pure glee with it.
It is strange - it is hard to believe, thinking about it - the poor Ramones, never had a real hit - nothing huge. Nothing like, oh - "We Will Rock You". They never sold the records - but within a year or so, that song - "Rock and Roll Radio" was as inescapably part of the universal pop culture as "We Will Rock You" - just, somehow, divorced from the Ramones themselves... And while maybe nothing else from the Ramones has reached that level of popular penetration, their music has permeated pop culture. Everyone knows them, loves them, takes them - took them - for granted...
Sometime in 1980, the radio stations where I lived got cool. I don't know when or why or how, but that year, I heard everything - I heard the Ramones, the Clash, the Talking Heads and Blondie and The Cars and Elvis Costello and The Police, I heard the B-52s, Split Enz, The Vapors, Sniff and the Tears, The Greg Kinh Band, U2 - all of this alongiside, on the same station, I think, as all the AOR stuff around. Zep and the Doors and Stone and Hendrix - and a good dose of Bruce and Lou Reed... not to neglect Southern Rock - crappy metal (Ozzie, Ronnie James Dio, Def Leppard, The Priest) - party rock (George Thorogood) - art rock (Steely Dan to ELP)... This did not last that long. Radio in Boston, in 1981 or so, was similar - less classic rock, more punk, new wave, and edgier punk and new wave (you could hear Soft Cell and the Damned in those days... the FCC was not so curious - you could hear "Jet Boy, Jet Girl" on the radio...) All this stuff layered on top of my fairly well established AOR music tastes - I liked a lot of the newer stuff, though I still separated it from the old stuff. That started to change as U2, REM, and eventually groups like the Replacements and Husker Du entered my consciousness....
But the Ramones - yes, the Ramones. Somewhere in here (80 or so) the radio started playing older stuff - "I Wanna Be Sedated" - sometimes "Sheena is a Punk Rocker", covers - "Do You Wanna Dance", "Needles and Pins" - very rarely, though, anything deeper, harder than that. Much later I heard those songs - and then a buddy of mine got Ramones Mania, and we wore the tape out, driving around listening to it over and over. And so... years after that, on a drive to New Jersey with some people, we had only 2 CDs in the car, and listened to Rocket to Russia through 3 or 4 times - that was a very good thing. It does not wear out its welcome. Every time "Cretin Hop" kicks in, you think - should I tell them to turn it off? Why should I? who's going to regret hearing this again? And so - again....
And from Johnny's memorial:
I was heartbroken by the news of his death. That surprised me a bit - I was sad, but not heartbroken when Joey died, and he was a lot more likable. It’s probably the timing - I'd seen the movie, and was writing about the band, thinking about them - and then he died. It hurt - far more than most celebrity deaths (Marlon Brando, say) - almost as much as when my transcendent cultural heroes (Johnny Cash? Charles Schulz?) died.
It’s odd, feeling sentimental about Johnny Ramone. Joey made sense - but Johnny? He was an asshole - no one liked him. He comes off very badly in the film - a sour, mean, bitter man, with a cruel streak - the way he turns to his wife and puts her on the spot about whether there was any tension between him and Joey, and won’t let her get away with uttering a platitude or too. His wife - the woman he took away from Joey, causing that break. Classy. But at the same time, he comes off as someone who knew what he had in the band - who knew, maybe even better than the others, how fucking good they really were (he says in the film that only the Clash were close to them - the only way to dispute that is to note that the Clash aren’t in their league.) He knew what he had, and respected it (The Ramones) immensely, to the point of realizing it was worth more than his petty feuds.
So, yeah, he was an asshole, but he was also a genius. Everyone says he inspired a raft of guitar players - true. And he and his band (but in a lot of ways, that is him - the sound of the band, if not their material, is really Johnny’s guitar, fully formed from the very beginning, pure and unwavering from that point on) did inspire a raft of musicians, making simplicity possible, making it possible for anyone to be in a band. I myself - I fiercely regret that I did not hear them in time. If I had heard them, instead of Kiss, in 1976? Where would I be? Better than I turned out, right? They were cool, they were simple, they were honest, they were perfect.
That is the last word on them: they were a perfect rock band. Very possibly the perfect rock band. And Johnny Ramone was, probably, the perfect rock guitar player.
So back to the Ramones - their place in the world of rock and roll, my reaction to them. About what they did - their sound, their importance...
The dirty secret is that I am ambivalent about them. Not really the Ramones themselves, but sometimes the propaganda about them, the propaganda that surrounds punk. You never hear anyone talk about the Ramones without talking about killing off the dinosaurs - and about simplicity and fun as if that were somehow antithetical to “seriousness” or virtuosity. That was not part of the first wave of punk. The Ramones' contemporaries were bands like Television - guitar noodling eggheads; Patti Smith - poetess; the midwest bands - Rocket From the Tombs, The Mirrors, the Electric Eels - coming out of the 60s bands, Stooges, Velvets, MC 5, the garage bands, the art bands (Captain Beefheart, Red Krayola, the Mothers, etc.) It was not monolithic - it was just devoted to freedom, aggression, to expression. The Ramones were part of it - it is a bitter pill to hear them being turned into another force of conformity.
