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...