RAMONES

Trying not to be too political but I have to note that W’s first act under the new bi-partisanship was to try and ram John (I am the Walrus) Bolton’s nomination to the UN through the Senate during this lame duck session (i.e. before the new congress is sworn in). Does not bode well for the future I think.

Okay – this is a band blog – I should write a bit about music yes?

Well okay – It is safe to say before the Ramones I had nothing. That’s only a bit of a hyperbole. I was just an outsider, marching to a different drum in a long island suburban town where conformity was the rule (yeah I know like lot of others). Didn’t. Fit in. Ever.

I was in college at the time, and I was having trouble. My low grade dyslexia made papers a nightmare for me – rather than be humiliated I would just not do the damn papers – which meant I would fail or barely pass the classes. It was driving me crazy I wanted to write, I could write but I couldn’t spell – or I’d miss words in the middle of sentence or sentences in the middle of a paragraph. It was maddening and humiliating at the same time.

I didn’t know it was, for the want of a better phrase, dyslexia, until a long time after that. I kept thinking there had to be something wrong else with me. Hell that’s what I heard in grammar school and high school. My parents were told a lot; “he’s obviously bright but he just doesn’t apply himself’ – Apply myself, what a laugh. I would try and try until I thought my head would explode but nothing worked. The word lazy began to be tossed about.

I had hoped that college in being away from high school and all the failures there would change things – it didn’t. I was still me. By then I had absorbed the “lazy failure” judgment and made it my own. I figured why bother to try after a while.

And of course this lousy sense of self esteem (the gift that keeps on giving) left me no confidence were women were concerned. I was told that a lot of women where giving me “I’m interested signals” but I was so sunk into me that I didn’t notice. My thinking was always “why the hell would she be into a loser like me?”

Which brings us to 1978 – I heard on the radio, once and once only, the Ramones single “Rockaway Beach” it was loud, it was catchy it was different. And it was about a place I knew which I thought was cool. My uncle had a house on Beach 130th Street in Rockaway and we spent a lot of our summers there.

So I bought the record. I didn’t know much about the band or the Punk thing. It was regarded as dangerous. Back then the DIY network was just getting started and there wasn’t anything like the internet.

So I took it home, placed it on the turntable and dropped the needle in. The first song was Cretin hop by the time – the record finished side one (“we’re a happy family”), I knew, this was my music and these were my people. All the frustrations, longing, anger, loss, sick humor, and yes rage at a world were there didn’t seem to be a place for me came out in that blessed blessed noise – I knew who these guys were, 4 skinny ugly kids from queens (Johnny, Joey, Tommy, Dee, Dee) with nothing but the urge to say “I got nothing and that’s not right” Elsewhere the vibe was good times, grateful dead music and dope. Or good times, Disco and Quaaludes. But not for me, not after that. Suddenly I had something, this thing called Punk. I laughed at the hostility it got from others, like I cared. It wasn’t like I’d been mister popular before anyway. This was a way out; a lifeline had been handed to me. There was a bigger world that white bread conformity in suburbia.

My world had shifted. I had liked music before this, now it became my world. And when I got Leave Home and heard Pinhead. Well.

‘Gabba Gabba we accept you, we accept you, one of us, Gabba, Gabba we accept you, we accept you one of us.”

It almost made me cry as stupid as that sounds. Lifted me right out of me it did. I never really accepted myself as just myself and suddenly there was this sense of myself and that I didn’t have to accept anybody’s definition of me – that it was up to me. Yeah I was a screw up and failure and jerk, lazy and even doomed but damnit I’m going to be doing the defining from now on. Heavy lifting for a 3 minute song but there you go.

I found the rest of the punks (Clash, Sex Pistols et al) after that, and the beats, Jack Kerouac, William Boroughs and bob Dylan and Mott the Hoople and Ian Hunter and Rocks roots in the Blues and the Haunted and doomed Robert Johnson, and Howlin’ wolf and the icy sarcasm and fury of Frank Zappa, the outrage of Hunter Thompson and lord oh so many others.

It’s not been a easy ride and I’ve had more than my share of failures as I’ve gone along but they are the ones that gave me that initial cattle prod poke to the fore brain.

I am forever grateful.

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