Vinson’s Variety: The Ramones and Capitol Hill
In a somewhat ironic twist of fate, the iconoclastic punk rock group the Ramones, over the course of the past year or so, lost founding members Dee Dee and Joey Ramone and, too, were inducted into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. With that, I am forced to recall the one and only time I watched the Ramones play, as well as disclose why I chose to intertwine that irreverent bunch of labeled misfits with current U.S. policy-making.
It was sometime in the mid-to-late ’70s, and a friend, Billie, and I went to the Exit Inn, then a major music venue located on Elliston Place in Nashville, and watched the Ramones perform. Clad in black leather jackets, hole-filled jeans, an assortment of chains and jewelry, terminator-style shades, sporting long, blunt, page-boy haircuts with squared-off bangs, cigarettes hanging out of the corners of their mouths, and walking around with swaggers somewhere between James Dean and Lou Reed, I felt they more resembled an adolescent, urban street gang than a rock band.
And I must admit I didn’t particularly enjoy their music – from a perspective of pure music ingestion and digestion, that is. Quite frankly, their music, for me, anyway, was overbearingly loud, to the point of being obnoxious and headache-inducing, and didn’t seem to have any real direction and destination. And I suppose I, to a large degree, was correct with my profiling of the Ramones, for both they and their music, as mentioned above, a blitzkrieg of ear-deafening cacophonies and politically incorrect lyrics, indeed captured what they stood, and still stand, for – confused, disgruntled, young urban America.
In a past episode of the “X-Files,” there is a scene that pays great tribute to the Ramones. In that scene, “The Lone Gunmen,” the three eccentric computer hackers – who also publish a conspiracy-themed newspaper of the same title – are hard at work in their sparse, covert quarters. The stringy-haired, grunge-looking member of the three, Richard “Ringo” Langly, is wearing a T-shirt that says “Joey” (maybe Dee Dee). A CIA type, Stiff Suit, upon seeing the T-shirt, inquires, in essence, with a demeaning, Joey–Joey who? Langly, in essence, emphatically responds with: Only Joey Ramone, founder of the greatest punk rock band ever, that’s who, dude! And, unlike you, he never sold out his principles to the system! And that, folks, is why a marginally talented band such as the Ramones is being widely recognized, and their musical works recently being covered by some of their higher profile contemporaries.
Yes, I was terribly wrong in my seventies-era assessment that the music of the Ramones had no real direction nor destination. Today, 2003, I clearly see and understand that their music indeed had both direction and destination. Here’s what the Ramones gave us, maybe more so and better than any other group before or since: They proved that to get the attention of the masses, especially concerning subjects of headline-worthy controversy, one sometimes has to do the outrageous regardless the consequences: exercise freedom of speech to the fullest and veer neither left nor right while pursuing the objective.
Concerning the current situation in America, AIDS, impossible cost of living increases, teen pregnancy and illiteracy, the constantly imminent threat of terrorist attacks, and, yes, last but not least, a for-sure invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces, and the subsequent retaliations promised to follow, some of the stiff suits currently employed on Capitol Hill, Washington D.C., would do themselves and our country a great justice by taking some lessons from those brats from New York, the Ramones, statesmen in their own right. Lukewarm or fence straddlers, they were not.
(Mike Vinson is a Warren County columnist who can be reached at [email protected].)