5/27/2023 0 Comments Joey ramonesOne was a 6ft 6in freak whose singing voice resembled the one belonging to Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits (a nearly man described by Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill in their seminal punk book The Boy Looked At Johnny as “one of mother nature’s greatest mistakes”) one was a half-German son of a soldier who claimed to have sold Nazi paraphernalia and unexploded bombs for morphine one was a bookish obsessive the final one a dropout who hurled TV sets off brownstone roofs. They were a motley crew in the first place, four odd teenagers from Forest Hills, New York. And punks they were: when the band’s tour manager arranged for them to visit Stonehenge, Johnny Ramone refused to get off the bus, wondering why he had been taken to see “a bunch of old rocks”. Sure, the noise they made may have advertised itself as a modern take on pop, but what it really was was the very essence of rock and therefore the very essence of punk. No, they didn’t look like Talking Heads, but they didn’t really look like rock stars either – they just looked like a bunch of guys who had decided to pull on some jeans, buy a job lot of leather jackets and then go round the world playing incredibly fast, loud, noisy pop music. The Heads’ rather arch persona was helped along by leader David Byrne’s insistence in saying – and only saying – “The name of this song is.” between songs, leaving the audience unable to figure out how sincere they were (which was maybe the point).Īnd then the Ramones would hit the stage. The Heads looked like the wrong kind of nerds, like the kind of people who stayed behind after class to help teacher with his science project. On their 1977 British tour they were supported by Talking Heads, who were far more alien to the crowds as they looked like people who'd spent five years avoiding fights at school. The only difference was the widths of their 501s. Although their demeanour was initially strange to us – why would you want to paint yourself as a dweeb when our entire adolescence was spent trying to show everyone else how smart and sexy and cool we are? – the Ramones looked like their audience: long hair, T-shirts, sneakers and jeans. The Ramones basically reinvented their genre through evaporation.Īnd, even though they made ridiculously fast (for the time) buzzsaw rock, audiences could relate to them because of how they looked. Using a methodical but instinctive process, the Ramones acted as though they were on a Cordon Bleu scholarship, boiling the rock’n’roll bouillabaisse until it thickened and intensified, allowing any unnecessary vapours to waft away to FM radio. That's commonplace now, but at the time the Ramones were a law unto themselves: nerdy, recalcitrant and reductive in the best way possible. Unlike most other acts of the mid-1970s – when the Ramones evolved – the band had no interest in being either nice or erudite (they celebrated a Mad magazine world inspired by cartoons, B-movies, bad TV and surf culture). And rather than the aggressive guttersnipe persona the media encouraged (as personified by the Sex Pistols, the Clash and pretty much everyone else), before the movement became commodified, punk literally meant punk – weedy, unformed, an outcast. In 1976, punk was a stance that encouraged rejection. “And then when we went on the TV show, we played them two of our own songs, and they didn’t notice,” said Bono. So they did what any squabbling nascent rock band would have done: they played him two Ramones songs when he arrived and told him they were theirs, and he thought they was amazing. They had been fighting in their garage about how their own songs should end, or start, or even what middles they should have, when this TV director suddenly appeared. These were all the things that prevented you from getting on the train when you were a kid if you hadn’t been to music college.”Īt one of U2’s first rehearsals, they were visited by a big-shot TV director who was going to give them a break on the national airwaves. “It was suddenly the end of progressive rock and virtuosity over melody and the end of interminable guitar solos and the rock-band-as-music-school. “They kind of stopped the world long enough for bands like U2 and others to get on,” Bono had said earlier. When U2 first came to be, Bono and Adam Clayton were 16, Edge was 15, and Larry was 14, and they were huge fans of the Ramones.
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