The Importance of Being a Ramone

NEW YORK — Joey Ramone’s father has never been too big on his son’s peculiar brand of rock & roll. Until recently, exposure to the Ramones‘ spare, howling blare would promptly reduce Dad to a headbanger (his own, of course) or leave him feeling like he wanted to, well, be sedated.

“The music used to drive me up a wall,” he admits wearily. “I tried to get him interested in some good music – his grandmother, Fanny, used to sing for Macy’s; you rented a piano from the store for a party and she came with it – so I got him an accordion when he was a child. He loved the goddamn thing, but he squeezed it until there was nothing left of it – I think he loved to hear the wheezy noise it made. As a teenager he was fairly good at the drums, playing em in the basement with his friends, but it got so I really had a hard time standing the racket.

“But say, I got a question for you: How the hell did you find me?“

It wasn’t easy. Precious little is known about the backgrounds of the various Ramones, save the customarily mumbled information that original members Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy Ramone all hail from Forest Hills, Queens, New York, and formed their one and only band in 1974 after graduating from, or “growing out of,” high school. They had been together for less than a year when they debuted to a virtually empty house at CBGB’s, the notoriously seedy Bowery club where a blank generation of distinctively raw rockers first gained a foothold. Hammering out a numbing, seventeen-minute set consisting of about eight three-chord, two-stanza songs, the Ramones were instrumental in spawning an aggressive national groundswell of back-to-basics rock bands whose defiant individualism inspired a horde of disaffected young English snots simultaneously rallying together as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Generation X . . .

New York music writers like Danny Fields of the Soho Weekly News began devoting passionate columns to the four Forest Hills rockers. Mop-haired and sickly looking, with faces so acne-caked they resembled pink peanut brittle, the Ramones were as appealing as their hasty repertoire of head splitters: “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Chain Saw,” “Loudmouth,” “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” etc.

Meanwhile, on the other side of a widening No Band’s Land, the trenches were full of contemptuous mainstream rockers and their fans, not to mention radio programmers, concert promoters and even some critics, all of whom denounced the Ramones as no-talent sacks of shit. Incensed that four mysterious creeps with the same last name (the Ramone Brothers?) had come out of nowhere to release one remedial record (Ramones, Sire Records, 1976) and subsequently generate as much press as the last Rolling Stones tour, the tradition-bound opposition demanded an explanation: Where do these punks get off?

Four years and four albums later, Joey Ramone’s father is still pondering the same question. “I gotta be honest with you,” says a bemused Noel Hyman, chatting in the office of his Manhattan trucking company, “I was surprised, very much so, when Jeffrey [a.k.a. Joey] and the band started putting out records and getting a little popular. I was always hearing him say, ‘We got something here,’ until it rang in my ears. And I didn’t believe in it at all. I would have liked him to come into the business, really.

“The first coupla times I saw the group play, I must say I didn’t like em, but I got used to it – although it took some time. But then, I guess the first time some people taste champagne they wanna spit it out, right? Still, I think they oughta put more different things in their music, ‘n’ complicate it up a bit, if they wanna get high up on the what-tayacallit – the lists, the charts? I dunno, I’m an old square. Guess it looks like he may do okay after all, right?”

‘I‘m sick of not selling records,” Joey mutters to himself as he peers into the mirror in his cramped upstairs dressing room at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre. “I want to draw more people to the shows, make something happen. If the new album isn’t a hit, I’m gonna kill myself.”

Recently returned from a well-attended tour of Europe, the Ramones are back on the road to promote their latest LP, Road to Ruin. The album has been almost universally praised as the band’s most ambitious and engaging effort to date, demonstrating as it does an impressive growth in musicianship and an expanded compositional flair. Dee Dee has blossomed into a deft, distinctive bassist; Johnny’s brisk, chunky riffing has given way to some canny, if restrained, leads; new drummer Marky (a replacement for Tommy, who bowed out last year) provides a solid bottom and a powerful forward thrust; and Joey has evolved – with the help of voice lessons – into a rather spry, inventive vocalist. None of these developments has lifted the band anywhere near the Top Fifty or the lofty status of an arena-filling attraction, however, so the Ramones have dragged their equipment out to Philly by van to headline a modest program on the site of the historic first presidential debate between Gerald R. Ford and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.