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Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Month: February 2016 (Page 15 of 25)
Hey, Bobby. Whatcha doing?
“Letting my feet breathe.”
Sure.
“What’s with the punk music?”
Anarchy Wednesday.
“Sure.”
You ever run into those punk rocker dudes?
“Oh, they were scary. They wore their leather jackets in a very aggressive fashion.”
Not to mention their trousers.
“Right, right. I never saw one of ’em in a decent jean short.”
Probably didn’t shop at Ernie’s.
“Their loss. I went down and checked out a couple of those punk rocker types. Ramones were pretty good. You know: they couldn’t play or anything, but that wasn’t what they were about. The girls that went to their shows were cute.”
Yeah?
“Fishnets.”
I hear you on the fishnets.
“One of ’em had green hair. Everywhere. All of her hairs.”
All of them?
“That’s what I’m getting at. When she took off her clothes, she looked like a patchy lawn.”
What’d you do?
“Gardened.”
Sure.
Don’t forget that Joey Ramone had quite a lovely, if oddly-accented, voice. Also, someone stopped by the studio with a twelve-string and tuned it for Johnny.
Hey, Garcia. Why are you at a Dutch Angle?
“Something bad’s about to happen.”
Monsters?
“They’re always lurking, man.”
Seems like it.
Because the asshole from the record company isn’t the hero. That guy isn’t the hero, no matter how macho you think he was, and guess what: in real life, the asshole from the record company wasn’t macho and wasn’t an anti-hero and wasn’t Bobby fuckin’ Cannavale in his outer-borough leather jacket and artfully maintained accent. The asshole from the record company was Seymour Stein. Or Neil Bogart. Clive Davis is not your hero; he’s just a guy who Iggy Pop let blow him for a record deal.
Not the musicians, either. How the light hits their hair. So few are allowed backstage; you must be so special to be here with us. Do you remember the man’s Rock Moves? We’ve taught them to an actor who vaguely resembles the man, but younger, and cheaper, and easier to work with, and that actor’s gonna do those Rock Moves for you.
The fans. Right? The show must be about the fans, man. Faaaaans, maaaaan. The Deadhead, Lysergicus Americanus, proud and strong and true and in need of a haircut. Fans. Fickle, feckless followers. We’re different, though. Deadheads are nothing like sports fans or EDM lovers or gamers or chronic masturbators. The thing we like is nothing at all like the thing they like. Everybody else’s love will fade away, but not ours.
The hero is the music. The hero is the show. The show is the atom; it is where the Dead becomes irreducibly complex; all labor and effort is towards its birth. The arguments and miles lead to the show. The drugs and sex flow from the show. Within the show is the band, the crew, the fans, and even the asshole from the record company, but they are all supporting players. The music gets the big dressing room and billing over the title.
There was fire in the music, and there was a joy in the show, no matter how miserable some of the contributors were. There was something about this music that forced people to assemble, from miles afield, and listen, just shut the fuck up and listen for once in their wretched, short lives.
Nostalgia’s lovely and profitable, but it doesn’t sell out football stadiums. A lot of things celebrated their 50th anniversary last year, and they did it in casino showrooms and shitty outdoor festivals. It wasn’t the band’s pretty faces filling up Soldier Field for three nights. It was the music. It was for the chance to wake up and say, “There’s a Dead show tonight,” again.
The Grateful Dead’s shows were about the Grateful Dead’s music. The Grateful Dead’s show should be about the music.
But, what the fuck do I know?
Things to remember today:
- Steven Tyler and Ted Nugent both legally adopted their underage “girlfriends” so they could transport them across state lines without any trouble from that pesky ol’ Mann Act.
- No matter how many women you beat, if you can carry a football, you deserve a statue.
- Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at the grave of SS soldiers, and then later expressed regret for “opening old wounds.” Not sorry that he brought flowers for the men who ran concentration camps. Sorry that people got all riled up over it.
- That pissed Jeffrey Hyman off, and he wrote a song about it. (How he got Johnny to play on it is anyone’s guess.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQFEo5pj-V8
God bless The Ramones, and save a prayer for P.J. Soles.
They couldn’t play
their instruments
all that well.
But the songs
sounded pretty good, y’know?
It was something to do.
Try not to look at Arthur Kane.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDNzQ3CXspU
Does this song have the greatest first line in rock history, or is your opinion wrong? Because I’ll never write a line as good as “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm,” and neither will you. Proust wrote 14 volumes of bullshit and didn’t have a line that good, but he was handicapped by writing in French and not having the Asheton brothers in his band.
Look out, honey, cuz I’m using technology.
Queens’ Ramones did it, too, but the Bronx’s Handsome Dick Manitoba and the Dictators did it better.
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