Don't Worry About Me

Joey Ramone's 2002 solo album of that name, which I finally caught up to a few days ago, is way better than I expected it to be. I suppose I didn't expect as much based on the things I've read about it, on the internet and elsewhere, which for the most part were by no means negative but rather sort of lukewarm.

The cover of "What A Wonderful World," the only widely familiar thing from the album (I think it was in a movie or two), is really a beautiful piece of work. So is the second song, "Stop Thinking About It," which is a nearly perfect song in the way that so many of the best Ramones songs are. "Maria Bartiromo" and the title track also stand out, and "Searching for Something" is something remarkable--catchy, beautifully constructed, musically mature and narratively complex--it seems like the kind of thing the Ramones might have done if Johnny let them grow up.

There's nothing really bad on the album, but it will take some more listens for me to decide how high to rank a few of the songs. The cover of "1969", while well-executed, doesn't do much for me, and "Venting" and "I Got Knocked Down" don't seem like particularly strong songwriting efforts after three listens.

Anyway, the new Joey album comes out this month, we'll see if they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel or if his left over recordings have more to offer (at the very least it will include "Waiting for that Railroad," so it has to be obtained). This one I am inclined to give 3.5 stars out of five.

***1/2

UPDATE: after living with this for a little while, I have downgraded it to three stars (still a good rating in my system).

***

The Seventies: Am I Deluded?

Warning: this is an extremely idiosyncratic and self-indulgent post; feel free to tell me I'm delusional or incoherent.

Lately I have been thinking that I grew up during a time of cultural richness that was perhaps unique for generations of American children. Most people my age, I think, are aware of most of the things I'm talking about below, but there's not much comparable that I've seen among younger folk, and to a lesser extent maybe not as much among older folk (the edge over the latter being that in my time high culture and politics were mixed in with popular culture for kids as a matter of course). But this seems absurd, and has never occurred to me before, so maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic.

Scandalous Revelations!

I've been reading the memoir by Joey Ramone's brother Mickey Leigh, entitled I Slept With Joey Ramone. It's a decent book without too many shocking revelations, but there was this titillating tidbit on page 72:

My brother was in agony, desperately trying to hang onto his sanity. He began listening less to the heavier rock & roll and more to soft, introspective music. We had heard that James Taylor's song "Sweet Baby James" was about the time he'd committed himself to a mental institution in Massachusetts for nine months. [Joey] got heavily into the song and that album.

Wow! Somehow this is way more shocking than hearing that Joey was into the Airplane, the Dead, and Quicksilver, which doesn't actually seem all that weird to me. And way more shocking that he was into the whole album.  Think about it: Joey Ramone was into James Taylor.

Robert Caro

I'm not sure when I first came to the conclusion that I had to read the books of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, but there were already three of them when I started (now there are four and soon, one hopes, there will be five). I had read an excerpt or two in the 90s and then there was a bunch of hoopla when 2002's installment, Master of the Senate, was released, and I read an excerpt of that one too. It was all compelling and very readable stuff and Johnson came off as a fascinatingly entertaining character, an impression I already had from reading Arthur Schlesinger's (fawning, even hagiographic) biography of Robert Kennedy. I read about the books one too many times, someone mentioned how much they liked them, and next thing you know I checked them out of the library and started reading them.

Although the three volumes I've read so far comprise, by my quick estimate, 2500 pages, it didn't take very long to read them. The books were far better than I could have ever imagined, even taking into consideration the fact that I must have been pretty sold on the idea of them already to undertake such a reading project. Caro's prose is a bit much at times if you stop and think about it, but he keeps you glued to the page. The New York Times magazine did a piece on him this week and the author does a good job of describing what's a little bit excessive about Caro's writing:

Caro has a bold, grand style — sometimes grandiose, his critics would say. It owes something to old-fashioned historians like Gibbon and Macaulay, even to Homer and Milton, and something to hard-hitting newspaperese. He loves epic catalogs (at the beginning of “The Power Broker” there is a long list of expressways that would not be out of place in the “Iliad” if only the Greeks and Trojans knew how to drive) and long, rolling periodic sentences, sometimes followed by emphatic, one-sentence paragraphs. He is not averse to repeating a theme or an image for dramatic effect.

But I'm not complaining. The one-sentence paragraphs are hilarious, but the books are (all) masterpieces.

