WHAT PRICE GLORY? RAMONES SOLDIER ON

“Survival of the fittest. And besides, it’s fun.”

—Daffy Duck, helping a wabbit-hunting Elmer corner Bugs in Rabbit Fire.

If God has a sense of humor, the Ramones will finally go all the way. The world will at last realize that the Forest Hills 4, whose slapstick rock is the sound of knuckles cracking, have a rendezvous with destiny. There will be stories *to tell then. 3tories told with a shrug of inevitability. They will tell of those days right before the spring of 1980. That angel of fame had never seemed so close to their leatherjacketed shoulders. Not when album one made a new age sound two chords away. Or when “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker” and “Rockaway Beach” hung precariously in the lower fourth of Billboard’s chart. Or when they stumbled on the road to ruin. Or when Corman’s brave New World made Ramones celluloid clown-heroes. No, never were the thighs of that angel parting as invitingly as in March of this year when End Of The Century, Phil Spector’s sonic expander on the basic format, was breaking down those last remnants of Ramone resistance.

“Our seyen years of bad luck are up soon,” Johnny Ramone insists. “It’s just been an uphill struggle. Finally, I guess, It’s all broken down.” Joey R. agrees: “Everything’s turning around. Things are looking up.”

That’s as may be, as someone on Upstairs, Downstairs used to say. So why, as I enter the Daily Planet, the Ramones’ rehearsal studio (only cheese-peanut butter sandwiches in the candy machine) on the eve of what is to be, no doubt, the band’s continent-conquering stampede, do I feel that the atmosphere is less celebratory than your average three field-goals down team at locker room halftime? For one thing, Joey is at home nutsing a sickness that has already postponed the tour’s kick-off date. For another, Johnny is, on the telephone, obviously agitated, saying things like, “I’m pissed about this!... If he doesn’t wanna do it...!” Turns out that drummer Marky has pulled a walkout with the Toronto date just three days away, and in his place is original Ramone Tommy Erdelyi, who is having a rough time finding the beat on “Let’s Go” and “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” Will Marky return? Will Tommy cut it? Tune in tomorrow.

We've tried not to compromise —but you have to succeed. H ■

In the van to Joey’s apartment, Tommy, who will surely be played by Michael J. Pollard in The Ramones Story, expresses his doubts about opening day. “Don’t worry,” Dee Dee assures him. “It’s only Toronto. We’ll have it together by Atlanta.” “By Atlanta I’ll be dead,” Tommy says. What does he think about End Of The Century, Johnny wants to know. “I guess it’s OK,” is the unconvincing answer. “It’s selling.”

What is going on? After helping Joey shlepp a few cartons of records from his basement to his new high rise apartment (great singles, by the way: Castaways, Seeds, Raiders, Ramones; a Sgt. Pepper cover is in the discard box), I wonder aloud about how these events are affecting the band.

“It’s been a wild day,” Johnny laughs. “We’ll get it together. We’ve overcome problems in the past. I thought,/Oh boy, somebody from CREEM is here and I can’t say nothing ’cause we don’t know what’s going on yet.’ Tommy hasn’t played drums since the day he left the group, for two years. And he never played drums before he joined the group. Mark just snapped. We have til tomorrow for him to snap back. It’s a comedy.”

Joey, perched on a trunk, Sipping coffee, is more pragmatic. “We’ll have to get Jim Keltnerfrom George Harrison. Did you see Harrison on Saturday Night Live? He looked terrible!”

But enough of this percussion soap opera. They will endure. Of this I have little doubt. Off to a better start is End Of The Century, the fifth Ramone long-player (not counting the incredible It’s Alive set and the soundtrack from Rock ’n’ Roll High School), and a pretty cool album if you ask me. Joey readily asserts, “Phil Spector is one of the great rock ’n’ roll producers of all time. It’s just that he didn’t have anything to work with since the early 60’s, you know. I mean, Cher and Leonard Cohen aren’t a very good example of anything. A lot of people think that maybe he dominated us, that he had total control, but it was 50-50.

All of us together. We all wanted the best record possible.”