I have to stop somewhere. I have the luxury here in blogland of developing whatever it is I'm saying over time. So I can come back. But I want to finish with this - something I wrote down back when Joey Ramone died. Punk changed everything - but it did more than kill off what was on the radio and replace it. (It didn't really do that - just exposed so much of what was on the radio as the shit it was.) It created plenty new - but it also changed what was already there. After punk - and when I say punk, I mean The Ramones - you could, if you were listening, hear the rock in the bloat of what came before. It didn't so much kill off all the Led Zeppelins and Black Sabbaths of the world as redeem them. Robert Plant once said that "God Saved the Queen" was a slowed down version of "Communication Breakdown" - which it is. But you needed punk to hear it again. It changed the way people listened to heavy metal - after punk, people could hear Bonham's drumming, Sabbath's drive and AC/DC's punch again. That is what punk did for me - I started listening to punk in earnest in the mid-80s - and it sent me as much for my old Zep and AC/DC records as for the punk-derived bands around at the time (The Replacements, Husker Du, Butthole Surfers, The Meat Puppets - my personal mid-80s favorites). I was not alone - as grunge would soon show us...
I can live with that... And so on to a top 10:
1. Blitzkrieg Bop
2. Rockaway Beach
3. Pinhead
4. Cretin Hop
5. I Wanna Be Sedated
6. Teenaged Lobotomy
7. 53rd and 3rd
8. Commando
9. Bonzo Goes to Bitburg
10. Now I wanna Sniff Some Glue
And video: a very great video for I Wanna Be Sedated:
Sniffin some glue in 1974, with that little Sabbath riff in the middle. (And 2 more songs in the 6 minutes of the clip.)
If you have an hour - live in Germany, 1978:
1980 - doing Rock and Roll High School and Rock and Roll Radio:
For a change of pace - a 1988 clip from Regis and Kathy Lee:
And right up to the end:
Friday, April 18, 2014
Punk, Ubu Style
Friday again, more music - and I have to follow up on last week. Actually - go backwards from last week - from Pere Ubu, to Rocket From the Tombs, mostly. A couple weeks ago, I went to see a kid I know who plays in a band - high school kids, they're a punk band, hammering away at their stuff, pretty good at what they do - though it sometimes gets very disconcerting watching them. Teenagers playing a 40 year old type of music, their parents pogoing and moshing along.... it is all very strange, given the claims of punk, then and now, to rebellion - to being a rejection of the past. All the talk back then about rejecting the worn out mainstream rock and roll - nonsense in the 70s, of course, but extremely bizarre now. It's another illustration of my theory that rock stopped in the mid-80s (say) - this bunch of kids (the first couple bands we saw) are playing their parents' music - without any anxiety about it at all. Which is fine with me - though I wish if they were going to play oldies, they'd play better oldies. I kept wishing they'd play Sonic Reducer.
Because before punk even existed, David Thomas and company pretty much summed it up and moved along, a lot of it in two songs: Sonic Reducer, Final Solution. They are very good - and very smart, the way they play their teenaged angst both for real and for a joke, and as something that's already old hat in 1974. Since it was old hat in 1974. They're so smart - their irony, their mix of wild hyperbole and solipsism (which is pretty close to the adolescent condition: hyperbole and solipsism), their distance and knowingness, playing alongside the sense that, at some level, he really means it - or meant it, when he was younger. Something like that. The way those songs embrace the fact that there is nothing new in their teenaged blustering, that it has always been thus for the Youth of Today, and that it has been pretty much exactly thus since rock and roll became the sound of Youth of Today... while at the same time, getting across the point that the reason teenagers keep repeating the same kinds of things is that this is what it feels like to be a teenager - ready to explode and being stomped down at the same time - "they all just pass me by, but I'm not just anyone..." And that became something like the point of an awful lot of punk rock, ever since - and it's all there, more self-aware than it would be again, in 1974. That self-awareness helps, too - it doesn't seem ridiculous to me for 60 year olds to play those songs - they were never a direct expression of teenaged angst - they were always about it, and always in on the joke, and written in a way you could be in on the joke when you are 50, partly because they make you remember just what it felt like to be 15. Always balanced between the real thing and making fun of it - balance of those classic rock riffs and the sense of their ridiculousness, which plays out in the straighahead parts of the songs and the ironic parts and the weird parts. They are nostalgic and mocking, modern and old; they rock out and deconstruct rock. They are fascinating.
It's interesting that Pere Ubu, especially, came up with some songs that seem a bit more direct in their angst. Heart of Darkness and My Dark Ages especially - they seem like a more adult kind of angst, with their literary and film references, their sense of restlessness and solitude, and a kind of loneliness that doesn't feel like it is going to go away any time soon. And musically, they are moving past the standard rock and roll templates - with their drones and minimalism and Ravenstine taking a bigger part. I recognized myself in those songs, far more than the others (especially when I first started listening to them) - I was never a particularly angtsy teenager in the usual sense, but I was a lonely and over analytical young adult. And shoot - there are days, you get in a certain mood, and everything I see seems so deformed - none of the faces fit a human form... you get that....
So - I wish those kids would cover RFTT. Pere Ubu if they want, but hey - they're just a punk band. Rocket is fine. Sonic Reducer is a better punk song than anything since, and not really done to death - it's in there with a couple others early punk songs - Final Solution, Suspect Device - that just never get old.
Though on the subject of RFTT and angst - the Peter Laughner songs are a bit of a different matter. Ain’t it Fun - jesus christ. That’s murder. You get contempt, self-contempt, despair, laid out like a patient on an operating table. In some ways it has distance, but it's almost the inverse of the Thomas songs: something that sounds like it's standing outside the angst, but is all of it exactly accurate. I mean - as far as I can tell that song is pretty much a straight recitation of Peter Laughner's sins. Right up to knowing you're going to die young. It has bite. (And every time I listen to it, I remember a remark someone made about the original RFTT recording - the way in the middle, Laughner takes a guitar solo - and it's completely drowned out by Cheetah, who's amp is closer to the mic.... Poor Pete - he was extraordinarily talented, and drank himself to death at 24, quite knowingly, guessing from Ain't It Fun.)
