Where have you gone, Joey Ramone?

BY NICHOLAS WEBB

COURTESY OFFICIALRAMONES.COM

Not that the major labels haven't been propping up some corpses. Total Request Live is happy to serve you up some Offspring when you're not bopping out to Britney Spears or moshing to some misspelled crew of metal thugs. Want anarchy? Hot Topic's got the shirt for only $16.99. Need to brush up on your punk rock history? Tune into Behind The Music: The Sex Pistols. And if you want to catch the Next Big Thing before it hits, there's an entire feeder circuit of corporate-sponsored skateboard tours where the pride of Southern California's Orange County can strut their stuff for the heartland. Punk is dead, all right.

So why does it still have so many true believers? Over Christmas break, I was hanging out with my younger brother and a friend of his; the friend, in turn, had brought his younger brother, a high school freshman with a six-inch mohawk and a sweatshirt covered in patches. Now, I'm just about as far from a grizzled '77 scenester as you can get, but for chrissakes, I can remember the year when this kid was born. Yet, despite Smash and Dookie, despite "Pretty Fly For A White Guy" and that "I will not go" song, the kids are keeping the punk rock flame alive.

Behind the flashing lights and the glamour, behind the media voices telling us that everything is all right—behind all that, there's nothing but wind and sterile emptiness. Sometimes a suburban kid will feel that instinctively. And if he or she craves something more, something solid, something heard in basements instead of arenas, on dead-end streets instead of interstates—that's punk rock. Shutting off the television, getting together with your friends, and making some fucking noise.

Which brings me to Joey Ramone, who died this week after a struggle with cancer. Punk didn't originate, per se, with the Ramones—the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and many others had labored in gritty obscurity for years—but Joey and his "brothers," four Brooklyn longhairs in matching leather jackets, gave the music its spirit. In the day of concept albums and faux-classical noodling, the Ramones were bashing out a three-chord populism that any kid with a cheap guitar could emulate. That spirit of do-it-yourself rebellion is still alive.

However, a I-IV-V chord progression can only do so much, so the Ramones' own musical territory turned out to be pretty limited, but the bands that used it as a point of departure are still charting a limitless universe. Between 1976 and 1980 alone, a staggering number of bands leapt the boundaries of mainstream rock to create an absolutely vital array of sounds. Wire stripped rock music to its bare essentials, Gang Of Four crossbred James Brown and Karl Marx, the Fall turned garage-rock clatter into visionary poetry, and countless other groups blazed their own idiosyncratic trails. And in the decade before Nirvana broke open the underground, the seed the Ramones had planted continued to blossom; between Beat Happening's gentle naïveté and Big Black's skin-peeling aggression lay a vast spectrum of genres to explore.

The bubble burst in 1991 when Nir-vana's Nevermind made the underground palatable to the mainstream. Kurt Cobain, guilty over "selling out," was eventually driven to suicide. But the short-lived "alternative" boom wasn't fatal. While Pearl Jam rocked the same stadiums as Foreigner, Slint were merging punk intensity with avant-garde rigor; while Courtney Love whined, Bikini Kill were taking action. And when the dust settled, the foundation had been set for a new generation of bands.

The Ramones are long gone—they broke up in 1996 after 15 years of decline—but the process they started is still unfolding. The cheery psychedelic swirls of the Elephant 6 collective and the psychotic technicality of Crom-Tech and Lightning Bolt, Tortoise's jazz-classical reserve and Sleater-Kinney's sheer intensity, have little in common with the sound of the Ramones; yet their roots can all be found in the original punk moment.

Thank you, Joey.

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