................................. To leave Commie, hyper to http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html ................................. I saw them at a show in CBGB's, it musta been 1979. Don't remember much, except that I was hanging out on the sofa in front of the stage, and the gig was brilliant. my girlfriend thought Joey Ramone was the sexiest thing on the planet. go figure. Yesterday Salon had some nice articles. Here's a couple of bits I think wrap it up. http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2001/04/16/joey/index.html Stephanie Zacharek is a staff writer at Salon: Maybe it wasn't about brains -- but then, the best rock 'n' roll often isn't. What you could hear in the music of Joey Ramone was a particular kind of passion, cooked down to its bare essentials: two minutes and three chords. Songs like "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" weren't exactly love songs, but there was a peculiar strain of love in them. "Sheena" was an ode to a girl who just had to bust out. Beyond that, you didn't know much about her, but that glorious beach-party beat gave you everything you needed to hang onto. Freddie Patterson published Back Door Man magazine: When their album was getting ready to come out, I was contacted by Sue Sawyer, a publicist at ABC Records, the label that was distributing Sire Records at the time. I went to her office and she gave me a test pressing of the album. At the risk of quoting myself like moldy fig Leonard Feather, I hailed the record as "a brave new album heralding the end of the Inna-gadda-da- vidda Age." My first line of the review was: "Anybody who hates this record is an asshole." I don't mean to tout myself as a visionary here; I am merely expressing delight in the fact that I was able to recognize this important step in rock 'n' roll when it was happening. When the Ramones played their first gigs in California, battle lines were drawn. Fans became close friends. (Sawyer introduced me to [writer and TV host] Art Fein and the three of us drove to the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, Calif., to see them and have remained friends through the years.) The others -- and there were many more of them than us -- became the enemy: lovers of all things Eagles and Peter Frampton and disco. Were the Ramones the first punk-rock band of the modern era (meaning post-New York Dolls)? Pere Ubu and the Droogs both issued records before them. However, the Ramones were certainly the most significant and the first band to take it to levels never before reached by either the Dolls or Iggy & the Stooges. The Ramones provided the blueprint for nearly every punk-rock band from the time of their debut album to this day, including the Sex Pistols, Nirvana and Green Day. In Los Angeles, bands that understood the lesson shortened their hair, shortened their songs and played fewer chords faster. The genie was out of the bottle. Bands like X, the Weirdos, the Dils, the Zeros, the Germs, the Go-Go's and Black Flag could now exist, have followings and make records. [ X, Germs, Go-Go's, B.F., all these L.A. bands were excellent -- f ]