Videos - latter day Rocket from the Tombs:
Cheetah singing Ain't It Fun:
And maybe Joey Ramone playing Sonic Reducer, with Cheetah Chrome on guitar:
And finally - Living Color doing Final Solution:
Because before punk even existed, David Thomas and company pretty much summed it up and moved along, a lot of it in two songs: Sonic Reducer, Final Solution. They are very good - and very smart, the way they play their teenaged angst both for real and for a joke, and as something that's already old hat in 1974. Since it was old hat in 1974. They're so smart - their irony, their mix of wild hyperbole and solipsism (which is pretty close to the adolescent condition: hyperbole and solipsism), their distance and knowingness, playing alongside the sense that, at some level, he really means it - or meant it, when he was younger. Something like that. The way those songs embrace the fact that there is nothing new in their teenaged blustering, that it has always been thus for the Youth of Today, and that it has been pretty much exactly thus since rock and roll became the sound of Youth of Today... while at the same time, getting across the point that the reason teenagers keep repeating the same kinds of things is that this is what it feels like to be a teenager - ready to explode and being stomped down at the same time - "they all just pass me by, but I'm not just anyone..." And that became something like the point of an awful lot of punk rock, ever since - and it's all there, more self-aware than it would be again, in 1974. That self-awareness helps, too - it doesn't seem ridiculous to me for 60 year olds to play those songs - they were never a direct expression of teenaged angst - they were always about it, and always in on the joke, and written in a way you could be in on the joke when you are 50, partly because they make you remember just what it felt like to be 15. Always balanced between the real thing and making fun of it - balance of those classic rock riffs and the sense of their ridiculousness, which plays out in the straighahead parts of the songs and the ironic parts and the weird parts. They are nostalgic and mocking, modern and old; they rock out and deconstruct rock. They are fascinating.
It's interesting that Pere Ubu, especially, came up with some songs that seem a bit more direct in their angst. Heart of Darkness and My Dark Ages especially - they seem like a more adult kind of angst, with their literary and film references, their sense of restlessness and solitude, and a kind of loneliness that doesn't feel like it is going to go away any time soon. And musically, they are moving past the standard rock and roll templates - with their drones and minimalism and Ravenstine taking a bigger part. I recognized myself in those songs, far more than the others (especially when I first started listening to them) - I was never a particularly angtsy teenager in the usual sense, but I was a lonely and over analytical young adult. And shoot - there are days, you get in a certain mood, and everything I see seems so deformed - none of the faces fit a human form... you get that....
So - I wish those kids would cover RFTT. Pere Ubu if they want, but hey - they're just a punk band. Rocket is fine. Sonic Reducer is a better punk song than anything since, and not really done to death - it's in there with a couple others early punk songs - Final Solution, Suspect Device - that just never get old.
Though on the subject of RFTT and angst - the Peter Laughner songs are a bit of a different matter. Ain’t it Fun - jesus christ. That’s murder. You get contempt, self-contempt, despair, laid out like a patient on an operating table. In some ways it has distance, but it's almost the inverse of the Thomas songs: something that sounds like it's standing outside the angst, but is all of it exactly accurate. I mean - as far as I can tell that song is pretty much a straight recitation of Peter Laughner's sins. Right up to knowing you're going to die young. It has bite. (And every time I listen to it, I remember a remark someone made about the original RFTT recording - the way in the middle, Laughner takes a guitar solo - and it's completely drowned out by Cheetah, who's amp is closer to the mic.... Poor Pete - he was extraordinarily talented, and drank himself to death at 24, quite knowingly, guessing from Ain't It Fun.)
Videos - latter day Rocket from the Tombs:
Cheetah singing Ain't It Fun:
And maybe Joey Ramone playing Sonic Reducer, with Cheetah Chrome on guitar:
And finally - Living Color doing Final Solution:
Friday, November 22, 2013
Friday Music
Quick one today - preparing for a bit of travel. I do hope to get back, to offer some kind of thoughts on the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination - that's kind of a big deal, though it's hard to figure out what I think about it. I am sure it changed my life profoundly (changing the world I would grow up in) - but I have never quite figured out how. A lot of that comes down to knowing how much of what is good and bad in the 1960s (and there were many things both good and bad) were driven by JFK, and how much LBJ. Johnson was the one who did most of it - the Civil Rights laws, the Great Society, but also the Vietnam War - but how do those things relate to JFK, and to his assassination? I don't know... and am not sure what to say about them.
Anyway - enough of that. I point you to a somewhat more pleasant subject - my essay on Winchester 73 for Wonders in the Dark's western countdown. More may come of that - I've put a couple essays in there about Anthony Mann, and suspect he might be my next Director of the Month - though probably not this month. The holiday, you know... For now - I leave you with music - a plain random ten, though it's a nice one.... I commend iTunes for its taste.
1. Gomez - Sweet Virginia
2. Sonic Youth - Winner's Blues
3. Mission of Burma - Good, not Great
4. Scott Walker - If You Go Away
5. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - Hold On to Yourself
6. John Zorn - The James Bond Theme
7. Ramones - 53rd and 3rd (live)
8. Spacemen 3 - Starship (live - feedback rules!)
9. Jimmy Smith - God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (oh crap! even iTunes is starting with the Christmas music!)
10. George Harrison - Hear Me Lord
Video: Ramones, of course. Twice, since that vintage footage is rather - distressed...
And - a different kind of thing, but just about as cool - Spacemen 3:
Anyway - enough of that. I point you to a somewhat more pleasant subject - my essay on Winchester 73 for Wonders in the Dark's western countdown. More may come of that - I've put a couple essays in there about Anthony Mann, and suspect he might be my next Director of the Month - though probably not this month. The holiday, you know... For now - I leave you with music - a plain random ten, though it's a nice one.... I commend iTunes for its taste.
