The Ramones “Mondo Bizarro”
Most American Rock bands are not actually born from cities. Obviously, city scenes do develop, girded by concert venues, record labels and local media. But, more often than not, the people playing in those bands are not from the place that the scene calls home. The famous L.A. and San Francisco bands of the 60s and 70s were dominated by men and women who grew up far from the West Coast. The same could be said of the Greenwich Village Folk scene or the Seattle Grunge scene or the twenty-first century indie scene that descended upon Brooklyn. R.E.M. was an Athens band. The E Street Band was from Jersey. But Athens and Asbury Park are not cities. The most iconic American Rock bands are made up of people who reside someplace very specific but who are also born from many places, many miles away.
Some might point to New York City’s famed CBGB’s scene as a counterargument to this rule. But even those bands and that moment arrived through bridges and tunnels. The greatest exception, of course, being The Ramones. Alongside The Velvet Underground (who were three fourths Long Islanders and one fourth Welsh), The New York Dolls (who were mostly from Staten Island and Mars) and The Beastie Boys (Brooklyn), The Ramones rank as the greatest band from New York. They sounded and looked like a Queens gang who were rejected by the shittiest of the other Queens gangs. Aside from their love of The Beatles and The Beach Boys, Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy had very little in common. Nevertheless, they managed to agree on a set of ten enduring, infallible commandments:
As few chords as necessary.
Twice as fast.
Twice as loud.
Under three minutes.
Jeans and leather jackets.
1-2-3-4.
Hey ho, let’s go!
Gabba gabba hey!
Do the work.
We’re all Ramones.
While much has been made of the aesthetic influence of Richard Hell on the English punks, it pales in comparison to the musical influence of The Ramones. The Clash’s “White Riot” and nearly every lick Steve Jones played for The Sex Pistols was made possible by the fellas from Queens.. Similarly, most East Coast Hardcore, a whole lot of Speed Metal and all of Pop Punk were invented by Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy in 1974.
With perhaps the brief exception of the Replacements, never has a band played so loud, fast, hard and tuneful as The Ramones. But while everything about the band screamed, the singer practically crooned. And while their sound could be aggressive to the point of nihilistic, they also seemed cartoonishly big-hearted. They were guys who, alone, had nothing and no one. But who, together, had so much and so many. They were barely friends, if they were friends at all. But they were most profoundly a band. It was all they could do, and they could just barely do that.
From 1976 to 1980, The Ramones’ established a breathless pace. And even in the early 1980s, when they were becoming both a popular brand and Punk veterans, the band’s output was remarkable. The latter part of that decade, however, was marked by personal sadness, professional transition and creative struggle. In the early 1980s, Marky Ramone, the band’s second drummer and iconic drunk, was fired from the band. And, in 1989, founding bassist, legendary junkie and gutter prince, Dee Dee Ramone, left to get sober. Unsurprisingly, The Ramone’s records from 1986 to 1989 (“Animal Boy,” “Halfway to Sanity” and “Brain Drain”) are considered the worst of their career.
As their cultural and musical influence grew in the 1980s, their sales foundered. By that point, Punk was a distant, almost quaint footnote to Pop music. Meanwhile, the seeds of Alternative Rock had been planted but were not yet viable. So, before the page turned to the 1990s, The Ramones were an anachronism. Their t-shirts could be seen in every city in America and they could still sell out rooms around the world. But, they had outlived their scene and were dwarfed by their own influence. Joey and Johnny barely spoke to each other. Dee Dee was an absolute mess. They were all over forty but were almost childlike at heart and in style. And physically, they seemed almost skeletal. It was an odd, unnerving contradiction. By 1989, while it seemed impossible that The Ramones would actually break up, it did seem fair to assume that they were finished.
Against all odds, however, The Ramones turned a corner. With the addition of avowed fan C.J. Ramone on bass, the band rediscovered a sense of youthful purpose. C.J. was fifteen years younger than the youngest Ramone and wanted nothing more than to write and play songs that sounded like the band he loved the most. Against all odds, his enthusiasm proved infectious — the entire band, including Johnny, the legendary curmudgeon, sounded giddy from the day C.J. joined.
