RAMONES REALITY
BY BRINK STAFF
On September 24th while the world's eyes were on DC, in Woodstock NY a stay at home mom put on a rock n' roll event, first of its kind in the Catskills. Independent promoter Stacy Fine, who considers her duties to be PR = Push Revolution!, organized a Ramones Tribute and Competition called "Ramones Reality".
Local bands and solo artists entered Ramones reality and gave their best imitation Ramones performance live on stage at the Joyous Lake . The winners were a group of 15 year old boys who have a garage band from Hyde Park , NY called Bums Against Poverty. Some truly little ones Dante, Tannee, and their 2 yr old friend Phin took first in the looks category (they lip synched "Beat on the Brat"). Joey Ramone's real life mom, Charlotte Lesher and JR's "god"-daughter, Raven were excellent guest judges as they were willing to be on stage and speak to the audience. The night was truly moving and empowered by video artist Jim C.'s (Howl and Eyewash Festivals, former Nada Gallery owner) psychedelic projection/ montage of live Ramones performances.
Since I had to emcee the show I prepared notes called "Ode (Owed) to the Ramones", here's what I wrote:
Someone said to me when I started promoting this event, "Ya know Stacy, not everyone knows who the Ramones are." That was hard to believe 'cause the Ramones are in the hall of fame. When I received the new box set, Weird Tales of The Ramones (Rhino/WMG) that inspired this night I thought to myself, "AHHH, now i have everything, it's a good day to die."
An odd thought.
Nonetheless, I stretched to see his point. I tried imagining, UN-knowing The Ramones and I failed because in my life I discovered the Ramones are great.
I came across their music naturally, living in NYC, listening to NYU's radio station.
I was born in 1965 in Queens , there is an affinity here, those Ramones made me proud of my birthplace. I was fortunate that Ramones albums were coming out as I was getting into music. My friends and I discovered Let It Be, Zeppelin III and Ramones all in the same year.
So in this unknowing experiment I became everywoman and laid down my city pride. I traveled to the great resource I learned about called allmusic.com. It's like the World Book of Music. If I didn't know anything about the Ramones here's what I'd learn:
"The Ramones are the first punk rock band.â€
It goes on,
"Other bands such as the Stooges and the New York Dolls came before them set the stage and aesthetic for punk but the Ramones crystallized the musical ideals of the genre by cutting rock n' roll down to it's bare essentials blah blah blah the writer says, and then adds something I quote: "the way they turned rock conventions inside out and celebrated kitschy pop culture with stylized stupidity."
HEY! WHO YA CALLIN STUPID?!?
(Not my beloved Dee Dee, Joey, Ritchie, Tommy, Marky or CJ)
I don't see it like that at all. To me there was nothing stupid about the Ramones.
They are genius in subject, lyrics, music, live and style. Perfect as kids are. AND it was their purity that made them great. The Ramones-brand imitation of sound and song is like the moment when the universe turns time inside out, Ramones are on the same plane as physics, Einstein, E=mc2, 1-2-3-4!
If the Ramones played closer to the speed of light then anybody else then it's easy to understand they really did change everything and warped peoples senses permanently. Great editors and stylists they were at that. Hearing the Ramones is like listening to a constant and rising stream of positive and negative forces all-energy; pleasure and pain balancing and canceling the other out, for example: 'I DONT WANNA WALK AROUND WITH YOU, I DON'T WANNA GO OUT WITH YOU SO WHY YOU WANNA WALK AROUND WITH ME? I don't wanna walk around with YOUUUUUU!'
In fact, I felt more alive and captivated (decapitated too) at a Ramones show then anywhere else in life except for maybe during an orgasm. First time I saw the Ramones at the Ritz in NYC, I knew I was witnessing a great moment in Rock history. Beyond conceptual art, Ramones are real; perfect pale longhaired gods in black leather and blue jeans, NO FAT and they never stopped playing. They never put upon us, the fans, that nausea of rotation, pauses and breath, they were so mesmerizing, penetrating, working so hard onstage. When a Ramones show did actually end it was hard to believe! We were all forced to reorient our senses. It took time to return to reality.
The end was a bummer in fact because we, the fans, wished it would go on forever.
Phil Spector may have created the wall of sound but the Ramones built more walls faster and splashed each with bright graffiti, scrawled poetry.
Stacy Fine has written for High Times and other publications, she lives like everybody else these days...on the Brink. stacyfine@earthlink.net
REACTIONSAscending | Descending
My Ramones reality:
-- Dicovered them in 1976 (?). Or with the release of their first record, whenever that was. (I'm not a fucking maven.) I was 16 or so.
-- Early on in my music listening, I thought the longer the song was, the cooler it was. The End, In a Gadda-da-Vida, Stairway, Bring It All Back Home B Side, Taxi, the whole AOR radio experience. This was a revolt against the "shallow" Top 40 pop experience that my older brother and sister grew up with.
-- As mentioned, the Ramones had harbingers like the Stooges. Creem Magazine turned me on to the Stooges in 1974. The Stooges' first album, especially, represented a turning away from AOR -- which is interesting because it actually predated AOR, having been released in 1969. This is an example of quantum cultural-musical phenomena.
(An older more enlightened friend of mine explained to me how the first Stooges album was like the anti-first Doors album. Both put out on Elektra. Similar covers -- brownish tones, faces in the darkness. And We Will Fall is the anti-The End. The Doors had a reputation as a Dionysian band, with Jim Morrison playing the part of Bacchus. I now see that the Doors were a psuedo-Dionysian band. Morrison's descent into darkness was a fraud. He was really just a confused Apollonian -- listen to Love Street and other silliness. The Stooges were the true Dionysians.)
-- The Ramones had really short songs. Even by 60s pop standards. Along with the machine gun tempo, I found the shortness of the songs at first disconcerting. I then realized that the Ramones really only played one long song with short breaks in between. (Actually, this isn't true -- the "one-long-song" impression is that of someone looking back, the experience throughly digested -- or maybe just fabricated.)
-- The unprecedented tempo of Ramones songs was soon eclipsed by the California post-punk bands. Now the Ramones sound rather tame.
-- I hung out with a bunch of nerds in high school -- chess champions, math whizzes, sci-fi geeks, etc. The Ramones to most of us seemed to express a simplicity, a raw power absent from the sophistication (and sophistry) of academia. The Ramones were an existential reality. (Or maybe we were lonely losers playing Marco Polo around the swimming pool and sucking each other's dicks because we didn't have girlfriends. And the Ramones seemed to make all of that seem cool -- dammit.)
-- Saw The Ramones in 1977 in a small club in Tempe, AZ. The Runaways (Joan Jett's and Lita Ford's all-girl band) opened up. Maybe 33 1/3 percent of the crowd knew who The Ramones were. The rest of them were just staring slack-jawed. This show and a Springsteen show also in 1977 in a relatively small venue were the greatest live shows I've ever seen. (Yeah, I like the Boss. Sue me.)
-- I don't own any Ramones albums or CDs. I owned the first three as a teenager. I hate hearing their songs on the radio now. I hate the fact that it got popular with frat boys and the like. I hate having my memories co-opted by the insincere and the unauthentic. By people who would have hated and made fun of me and my geeky friends.
-- Some other monkey on a typewriter has probably written exactly what I have written above, and it's on some other website. Monkeys jumping up and down in the chaos. The Ramones would understand this.
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