1. Gomez - Sweet Virginia
2. Sonic Youth - Winner's Blues
3. Mission of Burma - Good, not Great
4. Scott Walker - If You Go Away
5. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - Hold On to Yourself
6. John Zorn - The James Bond Theme
7. Ramones - 53rd and 3rd (live)
8. Spacemen 3 - Starship (live - feedback rules!)
9. Jimmy Smith - God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (oh crap! even iTunes is starting with the Christmas music!)
10. George Harrison - Hear Me Lord
Video: Ramones, of course. Twice, since that vintage footage is rather - distressed...
And - a different kind of thing, but just about as cool - Spacemen 3:
Friday, August 19, 2011
All Good Cretins Go to Heaven
Keepin' it short and sweet - 100% Random Friday Random 10!
1. Erase Errata - Dexterity is #2
2. The Go-Betweens - Right Here
3. Earth - Dissolution III [only 15 minutes of feedback, that's hardly nothing; the other track on the record goes an hour.]
4. The Young Knives - Another Hollow Line
5. Ramones - Glad to See You Go
6. Steely Dan - East St. Louis Toodle-oo
7. Beastie Boys - Live at PJ's
8. Ramones - Cretin Hop [well - this is kind of old iTunes! 2 Ramones tunes!]
9. Bishop Allen - Cue the Elephants
10. Blue Oyster Cult - Godzilla [with a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound...!]
Video - obviously:
1. Erase Errata - Dexterity is #2
2. The Go-Betweens - Right Here
3. Earth - Dissolution III [only 15 minutes of feedback, that's hardly nothing; the other track on the record goes an hour.]
4. The Young Knives - Another Hollow Line
5. Ramones - Glad to See You Go
6. Steely Dan - East St. Louis Toodle-oo
7. Beastie Boys - Live at PJ's
8. Ramones - Cretin Hop [well - this is kind of old iTunes! 2 Ramones tunes!]
9. Bishop Allen - Cue the Elephants
10. Blue Oyster Cult - Godzilla [with a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound...!]
Video - obviously:
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Film Festival Follies
I haven't been following the news from Cannes too closely this year - I was on vacation last week, up in the Northeast Kingdom and Upstate NY, with better things to use my spotty network reception for than reading about new Terence Malick films... But it's good to see that some auteurs can be counted on to deliver the goods. I mean of course, Lars von Trier - who made a fool of himself at a press conference (I like Emerson's post - he has video and some context) - though from a man who once cast himself as the "Schmuck of Ages", making a fool of himself seems pretty much standard operating procedure. Unfortunately, the Festival organizers proceeded to top him, making complete asses of themselves by banning him - my, my.
I'm not going to go into much depth on this, but - I'm not sure what of von Trier's remarks could be fairly called "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity" (as the festival's statement put it.) He used inflammatory words and images - you're always on thin ice cracking wise about Nazis and the holocaust [unless you're making shitty, anti-historical movies about it - fucking Life is Beautiful won a prize!] - but the actual content of what he said doesn't seem all that offensive. Something about discovering that his ancestors were Germans instead of Jews, and referring to Germans as Nazis... something about understanding what Hitler must have felt like in the bunker (related, I imagine, to the fact Von Trier's Melancholia is about the end of the world) - hardly offensive, a bit banal even - we all know Hitler loved dogs and kids!... By that time, (going by the video you can find at Scanners) he seems to have realized he was digging himself in a hole - you get some generalities about the evils of the holocaust, his support for Jews (though not for Israel), an aside on Albert Speer, and finally - well - probably the dumbest punch line you can come up with - "OK, I'm a Nazi." But still - it's a punch line, and bad taste, I'm afraid, isn't quite what I'd call "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity"....
It's not like he's alone in playing around with Nazi imagery - is there a punk rocker alive who didn't? There's just nothing there in what he said - provocation and posturing at most.... And on that note, I'll leave you with these nice American boys, doing a happy ditty about- something... about as seriously fascist as von Trier, to tell the truth...
I'm not going to go into much depth on this, but - I'm not sure what of von Trier's remarks could be fairly called "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity" (as the festival's statement put it.) He used inflammatory words and images - you're always on thin ice cracking wise about Nazis and the holocaust [unless you're making shitty, anti-historical movies about it - fucking Life is Beautiful won a prize!] - but the actual content of what he said doesn't seem all that offensive. Something about discovering that his ancestors were Germans instead of Jews, and referring to Germans as Nazis... something about understanding what Hitler must have felt like in the bunker (related, I imagine, to the fact Von Trier's Melancholia is about the end of the world) - hardly offensive, a bit banal even - we all know Hitler loved dogs and kids!... By that time, (going by the video you can find at Scanners) he seems to have realized he was digging himself in a hole - you get some generalities about the evils of the holocaust, his support for Jews (though not for Israel), an aside on Albert Speer, and finally - well - probably the dumbest punch line you can come up with - "OK, I'm a Nazi." But still - it's a punch line, and bad taste, I'm afraid, isn't quite what I'd call "unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity"....
It's not like he's alone in playing around with Nazi imagery - is there a punk rocker alive who didn't? There's just nothing there in what he said - provocation and posturing at most.... And on that note, I'll leave you with these nice American boys, doing a happy ditty about- something... about as seriously fascist as von Trier, to tell the truth...
