Donna Gaines - Why the Ramones Matter

Evelyn McDonnell

Loyola Marymount University

Series Editor

WHY THE RAMONES MATTER

Donna Gaines

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright 2018 by Donna Gaines

All rights reserved

First edition, 2018

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

ISBN 978-1-4773-1871-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1875-1 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1873-7 (nonlibrary e-book)

doi:10.7560/318713

For the Greater Glory of God, the Ramones, and the Generations Rising

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The Ramones are my band. Over the years every song has been for me. Why else would they have written 53rd & 3rd, about my former subway stop; or valorized glue, my favorite high school drug; or, in the highest-charting original song of their career, canonized my birthplace, Rockaway Beach? On top of that, perfectly predicting my career trajectorya teenage lobotomy-cum-PhD.

By now, long after all four original members have departed, a Ramones song, video, concert footage, or stray lyric floating around in my brain will connect me instantly to millions of people around the world. A generation later, the light and joy in the eyes of my students when they see a Ramones poster on my office wall says it all.

My name is Donna and Im a sociologist. The Ramones have been a de facto higher power for over forty years. Even now, post-ascension, theyre still my psychic protectors. Their music buffers me, as a participant-observer, against a social world I study formally but never fully engage with.

By day, as a graduate student in the early 1980s, I delved into the great works of Durkheim, Marx and Weber, Margaret Mead and C. W. Mills. By night, I embraced the sociology of the Ramones. So much of who I am has been informed by the Ramones music. They offered a subterranean view of postWorld War II America I could work with; high theory, low culture. So simple, so much fun, you might easily overlook how richly complex the music was, how sophisticated their lyrics were.

Before you realized it, you were abducted by the Ramones, sucked up into a cultural rebellion, a covert operation, a social movement. By the time you figured it out, the band had changed your life. Plus, the music was funfierce, energizing, loud, and fast. Vicious and wholesome and dark and hopeful, and all at the same time. Plus, they convinced us we could do it too; kids in the audience one night, onstage the next.

The Ramones penetrated the warped crevasses of the body social in sick new ways that resonated personally and culturally, prophesying in their specific time and place. Today generations of scholars, journalists, musicians, youth workers, filmmakers, artists, and clergy see the world through the punk prism most clearly articulated in the Ramones project.

From the beginning, I was a fan, a true believer. Then, in 1996, as the Ramones were about to retire, my editor at the Village Voice, Ann Powers, asked if I wanted to interview them. After twenty-two years of service, now my boyz were saying Adios, amigos. Although they were my heroes, Id never been interested in actually meeting them. I felt I already knew them, especially Joey. From their music, it was clear they knew me too. I rarely missed a show. The band lived inside my stereo speakers and my head. As my spiritual guides, the Ramones spoke to me in dreams. But I did need to get some quotes. Its widely known that the Ramones were one of rocks most dysfunctional families, complete with ongoing venomous intrigues and endless backstabbing. Johnny married Joeys fiance; C.J. married Markys niece, and it didnt end well. At any given time, Dee Dee hated Joey or Marky. Or Joey was pissed off at Dee Dee. Or Johnny said something about Joey. The next week they were back, busy collaborating and setting up shows and deals. Together they were even more fucked up than my extended family. Alone, the Ramones could be the sweetest men in the world. Still, if you hung out with one, you didnt mention that youd seen the others.

By 1996 Id done my share of wacko interviewsHoward Stern, Mister Rogers, Eric Bogosian, Steve Malkmus. But interviewing the Ramones took all my social skills, and my life would never be the same. Tommy had retired ages ago, and at the time Marky was out of the country. Nobody could find Dee Dee. Everyone warned me Johnny told every reporter the same thing and that Joey would make me interview him twice. From what I gathered, C.J.the bass player who replaced Dee Deewas the only normal one. At the core of my teaching, my scholarship, and my spiritual journey is the study of human alienation. In the Ramones and their legions I found fellow travelers, a soul family of people who get me. By now, the Ramones story has been told and retold in several forms and languages, across three generations. The names, dates, people, places, and things on their long tour of duty have been well documented. The Ramones of New York City were much greater than the sum of their documented achievements, awards, market shares, chart positions, and critical acclaim; they opened up the world for us. In recent years, weve enjoyed an outpouring of excellent Ramones biographies, memoirs, and oral histories, journalism, critical scholarly work, videos, bootlegs, documentaries, and feature films. C.J., Tommy, and the Ramones art director, Arturo Vega, too, have great stories yet to be told. But thats not my purpose here and now.

The work is part encomium, part eulogy, and Im completely biased and prone to hyperbole. Like any diehard fan, Im in an ongoing relationship with the Ramones material, inclined to creative readings of their text, ever wondering, What do they really mean? Im here to testify that the Ramones music mattersculturally, historically, sociologically, creatively, and profoundly. In the early days of punk, as critics and scholars began to hail punks as the New Agents of History, the next Marxian messiahs, I began to understand the Ramones as the True Sons of the early-twentieth-century Italian neo-Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. I embraced them as uniquely American organic intellectuals. They were of us, for us, and will remain with us, always.

Who were the Ramones? How have their individual and collective biographies intersected with us, with history? What did they stand for? What great gifts have they left for us? Its with great affection, reverence, joy, and sadness that I seek to add anything more to their story.

The Mission

When he heard a Ramones cassette demo for the first time, the famously icy Lou Reed, in a rare moment of exuberance, immediately saw a crack in the order of things. Without a doubt the most fantastic thing youve ever played me bar none. I mean, it makes everybody look so... wimpy, Patti Smith and me included... everybody else looks like theyre really old-fashioned, Reed told Ramones manager Danny Fields. Thats rock n roll. They really hit where it hurts. It was 1975, and rock and roll, as we knew it, was about to die. They are everything everybody worried aboutevery parent would freeze in their tracks if they heard this stuff.

God gave rock and roll to you, and when it was lost in the wilderness, the Ramones were sent to earth to reclaim it. In order to be successful, rock and roll must scare the shit out of adults, cleanse the psyche of everyday bullshit, and energize the spirit.