(Back in Africa, Wallflower David Rinck remembers a band without a reunion.)
Okay, this year was truly the year of reunions. In addition to Hair Theatre, Manual Scan, the Answers, the Mirrors and Noise 292, I also got to see X, X-ray Spex and the New York Dolls. I missed Sham 69 and the Sex Pistols, but that’ll come soon, I’m sure.
Well, it’s also important to remember those bands that were so great but that will never reunite and sadly we will never see again. Of course, chief amongst them are those four boys from Queens that changed the face of music, the one and only Ramones!
I guess the last time I saw the Ramones was at the Palladium in Hollywood when they toured for “Pleasant Dreams.” Before the show, I was hanging out at my then-girlfriend Cindy Longino’s house, and her dad was talking about seeing the Ramones. (She has a cool dad.) He said, “What I remember most was that they hardly stop between songs, they just count right off into the next one, like one- two-three-four!”
Wow, and so they did! Anyone who ever had the tremendous good fortune to see this band knows that their shows were a whirlwind experience that left you breathless and exhilarated. We showed “Rock and Roll High School” at the midnight movies in Nairobi once, and everyone just loved the live concert footage (note that you can see Darby Crash standing in the front row). It captures them perfectly in their heyday, blasting their way from one punk anthem to another.
And there was also something earthy and simple about these guys that endeared them to our punkest of hearts. I mean, bands have been standing in front of brick walls ever since the first Ramones album, but they’ve never quite got it the same. And they said things that mattered in the same straightforward fashion. For example, in their words:
They’re piling in the backseat
They’re generating steam heat
Pulsating to the back beat — the blitzkrieg bop
Hey ho, let’s go shoot’em in the back now
What they want, I don’t know
They’re all reved up and ready to go
They’re forming in a straight line
They’re going through a tight wind
The kids are losing their minds
And there were words of wisdom too. … For example, as early as 1978, the Ramones warned us that “we need change and we need it fast, before rock’s just part of the past, cause lately it all sounds the same to me.”
In an era of bloated stadium rock, the simplicity and straightforward approach of the Ramones was like a breath of fresh air, and the scene that they helped launch on the lower East Side of Manhattan was probably just the change that we needed to save rock from becoming “part of the past,” which it didn’t.
It is rare that officialdom ever recognizes anything good about underground music.
Like laws about hitching your horses in front of public buildings, I think the law making punk rock a misdemeanor is still technically on the books. But in December 2003, the city of New York re-christened a corner near the former site of CBGBs on the Bowery as Joey Ramone Place. At the same time, the city also declared November 30 to be Joey Ramone Day, “in recognition of the unique contribution of the Ramones to the cultural life and music of the United States.”
And rock did change, and it lives on!
— David Rinck
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