Ramones Leave Home

A 10-Minute Walk From CBGB to the Bottom Line, 1976

The Ramones had become such a constant presence at CBGB in 1975 and 1976 that I hardly knew when and how to write about them. The last post was my reporting about the general scene before the record companies moved in, especially Sire Records led by the visionary Seymour Stein. Sire signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Void-Oids from the Bowery scene; out of Ohio came the Dead Boys and the Pretenders.

Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy were so much the fabric of CBGB … perhaps the only fabric in CBGB, that their booking as an opening act for a showcase for the British pub rock band Dr. Feelgood amounted to a road trip: a 10-minute walk from headquarters. Dr. Feelgood were the nominal headliners, I guess, but the Ramones had hometown advantage in this article that appeared May 12, 1976 in Newsday. My conclusion, in which I expected that Dr. Feelgood “will probably reach a wider audience than the Ramones” was based on pessimism, not preference. But Dr. Feelgood, an excellent and entertaining band led by guitarist Wilko Johnson, who died Nov. 21, 2022, never got any bigger. Johnson died the night before I was inducted in to the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, where the Ramones, being from Queens, which is part of Long Island, are long-enshrined.

It took more time for the Ramones to break out than it should have. But during the 1980s and into the 1990s, before they all died, they were embraced around the globe. In Argentina, they were almost as big as soccer legends Maradona and Messi. Still, airplay in their home country, and home city, was rare and infrequent. I once appeared with the radio poobah Scott Muni, who I had once admired, at a panel discussion at Long Island’s C.W. Post College. I asked Muni why his station, WNEW-FM, did not play the Ramones, since their recordings, especially “Rockaway Beach” and “Rock & Roll High School” were basically surf music, no more outré than the Beach Boys. “They’re the wrong image for our audience,” Muni told me. I was astonished. “Image? Scott, it’s a radio station! How can people see the image?”

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On a good night at CBGB, the pagoda of punk rock of the Bowery, the Ramones are the best young rock and roll band in the known universe. That opinion had its reality test Monday night as the Ramones made their first important Manhattan appearance outside the punk rock ghetto in a performance at the Bottom Line, the shrine of establishment rock, jazz, folk, and blues.

The occasion was a two-night showcase with the Ramones opening for Dr. Feelgood, Columbia Records' new British hope. With each band performing only one set a night (as opposed to the standard two shows with separate admission), the 400 seat club at 15 West Fourth Street was packed with media people, from rock critics to Andy Warhol, record company personnel and members of other CBGB-type bands like Television, Tuff Darts, and Talking Heads. "I'm so nervous for them I'm practically catatonic," said Annie Golden, singer for the popular punk rock band the Shirts.

[About 15 years later, Annie would add some lines to a song I had written with my songwriting partner Frank Carillo, and she would sing it on an album by their band, Golden Carillo, released on the Silenz label in the Netherlands.]

The Ramones, who perform rock and roll as if it were the raunchiest of minimal arts (and isn't it?), triumphed. One neatly dressed young man, who looked like a refugee from a discoteque, kept insisting to his date that the band's rhythm was tasteless, but he was missing the point.

The quartet––drums, bass, guitar, led by singer Joey Ramone––has dispensed with such niceties as notes, melody, harmony, chords, and hooks. [This was an exaggeration designed to shock the suburbs, and perhaps the city too!] What remains is a surge of rhythm that maintains a constant high voltage throughout the Ramones set.

Some observers feel that you can't tell one Ramones song from another. That is ridiculous. You can tell one Ramones song from another because between each song, bass player Dee Dee Ramone shouts "1-2-3-4" so quickly that it seems that before one song ends, the next song has already begun.

The average Ramones song is about a minute and a half long. [Hyperbole for effect. The average Ramones song was closer to two minutes long]. These rudimentary structures can't quite pass for silly love songs. The band opened with the exemplary “Loudmouth”:

"You're a loudmouth baby/you better shut it up/I'm gonna beat you up/'cause you're a loudmouth babe." That is not a verse from the song. That is the song, in its entirety.

The Ramones then raced through a set of favorites like "Blitzkrieg Bop," which sounds like a combination of Tommy Roe's "Sheila" and the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" under martial law. Other songs included "Shock Treatment," which Johnny Ramone introduced by yelling: "gimme some juice!"; "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend"; "I Don't Wanna Go to the Basement," which was inspired by the cinema classic "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,"; and "I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You." The latter is not only the title of the song but its entire lyric as well, except for the line, "so why you wanna walk around with me," which occurs near the end of each verse.

Every new band should do some rock oldies to present its audience with a frame of reference. On its first album, "The Ramones" (a minimalist succes d'estime at the very least) the band does Chris Montez' "Let's Dance." Monday night, the band did "Warm California Sun," the Rivieras' surf/twist era standard. It's a great choice, affirming that Jimi Hendrix's announcement that "surf music is dead," a declaration made at the beginning of his "Third Stone from the Sun," was the wrongest thing he ever said.

Dr. Feelgood will probably reach a wider audience than the Ramones. This full-bodied English quartet plays American blues and rhythm and blues in the tradition of the J. Geils Band and the early Rolling Stones. Guitarist Wilko Johnson plays with maniacal glee, while singer Lee Brilleaux knows how to put across songs like Bo Diddley's "I Can Tell," Robert Johnson's "Rollin' and Tumblin'," and Leiber and Stoller's "Riot in Cell Block No. 9" without resorting to vocal blackface. He's also a terrific harp player.

The big if for Feelgood is how well and how far Wilko Johnson can develop as a songwriter. His contributions make up about half of the band's excellent new album, "Malpractice," and while they sound fine when you're listening to them, none is really memorable. Whether the band becomes the future Rolling Stones or a knock-off of the once great J. Geils Band parodying itself from record to record and show to show remains to be seen. Right now, Dr. Feelgood is a powerful newcomer from which we're certain to be seeing and hearing more.