They both went down to berlin, joined the ice capades

Just finished watching an excellent documentary, End of the Century: the Story of the Ramones.



Growing up I had only a marginal knowledge of the Ramones and their sound. I was busy listening to MC Hammer. I remmeber liking "I Wanna Be Sedated" and a couple of people I knew had Ramones shirts, but that was it. When I got to university, though, and I was trying to expand my musical tasts, a roommate lent me a couple of Ramones CDs. I loved the stripped down sound, the energy, the immediacy of their music. Sure, a lot of the songs sounded alike, and they probably only knew two, maybe three chords, but their music was awesome.

The documentary is especially interesting given the scope of interviews, all of the "main" Ramones - Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Tommy and Markie - had multiple interview segments. The artists are honest, revealing both the internal struggles that continued throughout the band's life (Dee Dee's drug addiction, Johnny's authoritarian approach to the band, Joey's shyness) and the external struggles.

The most fascinating section for me was the part about the Sex Pistols and how they changed punk. The Ramones formed before the Pistols and were a major influence on that group's sound. There's a great story about a young Johnny Rotten trying to get backstage during the Ramones first UK tour and being concerned that the band would beat him up. Of course, when the Pistols came to American, they shot their mouths off, spat on the crowd, swore and became legends. People often talk about the "Nevermind the Bullocks" album as a landmark for punk music, but the suggestion of the documentary was that the Sex Pistols themselves nearly destoryed punk. What was interesting, though, was the backlash against punk music that followed. The Ramones in particular suffered declining album sales, loss of radio airplay and concert bookings, as a result of the Sex Pistols' antics. So a band that many people believed were going to become the biggest thing in the world, were seriously hurt by the theatrics of another band. As Ramones' first manager put it: "it was easier not to book us."