Sunday, September 19, 2004
More Music, in Memorial
It has taken a couple days, but I am coming back to Johnny Ramone. I was heartbroken by the news of his death. That surprised me a bit - I was sad, but not heartbroken when Joey died, and he was a lot more likable. It’s probably the timing - I'd seen the movie, and was writing about the band, thinking about them - and then he died. It hurt - far more than most celebrity deaths (Marlon Brando, say) - almost as much as when my transcendent cultural heroes (Johnny Cash? Charles Schulz?) died.
It’s odd, feeling sentimental about Johnny Ramone. Joey made sense - but Johnny? He was an asshole - no one liked him. He comes off very badly in the film - a sour, mean, bitter man, with a cruel streak - the way he turns to his wife and puts her on the spot about whether there was any tension between him and Joey, and won’t let her get away with uttering a platitude or too. His wife - the woman he took away from Joey, causing that break. Classy. But at the same time, he comes off as someone who knew what he had in the band - who knew, maybe even better than the others, how fucking good they really were (he says in the film that only the Clash were close to them - the only way to dispute that is to note that the Clash aren’t in their league.) He knew what he had, and respected it (The Ramones) immensely, to the point of realizing it was worth more than his petty feuds.
So, yeah, he was an asshole, but he was also a genius. Everyone says he inspired a raft of guitar players - true. And he and his band (but in a lot of ways, that is him - the sound of the band, if not their material, is really Johnny’s guitar, fully formed from the very beginning, pure and unwavering from that point on) did inspire a raft of musicians, making simplicity possible, making it possible for anyone to be in a band. I myself - I fiercely regret that I did not hear them in time. If I had heard them, instead of Kiss, in 1976? Where would I be? Better than I turned out, right? They were cool, they were simple, they were honest, they were perfect.
That is the last word on them: they were a perfect rock band. Very possibly the perfect rock band. And Johnny Ramone was, probably, the perfect rock guitar player.
Now - perfection is not everything - perfect things are not necessarily the best thing. Perfection, purity, these things are limits - not weaknesses, really - but limits. You have to get past perfection at some point, to be the best - so all this sentimentality can’t blind me to the fact that if I were choosing, I’d still take Pere Ubu or the Velvets or the Beatles, possibly P-funk, maybe the Stones... it’s a short list - the bands I like more, or who were “better” than the Ramones - Beatles, Velvets, Pere Ubu, maybe (by some criteria) Beefheart, Can, P-Funk, maybe the Stones, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and the Byrds, maybe Fairport Convention/Richard Thompson, maybe even Bob Dylan - but that is about all. There are guitar players I like more, though that list isn’t much longer: Hendrix (though I don’t listen to him as much, and often feel almost intimidated by him), Thompson definitely, Clarence White and Michio Kurihara (the secrets), maybe Roger McGuinn - Jimmy Page, I’m afraid, Wes Montgomery and probably Charlie Christian, with Pete Cosey, Sonny Sharrock, Michael Karoli lingering around the edges. There could be others.
That’s not as long a list as I thought. I started, the morning he died, as it happened, making a list - my top 10 favorite guitar players of all time:
Richard Thompson
Jimi Hendrix
Jimmy Page
Johnny Ramone
Clarence White
Michio Kurihara
Roger McGuinn
Pete Cosey
Sonny Sharrock
Peter Townshend...
...say. There's Johnny, quite high up there. I was thinking about this stuff before he died - the movie had me thinking about him, and writing about him - which is obviously part of why this news was so devastating. They were on my mind...
So back to the Ramones - their place in the world of rock and roll, my reaction to them. About what they did - their sound, their importance...
The dirty secret is that I am ambivalent about them. I mean, the last 2-3 years, I have gone rather far in the other direction - listening to art bands, from Can and Soft Machine and Van Der Graf Generator to Derek Bailey and Keiji Haino to David Bowie and Radiohead. Yet - I have also gotten into punk a bit more, the edges of punk, bands I did not hear at all the first time around - the Buzzcocks (minimal airplay), Stiff Little Fingers (I had never heard them, knowingly, til I got the record - only 2 or 3 years ago.) Minimalism and avant garde and noise and - those things feed off one another, but they do it in a way that kind of pisses on the rhetoric of punk. I have never trusted its Puritanism (it is not accidental that it devolved into real Puritanism, pretty quickly, with straight edge hardcore and the like), its trashing of what came before. I loved AOR before I heard of punk, and continued to love it after I started liking punk, and still love both... so I don’t know.
Still - it is not really the Ramones I am ambivalent about. I am ambivalent about the propaganda that surrounds punk. You never hear anyone talk about the Ramones without talking about killing off the dinosaurs - and about simplicity and fun as if that were somehow antithetical to “seriousness” or virtuosity. That was not part of the first wave of punk. The Ramones' contemporaries were bands like Television - guitar noodling eggheads; Patti Smith - poetess; the midwest bands - Rocket From the Tombs, The Mirrors, the Electric Eels - coming out of the 60s bands, Stooges, Velvets, MC 5, the garage bands, the art bands (Captain Beefheart, Red Krayola, the Mothers, etc.) It was not monolithic - it was just devoted to freedom, aggression, to expression. The Ramones were part of it - it is a bitter pill to hear them being turned into another force of conformity.
I have to stop somewhere. I have the luxury here in blogland of developing whatever it is I'm saying over time. So I can come back. But I want to finish with this - something I wrote down back when Joey Ramone died. Punk changed everything - but it did more than kill off what was on the radio and replace it. (It didn't really do that - just exposed so much of what was on the radio as the shit it was.) It created plenty new - but it also changed what was already there. After punk - and when I say punk, I mean The Ramones - you could, if you were listening, hear the rock in the bloat of what came before. It didn't so much kill off all the Led Zeppelins and Black Sabbaths of the world as redeem them. Robert Plante once said that "God Saved the Queen" was a slowed down version of "Communication Breakdown" - which it is. But you needed punk to hear it again. It changed the way people listened to heavy metal - after punk, people could hear Bonham's drumming, Sabbath's drive and AC/DC's punch again. That is what punk did for me - I started listening to punk in earnest in the mid-80s - and it sent me as much for my old Zep and AC/DC records as for the punk-derived bands around at the time (The Replacements, Husker Du, Butthole Surfers, The Meat Puppets - my personal mid-80s favorites). I was not alone - as grunge would soon show us...
