Joey

By Crispin Sartwell

Someday I'll tell you the story of how me and Adam and Mike were chased and spotlighted by police helicopters after what started out as a simple car accident on the way to a Ramones show in 1981, and how we escaped to slamdance again another day. But for now I just want to pay tribute to the Ramones' lead singer, Joey Ramone, who died last Sunday of lymphoma.

I was seventeen in 1975, when the first Ramones album appeared, and like a lot of kids I was looking for something fundamental. Record sales at the time were dominated by art rock bands like Yes and Genesis; glossy southern Cal pop by Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles; disco by the Bee Gees.

Along came the Ramones and almost single-handedly saved rock 'n roll music from its flaccid rococo. Though they called themselves punks and pretended to be primitives who could barely play their instruments, the Ramones were archivists who knew and reinvigorated rock traditions.

In one way, they were a joke. When Joey sang "Teenage Lobotomy," for example, he was poking fun at adolescent trauma as well as getting it a new hearing. That raucous, funny/angry tantrum was the tone of many of their famous early songs: "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment," "We're a Happy Family (Daddy Likes Men)," "I Wanna Be Sedated," "Psychotherapy (That's What They Want to Give Me)" and so on.

Yet musically the Ramones were neoclassicists. Influenced by the early sixties girl groups and by surf music as well as by the Rolling Stones and the Doors, they understood what rock was and they played it perfectly. They stripped it down to its fundamental elements.

They also added something quite new, a kind of furious thrash that made people pogo and slam and mosh and stage-dive and that soon spawned bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols. The Ramones, just by straight-up rocking, were central to the aesthetic and to the experience of my generation and the kids who came after, to anyone who's loved Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, Nirvana, Green Day, the Misfits, Linkin Park.

Looking back at the Ramones through the lens of all they gave rise to, they sound tuneful, almost sweet and naive. It's hard to recover a sense of how radical they sounded a quarter century ago. Certainly, they are among the half-dozen most important acts of the rock era.

Joey himself was always seriously undervalued as a singer, and as the years went on his music, always within the narrow and voluntary constraints of the punk rock form, became more expressive, deeper and more true. Most critics have held that the Ramones' first few records were by far their best and that at best they repeated themselves through the eighties and nineties.

That's false. They kept getting better. And when Joey later on sang "Cabbies on Crack" or "Too Tough To Die," the voice was big and melodic and intelligent: one of the strongest in pop music. But nobody is too tough to die.

And though Joey has fallen silent, we still hear what he's saying.

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