Ramones at 50

 

Ramones turns fifty years old this week and it's a noticeable event. Disaster Amnesiac has seen various social media personalities giving their takes on the incredible, impeccable debut from the first so defined Punk Rock group, the Ramones. It's realized that Lester Bangs had used the term, perhaps a few others, too, but I'm in the camp that Punk Rock as qualified began at Ramones. That being stated it's not the intention here to analyze that origin but instead to try and dig deeply into the essential album that Ramones is. Ramones music has been a study for this listener since 1984 or so, when in the latter months of 8th grade I became aware of musics other than Heavy Metal, which had me enthralled from about 1981 or so. Kiss a bit earlier on that timeline. Sophisto-Jazz and Funk and Disco and Soul Jazz a bit before them. Etcetera. Over the years since '84 this listener has listened to the Ramones with some regularity. Starting in late February of this year the need to dig even deeper and with much more focused intent and regularity due to the coming 50th anniversary of Ramones arose. Hence the album has been pretty much the sole soundtrack to any drives in my increasingly desert worn ride. Its speaker are still great though. Basically only songs from Ramones traveled through them from that time until yesterday. And not as if it's been removed from the CD player yet even. Guess it will be determined whether or not that remains the case after today. The entire album song to song must have been looped one hundred times. Here's the thing though, and I'm sure you're already aware of it: Ramones can and may just as easily will remain being blasted for one hundred more times before some other sounds are deemed critical. It just has this power which is so lasting, so enduring and forceful and essential as to render it timeless. Many times as I've listened to it over the past couple of months it's been realized that the album will remain being listened to by fans of music on its 100th anniversary. It's cranking within my ears buds at this very moment and continuing to offer new sound combinations or technical brilliancy or mind blowing lyrics delivered by a singular vocalist. Just now: a hidden harmony vocal on 53rd & 3rd, an aspect that to just this point in time has never revealed itself to me. And yet there it is. No way that Disaster Amnesiac is the only one going through this experience right now either. Ramones were a seminal band within Rock 'n Roll and its various offspring. Millions know it. Their children know it. Their grandchildren will know it. So forth Ramones will live on through several generations of humans. They're huge in Argentina. Ditto Spain. And New York City, Tokyo, Tucson. Do they have a following in Kabul? Moscow? A listening update: Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World's last strains of crunchy guitar are pumping into my brain. I'm about to scroll back to Blitzkrieg Bop and start the entire process once again. And there it is, those power chords and that plunking bass guitar and open hi-hat cymbals roiling, and here we go again and it's just as good as it was the last time and the time before that and the time before that one and on and on back to that first time the musical brain was exposed the magical chemistry of the Ramones. Ramones is a multi-tiered work. Musically its conception and execution are high level genius as people such as Rhy Chatham and Thurston Moore and Joe Carducci have stated. There was a point the other day as Disaster Amnesiac merged onto Congress St. from I-10 when the guitar line in Chain Saw reached points of the highest abstraction, JS Bach levels of heavenly otherworldly sound. Ramones being a work of the 20th Century it's a work conjured from electricity and electricity feeds amplifiers. The amplifiers' sound emanations feed into microphones which in turn send these signals to mixing boards, wherein they're mixed down or up into whichever alchemist's recipe is in need of. All musicians and engineers are hoping for that elusive alchemy in which something effective and lasting is brewed up. Ramones, as you well know, is such a brew. I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement is now up in the rotation. From the simplicity of the players' and the singer's approach arises an ensemble sound, so sharp and cutting as to be able to inflect fresh cuts each time it's utilized. Perhaps somewhat more problematically for at least Johnny Ramone Ramones is also a template for, after its emergence from the zeitgiest, the Punk Rock movement. It's been inferred that he wasn't a huge fan of too many exemplars for the genre that his and the other Ramones imaginations, as many of them found much more material success. Did Johnny realize that in 2076 there would still be a market for his band's music, which will surely be the case? Ramones also enshrined the negative affirmation with music and art. After the album's release the the public's hearing of it, it became more of an option to go with "I don't wanna", except in cases such as "I don't wanna be taxed at high rates to fund incompetent programs run by government", in which case even the Punkers and the Hardcore Punks tend to bond with their inner Little Emperor but quick. Hell, Ramones pretty much invented Hardcore now that I'm thinking about it: Today Your Love Tomorrow the World again. Ramones Ramones Ramones Ramones Ramones. Say it forty five more times in celebration of its golden anniversary. Better yet spin it fifty more times, even if it's just once a year for the next fifty years. Those, and even additional listens, will offer up rich aesthetic rewards for their listening. Ramones will never die.