I am very grateful. Thank you Johnny (and Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy).
It’s odd, feeling sentimental about Johnny Ramone. Joey made sense - but Johnny? He was an asshole - no one liked him. He comes off very badly in the film - a sour, mean, bitter man, with a cruel streak - the way he turns to his wife and puts her on the spot about whether there was any tension between him and Joey, and won’t let her get away with uttering a platitude or too. His wife - the woman he took away from Joey, causing that break. Classy. But at the same time, he comes off as someone who knew what he had in the band - who knew, maybe even better than the others, how fucking good they really were (he says in the film that only the Clash were close to them - the only way to dispute that is to note that the Clash aren’t in their league.) He knew what he had, and respected it (The Ramones) immensely, to the point of realizing it was worth more than his petty feuds.
So, yeah, he was an asshole, but he was also a genius. Everyone says he inspired a raft of guitar players - true. And he and his band (but in a lot of ways, that is him - the sound of the band, if not their material, is really Johnny’s guitar, fully formed from the very beginning, pure and unwavering from that point on) did inspire a raft of musicians, making simplicity possible, making it possible for anyone to be in a band. I myself - I fiercely regret that I did not hear them in time. If I had heard them, instead of Kiss, in 1976? Where would I be? Better than I turned out, right? They were cool, they were simple, they were honest, they were perfect.
That is the last word on them: they were a perfect rock band. Very possibly the perfect rock band. And Johnny Ramone was, probably, the perfect rock guitar player.
Now - perfection is not everything - perfect things are not necessarily the best thing. Perfection, purity, these things are limits - not weaknesses, really - but limits. You have to get past perfection at some point, to be the best - so all this sentimentality can’t blind me to the fact that if I were choosing, I’d still take Pere Ubu or the Velvets or the Beatles, possibly P-funk, maybe the Stones... it’s a short list - the bands I like more, or who were “better” than the Ramones - Beatles, Velvets, Pere Ubu, maybe (by some criteria) Beefheart, Can, P-Funk, maybe the Stones, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and the Byrds, maybe Fairport Convention/Richard Thompson, maybe even Bob Dylan - but that is about all. There are guitar players I like more, though that list isn’t much longer: Hendrix (though I don’t listen to him as much, and often feel almost intimidated by him), Thompson definitely, Clarence White and Michio Kurihara (the secrets), maybe Roger McGuinn - Jimmy Page, I’m afraid, Wes Montgomery and probably Charlie Christian, with Pete Cosey, Sonny Sharrock, Michael Karoli lingering around the edges. There could be others.
That’s not as long a list as I thought. I started, the morning he died, as it happened, making a list - my top 10 favorite guitar players of all time:
Richard Thompson
Jimi Hendrix
Jimmy Page
Johnny Ramone
Clarence White
Michio Kurihara
Roger McGuinn
Pete Cosey
Sonny Sharrock
Peter Townshend...
...say. There's Johnny, quite high up there. I was thinking about this stuff before he died - the movie had me thinking about him, and writing about him - which is obviously part of why this news was so devastating. They were on my mind...
So back to the Ramones - their place in the world of rock and roll, my reaction to them. About what they did - their sound, their importance...
The dirty secret is that I am ambivalent about them. I mean, the last 2-3 years, I have gone rather far in the other direction - listening to art bands, from Can and Soft Machine and Van Der Graf Generator to Derek Bailey and Keiji Haino to David Bowie and Radiohead. Yet - I have also gotten into punk a bit more, the edges of punk, bands I did not hear at all the first time around - the Buzzcocks (minimal airplay), Stiff Little Fingers (I had never heard them, knowingly, til I got the record - only 2 or 3 years ago.) Minimalism and avant garde and noise and - those things feed off one another, but they do it in a way that kind of pisses on the rhetoric of punk. I have never trusted its Puritanism (it is not accidental that it devolved into real Puritanism, pretty quickly, with straight edge hardcore and the like), its trashing of what came before. I loved AOR before I heard of punk, and continued to love it after I started liking punk, and still love both... so I don’t know.
Still - it is not really the Ramones I am ambivalent about. I am ambivalent about the propaganda that surrounds punk. You never hear anyone talk about the Ramones without talking about killing off the dinosaurs - and about simplicity and fun as if that were somehow antithetical to “seriousness” or virtuosity. That was not part of the first wave of punk. The Ramones' contemporaries were bands like Television - guitar noodling eggheads; Patti Smith - poetess; the midwest bands - Rocket From the Tombs, The Mirrors, the Electric Eels - coming out of the 60s bands, Stooges, Velvets, MC 5, the garage bands, the art bands (Captain Beefheart, Red Krayola, the Mothers, etc.) It was not monolithic - it was just devoted to freedom, aggression, to expression. The Ramones were part of it - it is a bitter pill to hear them being turned into another force of conformity.