Johnny Guitar adds, “There were no confrontations. We were careful • about jumping into anything. He would always say, ‘You guys wanna make a good album, or you guys wanna make a great album?’ I thought we were always making great albums, but... Anyway, our record doesn’t have his old sound. It’s us.”

Not only is it them, but it’s in the nick of time. The Ramones are reluctant to entertain such notions, but the fact is that the absolute failure of End Of The Century could have bpen, if not fatal, at least debilitating, and they can’t be unaware of that. “You don’t know what’s holding you back,” Johnny says. “You always feel that this one’s going to be it.”

“We’ve had it tough,” Joey says. “Since we were the first group doing this, we were like the fall guys for everybody else. We hadda be like the example. Where like the Knack comes out and the next day they’re the number one group in America. After the Cars broke, people were saying, ‘Well, new wave, this is all right,’ and we started coming into the picture. They started taking notice that it was us.”

Radio, once the enemy, is now at least a temporary ally, with tracks like “I’m Affected,” “Danny Says,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Radio” and even the misdirected remake of “Baby I Love You” (Spector suggested “The Best Part Of Breaking Up,” according to bassist-by-numbers Dee Dee; Phil was outvoted) turning up on the AOR tip-sheets. And yet all is still not rosy on the airwaves, and both Ramones present are eager to talk about the state of the medium.

Johnny: “There have been stations that say, ‘We’re not gonna play the Ramones if they get to number one’.”

"We haven't lowered our standards."

Joey: “The majority of disc jockeys could care less about what they play. They know that they’re getting a good salary and that they’re happy. Foreigner, Toto, Styx, Kansas. It’s all bullshit.”

Johnny: “It’s the disc jockey’s job to keep rock alive, to keep it from getting stagnant, and nothing was happening for so long. What happened at PIX [a flaky, adventurous New York City rock station that recently scuttled its format to go conservative] is what happens when you have too much freedom.”

Joey: “They didn’t do it right. It was a great station, all in all, but it was too unrealistic, too fantasy. It didn’t deal with the real world.”

Johnny: “If they compromised a little bit, they might still be going. We’ve tried not to compromise—I’m always aware of that— but you have to succeed. So I don’t know whether it’s in your subconscious not to go out of your way to make it any more difficult for you.”

Joey: “We haven’t lowered our standards.”

“You just go on being obnoxious. That’s up to you.”

—Wallace Cleaver, to his swell-headed kid brother, after the Beaver caught a game-winning touchdown pass and hired Eddie Haskell as his personal manager

It wasn’t captured on screen in the cartoonish Rock ’n’ Roll High School (even -Joey thinks it’s more like Yellow Submarine than A Hard Day’s Night, a mounted, shrink-wrapped one-sheet of which hangs over his couch), and it doesn’t come across on stage, where energy is all, but the relationship between the three key Ramones is very much complementaryfraternal. Johnny plays canny Ratso Rizzo to Dee Dee’s simple Joe Buck; Joey acts Larry tp Johnny’s impatient Moe; they interact, interlock, interrupt; they’re casually brusque with each other one minute, protective the next. After meeting them, you can see how this symbiosis works creatively: stability bouncing off goofiness, wit colliding against the steady beat, the basic meeting the cryptic. Like many ground-breaking American bands, both good (New York Dolls) and bad (Grand Funk Railroad), Ramones have forged an aesthetic from their, audience, their aspiration, their inadequacy, their influences. For commercial good or ill, they have to come to represent something that this reporter both respects and enjoys. Their politics, however, are something else.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24

Johnny’s 1980 campaign speech: “We’re very American. I tjiink it comes through. I’m naive about politics, and I really don’t understand it, but I feel strongly, and I’m sure that I’m probably not looking at things clearly. You can’t help it. All we do is get our one-sided view of things. That’s all right with me. It doesn’t bother me. So it’s really hard to make intelligent statements about certain things. I’m for bombing Iran and boycotting the Olympics. That’s probably not the right answer.

‘‘I’m glad to see that people are becoming more nationalistic. I guess things like Afghanistan, Iran and all have united America. It showed in the Winter Olympics. You can’t help sometimes that you want to come across with your political ideas because you have that advantage of being up on the stage and people will listen to you. We sort of try to avoid it, but it comes through anyway.