The Ramones were perhaps the most conservative Rock band of all time. Although Johnny was the only political conservative, the entire band was almost regressive in their world view. Change was their kryptonite. When they got progressive, they got lost. Their sameness, however, was also their genius. Fortunately C.J. was a preservationist — his faith in the band’s ten commandments helped The Ramones get born again. Released “Mondo Bizarro” in 1992, “Mondo Bizarro” attempts exactly zero new ideas. But it does favorably add to their oeuvre by finding dumb jokes they somehow missed the first time around and by capturing the pathos of a band that is both always together and beloved and always feeling alone and unlovable. The album’s thirteen songs clock in at barely thirty-seven minutes. There are about three guitar solos and none lasts more than ten seconds. They even recorded three songs written by Dee Dee (who was no longer in the band but who sold the tracks in exchange for bail money). As with all the greatest Ramones’ albums, the lyrics are at once clumsy, silly and profound. It’s a lazy cliche to call an album a “return to form,” but “Mondo Bizarro” is precisely that.
Not everything works. The opener, “Censorshit,” sounds like a fuzzed out, dressed up Ramones cover band. It’s a decent gag — somewhere between “Mad Magazine” and a “Playboy” comic — about Tipper Gore and the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center). But it’s not aged particularly well. Similarly, there is a good enough, but unnecessary cover of The Doors “Take it as it Comes.” And, while the songs written and sang by C.J. fit the mold, they do pale when compared to anything sung by Joey.
But that’s mostly nitpicking. When the palette is as restricted as the Ramones’, the line between redundant and revelatory can be thin. But, to those that love them, that difference is everything. For example, “Poison Heart,” one of tracks that Dee Dee gave the band, is a notch slower and sadder than their breakneck singles from the 1970s. Joey sings it a lower register, evoking a heartbroken, middle-aged Iggy Pop. It’s a darkly romantic could-have-been hit written by an overconfident, lovable drug addict, but performed by his neurotic, insecure friend. Similarly mid-tempo but surprisingly softer, “I Won’t Let it Happen” is a sunny jangle that sounds not unlike the gentler, liter Alt bands of the day (Gin Blossoms, Goo Goo Dolls, etc.), but with Joey Ramone crooning on top, owning his fuck ups and promising to be good.
Elsewhere, the rewards are faster and more familiar. “It’s Gonna Be Alright” is delightful fan service, featuring Johnny’s two chord down picks and Joey formally welcoming C.J. into the family. It’s the sort of song that a teenager in a Green Day shirt could crowd surf to — and I mean that as a compliment. “Cabbies on Crack” is a heavy, frenetic Punk tour from fifty-ninth street to the outer boroughs and a necessary addition to the band’s joke book. “Touring” is an almost carbon copy of “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” — it speeds up early Beach Boys, removes he complex melodic changes and reduces it all to a delirious three minute drag race. It’s basically Joey repeating: “Touring, touring, is never boring.” And while “Heidi is a Headcase” provides no new thrills, it has everything you’d want from a Ramones’ song, including a lyric that is both completely dull and wildly deft:
Headcase baby
she's a cool kind of crazy
Wild and she's willing
into early Dylan
She drives me crazy
oh yeah, ooh, ooh, yeah
Though not extraordinary, “Mondo Bizarro” is the last very good Ramones album but it was not their swan song. Riding the wave afforded by the mainstreaming of Alternative Rock, they soldiered on until 1996. In those final years, they made two, largely unnecessary records, shared stages with Nirvana, played Lollapalooza and made one final appearance in Los Angeles, where they were joined onstage by Dee Dee. Perennially stuck in a version of adolescence defined by comics, rebellion and drugs, they never had a proper adulthood, much less a middle age. That, of course, was precisely their charm, but it was also a tragedy. After the band broke up, the founding members rarely spoke and never saw each other. Once they left the familiarity of the band and the road, the founding Ramones got sicker. Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee never repaired or resolved their broken youths. For over thirty years, they aged, but, hidden in their jackets and jeans and hair, they never got older. And, once they did, they died. Joey in 2001. Dee Dee in 2002. Johnny in 2004.