#johnny ramone
“Our first shows were at CBGB’s on August 16 and 17, 1974. It was just an old, dumpy little bar on the Bowery, as everyone knows. Hilly Kristal and his wife ran the place, and they had nothing going on there besides winos, so they started letting these new bands play there, like Television and Patti Smith’s band. Dee Dee had heard about it, and so we decided to give it a try. It was like a practice in front of ten people. We had gotten a lot better by then, and we had more songs. At that point, we were still dressed in partial glitter because the Dolls were still the big thing in New York. I had these silver lamé pants made of Mylar and these black spandex pants I’d wear too. I was the only one with a real Perfecto leather jacket—what the Ramones would later be identified with—which I had been wearing for seven years already.” (extract from Commando Johnny Ramone’sbio).
Johnny Ramone during the early Ramones glam rock phase, photo by Chris Stein ca 1974
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FUCK YOU, WE ARE THE FUTURE!: A pissed off Johnny Ramone giving the finger to 46.000 enraged heavy metal fans (and I think I can see Dee Dee’s middle finger totally in the same wavelength) after getting booed off the stage and mercilessly bombarded with all kinds of trash, beer cups and bottles during a live performance of The Ramones at the Canadian World Music Festival, Toronto, July 2, 1979, where they were billed to play along with Aerosmith, AC/DC, Ted Nugent, Nazareth and other hard rock acts.
It wasn’t exactly the first time this had happened when paired up with heavy metal bands. Keep in mind that it was still the late ‘70s and though hard rock was outdated and dying a slow death, it was still massive, so when The Ramones’ booking agents decided it was time for the band to leave their CBGB’s comfort zone and appeal to a wider audience, the idea was to achieve this through opening for mainstream rock bands -no matter how mismatched the pairing- such as Foreigner (!)orToto ( whose lead singer came out and apologized to the crowd for having to endure such a ‘horrible band’ !!!) and even worse, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Van HalenorAerosmith. This unfortunate idea resulted in the band constantly being showered with insults and boos or sanwiches, debris, bottles, batteries and icepicks -which only caused them to play faster and louder- throughout 1978from tens of thousands of heavy metal Neanderthals, who saw this as a Heavy Metal VS punk thing and hadn’t realised that stadium rock was actually dead but nobody had told them.
Sure, The Ramones were tough NY motherfuckers, spearheading the punk rock apocalypse since 1974 but they would tolerate all this shit up until a certain point. Let’s hear it from Johnny Ramone himself (and do check this fascinating source post with all the juicy details, here):
“…We played on a bill with Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Johnny Winter, AC/DC, and Nazareth to a crowd of forty-six thousand people in Toronto… I saw the other bands we were playing with and I thought, “This isn’t gonna work.” I complained to Premier, our booking agency, about it, and they said, ‘We’ve been in the business a long time, we know what we’re doing’…”
“About five or six songs into the set, the whole crowd stood up, and I thought it had started to rain. Dee Dee thought the same thing, but they were throwing stuff at us – sandwiches, bottles, everything. Then, all of a sudden, I broke two strings on my guitar in one strum. I thought it was a sign from God to get off the stage, because I’d rarely break a string, maybe once a year. So I just walked to the front of the stage, stopped playing, and gave the audience the finger – with both hands. I stood there like that, flipping them off, with both hands out, and walked off. The rest of the band kept playing for another ten or fifteen seconds until they’d realized I was walking off, and then they did too. I wasn’t gonna stand there and be booed and have stuff thrown at us without retaliating in some way. We had to come off looking good somehow, and there was no good way to get out of that.”
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1-2-3-4! Ramones: Joey, Johnny, Tommy, Dee Dee, sketch, ink on sticker stamps, 2017.
- Follow my Instagram, I post doodles and artwork mostly, as well as random stuff I ran into.
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Ramones:Rocket to Russia ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ stars review by Jon Savage, 1977
“This has to be the one (…)
(…)‘Rocket’ adds little new; only everything’s that little extra better. Production little short of brilliant: phased drums/guitar - subliminal, wall of sound massively echoed… pure soda cathedral(…)”
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