I have to stop somewhere. I have the luxury here in blogland of developing whatever it is I'm saying over time. So I can come back. But I want to finish with this - something I wrote down back when Joey Ramone died. Punk changed everything - but it did more than kill off what was on the radio and replace it. (It didn't really do that - just exposed so much of what was on the radio as the shit it was.) It created plenty new - but it also changed what was already there. After punk - and when I say punk, I mean The Ramones - you could, if you were listening, hear the rock in the bloat of what came before. It didn't so much kill off all the Led Zeppelins and Black Sabbaths of the world as redeem them. Robert Plante once said that "God Saved the Queen" was a slowed down version of "Communication Breakdown" - which it is. But you needed punk to hear it again. It changed the way people listened to heavy metal - after punk, people could hear Bonham's drumming, Sabbath's drive and AC/DC's punch again. That is what punk did for me - I started listening to punk in earnest in the mid-80s - and it sent me as much for my old Zep and AC/DC records as for the punk-derived bands around at the time (The Replacements, Husker Du, Butthole Surfers, The Meat Puppets - my personal mid-80s favorites). I was not alone - as grunge would soon show us...
I am very grateful. Thank you Johnny (and Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy).
Monday, September 13, 2004
End of the Century
The release of End of the Century, a documentary devoted to America's greatest rock and roll band, The Ramones provides an excuse to write about music.
Hard to say what I have to add. I am listening to the Talking Heads right now - The Name of this band is the Talking Heads. Adrian Belew making strange noises on guitar. The rest of the band banging away that white boy funk they did in the early 80s. They are a band I am not sure what I think of. Moments of glory, lots of stuff that's just witty drab new wave, a few songs in the middle, when they sound like a watered down version of Pere Ubu or the Gang of Four.
Punk: I heard it late, and probably didn't really hear punk for a while - what I heard first were bands like the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello - The Cars, if that counts (and probably it does, in some sense.) I don't know what the first punk song I ever heard was. Probably "Train in Vain" - I knew the Clash was a punk band, heard that - thought, this is not so strange - this is just a bit rougher version of Tom Petty or Neil Young - this is pretty good! And then I heard "Lost in a Supermarket" and thought this is even more so than the last... And then I heard "London Calling" - that's when I realized what people were talking about with punk.
The Ramones I didn't hear until End of the Century came out - "Rock and Roll Radio". I found it to be just about exactly what it was meant to be - those big melodies, the big sound - I loved it, without thinking it was anything but just a great little updating of all those old pop classics you heard on oldies stations. When I was youngr than that, I rather liked bands like The Bay City Rollers, Shawn Cassidy - those cheesy pseudo Rock 'n' Roll teeny bopper bands... The Ramones struck me as making music like that that was, unlike theirs, original (in both the sense that they wrote it and the sense that, even playing this old fashioned sound, they sounded brand new, and completely real), and absolutely legit. None of the calculated crowd -pleasing - the feeling I got from the Ramones was of a bunch of guys who absolutely worshipped the music they were playing and were trying to express pure glee with it.
It is strange - it is hard to believe, thinking about it - the poor Ramones, never had a real hit - nothing huge. Nothing like, oh - "We Will Rock You". They never sold the records - but within a year or so, that song - "Rock and Roll Radio" was as inescapably part of the universal pop culture as "We Will Rock You" - just, somehow, divorced from the Ramones themselves... And while maybe nothing else from the Ramones has reached that level of popular penetration, their music has permeated pop culture. Everyone knows them, loves them, takes them - took them - for granted...
Sometime in 1980, the radio stations where I lived got cool. I don't know when or why or how, but that year, I heard everything - I heard the Ramones, the Clash, the Talking Heads and Blondie and The Cars and Elvis Costello and The Police, I heard the B-52s, Split Enz, The Vapors, Sniff and the Tears, The Greg Kinh Band, U2 - all of this alongiside, on the same station, I think, as all the AOR stuff around. Zep and the Doors and Stone and Hendrix - and a good dose of Bruce and Lou Reed... not to neglect Southern Rock - crappy metal (Ozzie, Ronnie James Dio, Def Leppard, The Priest) - party rock (George Thorogood) - art rock (Steely Dan to ELP)... This did not last that long. Radio in Boston, in 1981 or so, was similar - less classic rock, more punk, new wave, and edgier punk and new wave (you could hear Soft Cell and the Damned in those days... the FCC was not so curious - you could hear "Jet Boy, Jet Girl" on the radio...) All this stuff layered on top of my fairly well established AOR music tastes - I liked a lot of the newer stuff, though I still separated it from the old stuff. That started to change as U2, REM, and eventually groups like the Replacements and Husker Du entered my consciousness....
But the Ramones - yes, the Ramones. Somewhere in here (80 or so) the radio started playing older stuff - "I Wanna Be Sedated" - sometimes "Sheena is a Punk Rocker", covers - "Do You Wanna Dance", "Needles and Pins" - very rarely, though, anything deeper, harder than that. Much later I heard those songs - and then a buddy of mine got Ramones Mania, and we wore the tape out, driving around listening to it over and over. And so... years after that, on a drive to New Jersey with some people, we had only 2 CDs in the car, and listened to Rocket to Russia through 3 or 4 times - that was a very good thing. It does not wear out its welcome. Every time "Cretin Hop" kicks in, you think - should I tell them to turn it off? Why should I? who's going to regret hearing this again? And so - again....
This has been a rambling, pointless post. I will end it with some comments on the movie. It is, of course, a blast - hearing the stories, the songs, seeing the boys playing... And as always, seeing and hearing them play is a revelation. Someone in the movie said, they got so they could play their songs as tight as if they'd lived in New Orleans all their lives. That is true. They are so sharp, so tight, so dead on, all the time, they are amazing. I am not generally a minimalist, in anything - I like long, complicated, weird stuff - that goes for music as much as anything. And I am not all that impressed by purity - impure things are almost always more interesting than pure things. Perfection is usually not as interesting as a mess. But the Ramones were perfect - they figured out something that had to be done, and did it perfectly for 20 years. In the process - in terms of accomplishment - in terms of the quality of their work, their influence on music and the world, their personal integrity as musicians (though they may have been bastards as people - Johnny at least - holy crp, the pooor man comes off bad in this film - but in a way that you almost respect him for - for knowing what he had, for knowing how to make it work, and he himself seemed to understand, everything else is secondary) - they came out as one of the very short list of great American musical acts. Johnny Cash might be their only better...
