2/23/2023 0 Comments You tube the ramonesMost of the videos are just silly enough to fit with the Ramones' particular aesthetic, although "Something to Believe In" is a hilarious parody of stuffy mid-80s USA for Africa self-seriousness.īut this box set's real attraction, aside from the music, is the packaging, which includes a thick comic book inked by several artists including Mary Fleener ( Life of the Party), Bill Griffith ( Zippy the Pinhead), John Holmstrom (two Ramones album covers), and Sergio Aragones, whose work in Mad magazine was influential to the Ramones specifically and to early New York punk in general. A DVD contains all of their videos, most of them embedded in a 1990 program that includes short interviews with contemporaries (Debbie Harry, Tina Weymouth) and fans (former New York Yankees pitcher Dave Righetti, who doesn't seem to get the band). Like most box sets these days, Weird Tales is a multimedia package. In the 1990s, they covered Tom Waits ("I Don't Want to Grow Up"), the Who ("Substitute"), the Amboy Dukes ("Journey to the Center of the Mind"), and Love ("7 and 7 Is"), but best of all is their webslingin' version of the original "Spider-Man" theme, which originally appeared on the 1995 compilation Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits. Phil Spector gives "Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?" the wall-of-sound treatment, and "Rock and Roll High School" is basically a revved-up Beach Boys song. If they were reluctant to evolve their sound, the Ramones constantly tested its flexibility. The Ramones' aesthetic has become such common currency, though, that it's easy to forget how raw they could sound, how tough and tender, how just a handful of elements could be recast in infinite variations. Every song, from the first track ("Blitzkrieg Bop") through the last ("R.A.M.O.N.E.S."), shares the same basic elements: sharp, fast guitar riffs punchy momentum driving tempos and handclaps or sha-la-las or some other nod to pre-album rock pop music. The Ramones were the anti-Beatles: they resisted musical growth and maturation, and we're all the better for it.Ĭollecting 85 songs from 20 years, Weird Tales of the Ramones, which Johnny helped to curate, reveals just how little the Ramones' sound changed and just how little that mattered. As their contemporaries imploded or exploded, the Ramones maintained a surprisingly consistent pace, continuously putting out albums but refusing to expand their sound too far beyond the template they established on their self-titled debut. Instead of taking over the airwaves, they became a cult band, but always seemed too big for such a diminutive label. Their desperate hopes for mainstream popularity, which showed through in their professionalism and dogged work ethic, were dashed when the Sex Pistols made the new style a four-letter word. Unfortunately, the movement the Ramones helped to jumpstart quickly got away from them, turning their practiced naivete into impractical nihilism.
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