“I’m for a new President. I like Reagan. Or Ford would have beerf nice. Reagan seems hard line on a lot of things.”

“He’d probably hate the Ramones,” I offer.

“Probably. My idol’s John Wayne, and fje’d probably have hated the Ramones too.”

“Lester* Bangs should be President,” Joey pipes up.

Johnny says, “If Reagan knew us, he wouldn’t hate us.” v

The 60’s activist in me refuses to fet this pass. “If someone were to screen Rock W Roll High School for him in the Oval Office, he would not be overly thrilled.”

“No, I know. But otherwise we’d be stuck with Carter again. Motley bunch, eh? How’s this Anderson guy?”

“Anderson seems...earnest,” I say.

“Does he have a chance?”

“Not much.”

“See?”

So much for the Ramone-Cohen debate. As disheartening as is the thought of Borax-brain Ronnie in the White House and, heaven help us, Nurse Nancy as first lady, that’s how cheering is the idea of the Ramones breaking through to the heart of the heartland. It is by no means a fait accompli. Punk is still a nasty word out there, and there are those cogs of the star-making machinery who find Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and, uh, whoever, Utterly unfathomable. Even Clay Cole, unflappable in the face of multiple confrontations with the Rolling Stones in ’64 and ’65 on his local teevee-er* was nonplussed when head to head with Ramones at nine in the morning, doing “Rock ’n’ Roll High School” on AM New York. And there are those radioites, as Johnny indicates, who are less than Ramoneophiles. Stigmas die hard. Still and all, with a new manager (Gary Kurfirst, replacing Danny Fields, immortalized on “Danny Says”), with the movie (tapped as the next supercult flick by those PBS pontiffs of cinema, Siskel and Ebert) spreading the message at midnight masses, with the Spector cachet (quick! name another culture-figure whose career was brushed by Spector and Roger Corman; does Peter Fonda count?), with their prowess as a live band, the Ramones are better positioned than they have been since the start. O

For it to work, they’ve got to get the kids.

The same kids who are listening to Pink Floyd’s wall crumble, who made Cheap Trick big league players. Joey, the rock fan who, with Rodney Dangerfield delivery, can issue snap judgements on everything from Billy Joel’s new LP to Queen’s attempt at rockabilly to the deficiencies of The Cretones, wants them. The lead-off track of EndOfThe Century, “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” (a jolting slice of rock that can’t fail to stir anyone who listened to the Good Guys’ all-nighter on a 7-transistor radio tucked under his pillow when he was supposed to be asleep), is aimed at that audience. “It’s like ‘Wake up!’,” Joey says. “Kids now don’t know who the Beatles were. They know Paul McCartney and Wings. They don’t know Moulty.

“It’s true in a sense that you gotta go back to go forward, because everything’s been done. It’s how you put it across that makes it unique. But it’s not a nostalgia song. It’s very much the future.”

“When we first came out,” Johnny says with only a trace of bitterness, “everyone was so used to the other music, and then they heard us, and they thought we were out to destroy everything they had grown to like. We sent out tapes. They sent them right back, still sealed. They didn’t even listen to them. They thought we were a joke because we sang about things that other people didn’t sing about. Singing about sex and drugs is a lot more dumb/. The fact that you’re different takes more intelligence than to do what somebody else has done.”

It comes down to this: the Ramones are not the chaps they were when they originated Bowery Boys rock ’n’ roll, reawakened Manhattan and London, did 18 songs in 33 minutes and were off before you could absorb the precise effect of it all. If they are to continue being Ramones, they must also be careerists, and they are learning the ropes. After all, reasons Johnny, “I didn’t think Queen had a chance in the world. When I was working as a construction worker at the Uris Theatre, they came and opened for Mott The Hoople. I saw them doing their sound check. I thought they’d get laughed off.” The moral is: you never know in this biz.

Joey, however, prefers to take his cue from another contemporary success story.

“I think everybody really wanted to see Tom Petty happen because he had so many bad breaks and all. Not as bad as ours, though. Maybe if we get sued, everyone’ll get behind us.”