![]() What you could hear in the music of Joey Ramone was a particular kind of passion, cooked down to its bare essentials: two minutes and three chords. Maybe it wasn't about brains - but then, the best rock 'n' roll often isn't. Vale is the founder of Search & Destroy and RE/Search Publications.) Finally, the new "punk rock" era had arrived. Joey, who admitted to writing most of the lyrics, sang "Commando" (nobody was writing about the Vietnam War most musicians were still in denial), "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" and other decidedly non-peace-and-love songs. Wearing thick, dark maroon glasses beneath a shock of shoulder-length hair, he screamed to be heard over the Marshall-amp machine-gun assault of the band. The bass player, Dee Dee, seemed the most menacing his T-shirt sported a Special Forces logo, "Death From Above."īut Joey seemed the most alien - like an enormous, gangly human spider. Keds sneakers, tiny baby doll T-shirts and black-leather motorcycle jackets. They were dressed in shockingly ripped-up faded blue jeans, basic U.S. When the Ramones hit the tiny stage, Joey yelled, "One-two-three-four," and they launched into a 30-minute blitzkrieg that seemed nonstop, with one song segueing into another. If you were an aspiring young musician, you could never afford props like that. This was the pre-MTV era, when on Don Kirshner's "Rock Concert" you'd watch rock extravaganzas like Emerson, Lake and Palmer playing a grand piano revolving in the air on a giant crane. I'd never seen anything like the Ramones before. Later, they turned out to be members of the Nuns, one of San Francisco's first punk bands. One of them was a ravishing '50s blond in a black cocktail dress. ![]() Behind me was a scruffy bunch of intriguingly dressed musician types, all in dark clothes (not the style in California that year) - they looked like refugees from Warhol's Factory. Instantly I recalled the first time I saw the Ramones - in August 1976 at the Savoy Tivoli on Grant Avenue, San Francisco. What a horrifying shock! Joey Ramone dead at age 49 - maybe I better make out my will. (Mike Watt was a founder of the Minutemen.) Made me what I am today and am still becoming. ![]() Boon, it was the biggest gulp of fresh air our lungs ever took in. They represented a way of letting your freak flag fly - not by asking folks to copy what they were doing and sound and look just like them but just go for it and find your own way. ![]() The Ramones meant so much to a lot of cats like myself who felt marginalized by "correct rock" and the whole load of shit that was getting foisted on anyone trying to be different in the '70s. (Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer in New York.) "Be careful" were his only words to me on the subject and, unfortunately, I never was. He came into the living room and, without asking, picked up the lyric sheet and read along for a few minutes. My father, an open-minded fellow and a lyricist to boot, heard the music and did something he hadn't done before and didn't do again, even during the reign of rap ('82-'84). My first thought was that it didn't sound as good as my Aerosmith records. I took it home and played it over and over, trying to figure out what it was. He smiled, like he knew that we'd make it home from jail without car fare but it would be good for us. ![]() I played the first song and Bryan's dad, a stockbroker, came out and looked at us like we had taken a crap on the rug. He only had the soundtrack from "Grease." I bought it at A&S on Fulton Street and brought it to my friend Bryan Lawrence's house. I read a review by Steve Simels of the first Ramones album in Stereo Review. ![]()
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