Culture » October 21, 2004

Swan Song of the Century

By Michael Atkinson

Now, Johnny Ramone is dead. Like a chilling, not-so-funny answer to Spinal Tap—the fictional rock band whose drummers kept dying in absurd ways—only the Ramones’ drummers, three of them in 20 years, still survive. (OK, CJ, the late-in-the-game replacement bassist, is still walking and talking, but that’s like counting Kenny Jones in the history of The Who.) First Joey, the Frankenstein-monster ur-misfit singer, his voice a straight-outta-Queens mutant-goat bleat, succumbed to lymphoma in 2001. Then Dee Dee, the archetypal post-Iggy hustler-hophead bassist, finally OD’d in 2002. This September, Johnny, whose reactionary militancy provided the group with its glue and whose aboriginal guitar style amounted to assault and battery, let prostate cancer take him. The drummers are, by all accounts, aging gracefully.

Christ, I love the Ramones, but we’re not talking geeky, punk-is-civilization-defining-art, hyperbolic-rock-critic love. I love them the way I love chocolate and good German beer, the smell of playground asphalt and the weight of my wife’s breasts in my hands. I love them for the buoyant, angry, joyous, innocent fact of them in my life, and now that I’ve seen Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia’s bio-doc End of the Century, I love them even more. All successful rock bands beat the odds of anonymity, industry corruption and popular whim; the Ramones also beat the odds of talentlessness. As someone recounts in the film, Johnny replied to the nascent Sex Pistols’ admission that they can’t play with a grunt: “Wait’ll you see us, we stink.” No one should’ve been surprised when, in 1975 or thereabouts, Johnny and the boys reinvented rock as apocalyptic hailstorm, and did so with little more in their arsenal than guile and a sense of what music shouldn’t play and sound and look like. Anyone who knew Elvis knew that attitude is all it takes, and the swollen silliness of pop at the time demanded an oppositional response.

Quite apparently, the Ramones were not poetic souls, but because they universalized the pitiful ire of every unhappy teenager, they couldn’t help but muster poetic, heartfelt reactions. Every obituarist chronicling the guys’ domino drop these last four years has been thunderstruck by the intimate connection they made with the group as youngsters. But if we all grew up, the Ramones never did. As the movie makes clear, Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee were lifelong martyrs to adolescent-reject misery—they never matured, just got older, never changed how they looked or what they played, never stopped fighting with each other and resenting the world for how unaccepted they were as teens. They remain, in fact, impossible not to love.

A conventional hodgepodge of interviews and video clips, the documentary is profoundly mournful, albeit kneecapped by the lack of decent performance footage. (The Ramones were never popular phenoms, so you don’t have a The Kids Are Alright array of material to sort through.) All the stories told about the band’s initial impressions are the same: On stage, they were the sonic equivalent to a sudden fist in the face, playing short, defiantly simple, hellaciously loud songs, no pauses, no patter, ripping it out as if they had to hurry before the roof caved in. Though doggedly self-defined, in tone and dress, as a homogenized gang, here individuals emerge. Tommy the pioneer drummer-conceptualizer seems relieved he quit the band, while Dee Dee affects the junkie’s sang froid. Johnny is as bullnosed in interview as he was when he was bleeding on his guitar strings, but he’s also surprisingly open and frank. Joey is the most melancholy figure, a still-shy hair disaster whose success on the stage was an indisputably heroic triumph over social ineptness, obsessive-compulsive neuroses and the heartbreak of having Johnny steal his woman.

They’re dead, but they’re still here, in my life. As Keith Phipps, writing on The Onion Web site, puts it, “For all the darkness and disappointment that dogged the group, no one else has produced a noise quite so life-affirming as the band’s trademark ‘1-2-3-4’ count-off.” The film’s title is fabulously apt: If little in American culture matters as much and lasts as well as the Ramones did in Our Century’s final quarter, now we can say it’s finally over. Adios, amigos.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  if there’s one thing i hate (and i hate many things), it’s psedo-intellectualizing ala rolling stone magazine about rock music and its iconoclasts.  since the early 70s, i’ve come to loathe all this kulturewissenschaft cum philosophizing about rock bands like the rolling stones, bob dylan and in this case, the ramones.  it’s rock and roll, for god’s sake. there is no hegelian dialetic involved here.  there’s no major political themes or life-changing apparatus at play. there’s no marxist underscoring or cryptic mysticism when you play the record backwards. it’s about young kids and the wand of youth with its infantile rebelliousness and vigor. it’s about drugs, frustration, sex, hormones and most importantly, money.  i’m not going to get into a lengthy diatribe about this other than to admonish ‘in these times’ for publishing academic hogwash like this, and on its front cover, to boot!  please stick to the issues you deal with best: politics, corruption, the economy and the little guy being messed over by the powers that be. leave this musical crank yanking to the pseudo intelligentsia who need something to write about for the village voice, rolling stone and the chicago reader!

  Posted by mb on Oct 21, 2004 at 4:57 PM

  Snore. Lame music, uninteresting people. Must be an East Coast thing. I only wish this had been written about the Beastie Boys.

  Posted by opeluboy on Oct 21, 2004 at 10:07 PM

  i totally agree with mb (the first comment).  am still trying to read these intellectual-rock critiques without getting a headache.  Why do I keep thinking writers like Mr. Atkinson just makes this stuff up?  If they are making it up, what for? 

  More clever rhetorical questions:  Couldn’t we do this with other popular American entertainment sources?  Was my favorite Star Wars action figure my favorite because i was a kid, or because he was secretly a Freudian (add your own shit here)?  Why was Robin Yount my favorite baseball player?  Was I just a kid?  or I mean… ok, write me back if you want im not trying to rant.

  Posted by tom w on Oct 22, 2004 at 5:40 AM

  Okay, fine, critize the Ramones for whatever the hell kulturewissenschaft means. The only over-intellecutalizing I see here is in the responses. You really have to consider the Ramones from where they came. When they literally hit the music world, Led Zeppelin was overproducing Physical Graffiti, ELO was being ELO and the Bee Gees were hypnotizing millions into a huge, hustle-dancing robot army. Shaun Cassidy was actually pulling down a paycheck by singing. The Ramones kicked them all in the balls and didn’t even pause while segueing into the next minute-and-a-half masterpiece. 1-2-3-4ever!!!!!!

  Posted by Jackalope on Oct 22, 2004 at 1:16 PM

  To those who have insecurity issues and need to belittle the Ramones or their fans, I have one statement that ought to let you know where you stand: The Ramones were great, famous, and millions enjoyed ther music. None of this can be said for you. Your life sucks. ;)

  Posted by Ryan Conover on Oct 23, 2004 at 4:45 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 10 posts.

Also featured Bushs War Against the Military
Running a Media Deficit
Reality Check

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Michael Atkinson

• Always Look on the Bright Side of Genocide
  When did the Holocaust become morally ambiguous?Posted on March 5, 2009
• A Massacre in 3/4 Time
  Waltz with Bashir is hallucinatory, relentless, and amazing.Posted on February 3, 2009
• Moore Than You or Me
  Slacker Uprising offers nothing new, but it will be worth something if it affects November's electionPosted on November 5, 2008
• Errol Morris’ Myopia
  Filmmaker Errol Morris has grown famous and revered as the pioneer of what… morePosted on May 13, 2008
• Iraq: Mismanagement or Mass Murder?
  No End in Sight explores how we got into Iraq and what screw-ups have made the situation spiral out of controlPosted on July 24, 2007