APRIL 16, 2001. This isn't about rage, really. It's about love. But where there's punk rock, there's rage, so I managed to work some up in here. R.I.P., Big Guy.

  

 

 

ADIOS, AMIGO
© 2001 Roy Edroso

One of the great things about being young and punkrock -- which, believe it or not, I was, once -- was that you could always count on being misunderstood. Sometimes you would be misunderstood directly -- as I was by my friends when, after seeing my first Ramones show, I gave up pot, started drinking lots of coffee, and spent all my lesiure time listening to "incompetent" musicians (and trying to play like them).

But more often you were misunderstood vicariously through your heroes. The world barely noticed you, but it always had a thing or two to say about those mohawked freaks with record contracts. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on 12th and First, eating a 99 cent breakfast special and glumly reading the Daily News as it gave Sid Vicious the old thrill-killer treatment, as if he were just a green-haired Berkowitz too dim to murder more than one chick before getting caught. I remember the puffy, longhaired countenance of Woodstock fossil Chip Monck, hosting some TV year-in-rock roundup, sneering, "Then there was punk rock -- you know -- safety pins through the cheek!"

And so on. These misperceptions and expressions of contempt were bracing. If the unclued dweebs who ran around snorting coke and dressing like the Great Gatsby thought we were wrong, we figured, then we had to be right.

But over time this weirdness gave way to another weirdness: the dweebs deciding that there was something to this punk stuff after all, especially when tastefully mixed with disco or rap or arena rock. Blondie went legit. Video killed the radio star. You went to a temp job all hung-over and the secretaries were talking about the lead singer from Generation X who had somehow gotten quite big.

Things got weirder and weirder: Lou Reed did a Honda commercial. Elvis Costello sang with a string quartet. Finally, 25 years on, we have all these kids wearing Chuck Taylors (aren't those just hightop sneakers? Who's Chuck Taylor?) and ripped jeans, calling themselves punks. Sure, kid, and I'm a flapper.

Of course I liked the old weirdness better, because it allowed me to feel superior. Think that's sick? These days, it's hard enough to feel even adequate. I can't afford the right clothes, and I haven't the leisure to explore the appropriate trends. Of course that was true a quarter-century ago, too, but back then it made me cool. Now it makes me the opposite. Cool used to be the alley behind the lame club you couldn't get into. Now it's the lame club.

So mixed in with the sadness on Sunday came a wonderful surprise. The coverage of Joey Ramone's death was as stiff as -- well, as Joey himself was onstage. But not stiff in a cool way like Joey.

Reporters talked about the Ramones and their contribution to rock as if their eldest son had mumbled something about it to them on his way to soccer practice, and they had done their best to pull it together with some snippets of crit-speak they vaguely remembered from some article they'd read one day in a copy of the Soho Weekly News that they'd picked up to get the address of Plato's Retreat.

CNN was about the best of the obits, and it sucked. In a time-honored tradition, they tried to explain the Ramones via their connection to more famous people. "Their 'do it-yourself,' garage-rock influence still echoes today in bands such as Green Day and the Offspring... Bruce Springsteen, after seeing the Ramones in an Asbury Park, New Jersey, club, wrote 'Hungry Heart' for the band..." Yes, folks, the Boss actually knew who this guy was. Prepare to mourn! And yes, Green Day echoes the DIY sound of the 1975 Ramones by spending as much on the kick drum mike as the Ramones did on their whole fucking first album.

"They became fixtures in downtown clubs like CBGBs and Max's Kansas City, joining fellow punkers like Patti Smith and Richard Hell." (When was the last time you heard them called "punkers"? People ca. "Mexican Radio"?) "The scene eventually produced commercially successful bands like Blondie and the Talking Heads."

Spin just named Ramones the #1 punk rock album of all time. That delights me. Why? Because I picture some youngsters putting on the CD (assuming it's available) and listening with furrowed brows and perplexed stares. We don't get it. Where's the phat beats? Where's the syrupy production values? What's wrong with his voice? Ewww, he sniffs glue? That's so ghetto! Wait -- aren't Nazis, like, bad?

Is it any wonder my heart was warmed? All these years and all this credibility later, and Joey and his band are still totally mysterious to the mainstream.

For those of us with some mileage on the meter, things look and sound different. In fact, it was Joey and his band that made me a "punker" in the first place: Crummy rock theatre, northern New Jersey, November 1977. The lights go down. Yelling, whistles. Vin Scelsa announces: "What can I say... here are the Ramones!" Lights up, bang. They look like their picture. They are their picture. Torn jeans. Biker jackets. Facing us down like an offensive line. The guy in the middle looks sick. Too thin. Weird specs. Crooked mouth. "It's great to be back in.... NEW JERSEY!" He sounds the way you probably sound when you're pretending you're a rock star circa 1966: Slightly ludicrous, pretty fucked up, vaguely British, egregiously tough -- totally cool. "The first song is called.... ROCKAWAY BEACH!" Somewhere in the background: "Onetwothreefour--"

After that, everything's a pounding brilliant blur. All I know is when I came to, I was cradling a Music Man RD-50 amp in my arms, guitar slung over my shoulder, trying to make it to a gig.

Some stupid shit at Salon said Joey "didn't sing so much as bleat." I suppose Joey wouldn't have been a good choice for Billy in Carousel. But if you accept that bel canto isn't the only acceptable vocal approach in the whole wide world, then Joey was actually an amazing song stylist. He stretched, flattened, and fragmented lyrics in the classic rock manner -- that is, the manner of trying to sound bored and impassioned all at the same time. Then he took it further, till the words got so far from their original pronunciations that when you try to write them out phonetically they look like George Bernard Shaw's dialect parts: "Ay daddyo! Ah, dwanna go! Daaaaahntuh baseman! Stock donnair!"

Then there are the records (or, as we used to call them, rekkids). That first album, acetylene strong. Leave Home, the only major-band second album I can think of that's totally devoid of Sophomore Slump. Rocket to Russia -- the Greatest Ramones Album Ever, and the Greatest Rock A-Side of All Time (You dispute? "Cretin Hop," "Rockaway Beach," "Here Today Gone Tomorrow," "Locket Love," "I Don't Care," "Sheena is a Punk Rocker," "We're a Happy Family" -- what the fuck beats that?). Road to Ruin, End of the Century, "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg," Subterranean Jungle, "Something to Believe In," Animal Boy, "I Don't Want To Grow Up"... et alia ad gloria.

I never got to thank him. Oh, wait, in a way I did.

Joey attended one of my old band's shows at CBGB. Our drummer approached him afterwards and asked what he thought. "It was cool," said Joey, "It reminded me of those alpha waves --" He raised his stalklike arms and fluttered his hands around his head, as if to demonstrate.

Not a rave, exactly. But it meant that Joey had heard us. And pretty much every band that played CBGB, or played like a CBGB band, however many times removed (yea, even unto Crazytown), that he heard was thanking him whether they knew it or not. Because they wouldn't have been there, and maybe they wouldn't have been anywhere, without him. .