The Ramones join with Phil Spector to top off the new wave
Two things may help, at least initially. First, while considering the new Ramones album, End of the Century, a kind of LP Hellzapoppin, grab a scorecard. A pencil would help too.
The Ramones is a wonderfully zany new-wave band from the nether suburbs of Manhattan. (Now, pencils up.) The moniker shared by Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky gives the group its cozy familial name, although—pencils ready—none of the Ramones is related. In fact—start writing! —none of the Ramones is a Ramone. Joey is Jeffrey, scion of the Hyman family of Forest Hills, Queens, but he has no brother named Johnny, whose true surname is Cummings and who is,in no way related to either Dee Dee, who started life as Douglas Colvin, or Marky, born Bell, who joined the Ramones family after Tommy Ramone, whose real name is Erdelyi, dropped out of the group, pleading road fatigue and work pressure. Got that? There will be a quiz tomorrow morning.
Confronted with the cold biographical facts, Lead Guitarist Johnny Ramone clams up like a good JD facing his first joyride rap. "We never say our real names," he allows with teasing stubbornness that combines the flirtatiousness of a starlet who has just been asked her age and the sacred silence of a button man pleading the Fifth. If pressed, Johnny will elaborate: "We can't subject our parents to this. I never told them in the beginning about the band. They'd have said, 'Stop this, you can't even play a song.' I waited until we had an album before I told them. Now they're happy." "Yeah," adds Joey, with the half-speed weariness of a shell-shocked veteran of the star wars. "But now they say, 'Why aren't you as big as Kiss?' "
The folks should relax. The Ramones may never sell records like Kiss, but their inspired, self-parodying lunacy and sideways sophistication have given an antic and raucous heartbeat to the often sober-sided American new wave. "I like people to take us seriously," insisted Lead Singer Joey to TIME'S John Buckman. "It's no joke, no novelty act. We're not clowns." The nice thing about the Ramones is that one can take them seriously and have a good laugh at the same time. Tunes like Sheena Is a Punk Rocker and Rockaway Beach are feckless, speedy japes that play fast and loose with rock styles and traditions even as they pay tribute to them. Onstage, the boys look like aging incorrigibles, the bottom four students in the remedial class at vocational high school. They play with headlong, madcap and deliberately amateurish intensity punctuated with agog appraisals of the audience. Gazing out at the roistering hordes, the Ramones look like a quartet of glue sniffers who have just crashed a model-plane convention. Adoring audiences respond in kind; they cheer when Joey brandishes a black and yellow sign that reads GABBA ABBA HEY!, the Ramones' own e pluribus unum.