Hard to say what I have to add. I am listening to the Talking Heads right now - The Name of this band is the Talking Heads. Adrian Belew making strange noises on guitar. The rest of the band banging away that white boy funk they did in the early 80s. They are a band I am not sure what I think of. Moments of glory, lots of stuff that's just witty drab new wave, a few songs in the middle, when they sound like a watered down version of Pere Ubu or the Gang of Four.
Punk: I heard it late, and probably didn't really hear punk for a while - what I heard first were bands like the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello - The Cars, if that counts (and probably it does, in some sense.) I don't know what the first punk song I ever heard was. Probably "Train in Vain" - I knew the Clash was a punk band, heard that - thought, this is not so strange - this is just a bit rougher version of Tom Petty or Neil Young - this is pretty good! And then I heard "Lost in a Supermarket" and thought this is even more so than the last... And then I heard "London Calling" - that's when I realized what people were talking about with punk.
The Ramones I didn't hear until End of the Century came out - "Rock and Roll Radio". I found it to be just about exactly what it was meant to be - those big melodies, the big sound - I loved it, without thinking it was anything but just a great little updating of all those old pop classics you heard on oldies stations. When I was youngr than that, I rather liked bands like The Bay City Rollers, Shawn Cassidy - those cheesy pseudo Rock 'n' Roll teeny bopper bands... The Ramones struck me as making music like that that was, unlike theirs, original (in both the sense that they wrote it and the sense that, even playing this old fashioned sound, they sounded brand new, and completely real), and absolutely legit. None of the calculated crowd -pleasing - the feeling I got from the Ramones was of a bunch of guys who absolutely worshipped the music they were playing and were trying to express pure glee with it.
It is strange - it is hard to believe, thinking about it - the poor Ramones, never had a real hit - nothing huge. Nothing like, oh - "We Will Rock You". They never sold the records - but within a year or so, that song - "Rock and Roll Radio" was as inescapably part of the universal pop culture as "We Will Rock You" - just, somehow, divorced from the Ramones themselves... And while maybe nothing else from the Ramones has reached that level of popular penetration, their music has permeated pop culture. Everyone knows them, loves them, takes them - took them - for granted...
Sometime in 1980, the radio stations where I lived got cool. I don't know when or why or how, but that year, I heard everything - I heard the Ramones, the Clash, the Talking Heads and Blondie and The Cars and Elvis Costello and The Police, I heard the B-52s, Split Enz, The Vapors, Sniff and the Tears, The Greg Kinh Band, U2 - all of this alongiside, on the same station, I think, as all the AOR stuff around. Zep and the Doors and Stone and Hendrix - and a good dose of Bruce and Lou Reed... not to neglect Southern Rock - crappy metal (Ozzie, Ronnie James Dio, Def Leppard, The Priest) - party rock (George Thorogood) - art rock (Steely Dan to ELP)... This did not last that long. Radio in Boston, in 1981 or so, was similar - less classic rock, more punk, new wave, and edgier punk and new wave (you could hear Soft Cell and the Damned in those days... the FCC was not so curious - you could hear "Jet Boy, Jet Girl" on the radio...) All this stuff layered on top of my fairly well established AOR music tastes - I liked a lot of the newer stuff, though I still separated it from the old stuff. That started to change as U2, REM, and eventually groups like the Replacements and Husker Du entered my consciousness....
But the Ramones - yes, the Ramones. Somewhere in here (80 or so) the radio started playing older stuff - "I Wanna Be Sedated" - sometimes "Sheena is a Punk Rocker", covers - "Do You Wanna Dance", "Needles and Pins" - very rarely, though, anything deeper, harder than that. Much later I heard those songs - and then a buddy of mine got Ramones Mania, and we wore the tape out, driving around listening to it over and over. And so... years after that, on a drive to New Jersey with some people, we had only 2 CDs in the car, and listened to Rocket to Russia through 3 or 4 times - that was a very good thing. It does not wear out its welcome. Every time "Cretin Hop" kicks in, you think - should I tell them to turn it off? Why should I? who's going to regret hearing this again? And so - again....
This has been a rambling, pointless post. I will end it with some comments on the movie. It is, of course, a blast - hearing the stories, the songs, seeing the boys playing... And as always, seeing and hearing them play is a revelation. Someone in the movie said, they got so they could play their songs as tight as if they'd lived in New Orleans all their lives. That is true. They are so sharp, so tight, so dead on, all the time, they are amazing. I am not generally a minimalist, in anything - I like long, complicated, weird stuff - that goes for music as much as anything. And I am not all that impressed by purity - impure things are almost always more interesting than pure things. Perfection is usually not as interesting as a mess. But the Ramones were perfect - they figured out something that had to be done, and did it perfectly for 20 years. In the process - in terms of accomplishment - in terms of the quality of their work, their influence on music and the world, their personal integrity as musicians (though they may have been bastards as people - Johnny at least - holy crp, the pooor man comes off bad in this film - but in a way that you almost respect him for - for knowing what he had, for knowing how to make it work, and he himself seemed to understand, everything else is secondary) - they came out as one of the very short list of great American musical acts. Johnny Cash might be their only better...
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