I have been recommending these books ever since, whole-heartedly, but I have only ever succeeded in convincing one other person to read them--I guess a multi-volume biography of LBJ is a hard sell. But that person has become as enthusiastic a fan of the books as I am. 

In two weeks the 4th volume comes out. Caro was to have finished the series with this volume (at one point there were only going to be three), but he is now planning on writing one more. They have been coming out at a rate of, on average, one every ten years. Caro is 76 years old. He has apparently made a will stipulating that, if the last volume isn't finished when he dies, nobody is to finish it for him. So now fans of Caro are holding their breath, hoping that he stays healthy. God forbid he gets hit by a train or something. It would be a real tragedy. After all, he hasn't even gotten to LBJ's presidency until this latest volume, which supposedly only goes up to 1964. 

If all goes well, though, the fifth volume will be finished before Caro is. I plan on rereading the first three before I read the fourth. These are some of the greatest books of our time, and also some of the most pleasurable to read. I cannot recommend them highly enough, read them now!

Let Us Pause To Marvel At The Uncanny Genius That Was The Ramones In 1976-77

It's Alive is a remarkable live album; it plays like a greatest hits collection, or, since the Ramones never had a hit, perhaps it's better to say a "best of." There are 28 songs culled from the first three Ramones albums. There is no filler, there are no weird outtakes or interesting experiments, and nothing is included to showcase one or more of the musicians--every minute of the album is a full-bore frontal assault on the hypothalamus. There are no low points. It's a remarkable achievement for a band with only three studio albums--every song is taken from the albums, every one could have been a single, the songs are not embellished yet there is never a moment when one is tempted to think "do I need a live version of this?" As if that's not enough, however, take a look at the remaining songs from the first three Ramones albums, the ones not included on It's Alive:

Beat on the Brat

I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend

I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement

Loudmouth

53rd and 3rd

I Remember You

Carbona Not Glue

Swallow My Pride

What's Your Game

You Should Never Have Opened That Door

Locket Love

I Can't Give You Anything

Ramona 

Why Is It Always This Way?

This could be an exceptional "best of" collection. In fact, every song from the first three Ramones albums could be a "best of" selection. How many bands in rock history could have a "best of" collection taken from their first three albums as good as the above list of songs not on It's Alive? Probably none; maybe not even The Beatles, and if we add the other 28 songs, definitely not the Beatles! That's a powerful argument for why the Ramones are on a very short list of the absolute greatest rock bands of all time. 

The Beatles' genius was more diverse than that of the Ramones; they were more innovative and adaptable after the initial phase of their career. The Ramones' palette was much more limited than a lot of bands, probably than most other bands. But that was a good bit of the point of the Ramones; every song was a manifesto for simplicity and sticking with what works and jettisoning the rest (although the claim repeated ad nauseum that the Ramones were a three-chord band is simply false). And, if anything, that makes the Ramones' achievement even more impressive: they managed to write the greatest 2-minute pop song anyone had ever heard over and over and over, filling whole albums with them (This wouldn't be an easy claim to make about the albums that followed, but "I Wanna Be Sedated," "She's The One," "Do You Remember Rock n Roll Radio?," "Rock n Roll High School," "The KKK Took My Baby Away" and "Psychotherapy" didn't even exist yet when It's Alive was recorded).

Considering that It's Alive was recorded at the end of 1977, and the first Ramones album was released in early 1976, it's positively staggering to consider what the Ramones achieved in less than two years. I doubt any other band, ever, could claim to have produced as many great songs in a comparable period of time (even subtracting the four cover songs, that's still 38 classic original songs). If anyone wishes to contest this claim in the comments below, I'm all ears.

Brain Drain again

This is one of two Ramones studio albums I never previously owned or was at least extensively familiar with. The few times I heard it in the 80s I was not impressed. For one thing, I was turned off by the notion that the Ramones did a song called "Pet Sematary" and didn't really give it a chance. I was always turned off by Stephen King as a youth, probably because all my classmates read him while my typically anguished and alienated teenage existence was spent reading things like Joyce, Faulkner and Yeats (if that sounds snobby and pretentious so be it).

But now I like "Pet Sematary," mostly because of Joey's singing. It's definitely lightweight and corny, but for some reason these qualities seem less threatening when considering a 20 year old album than when deciding if "the new Ramones" is worth buying. I do not skip this song.

I love love love "I Believe in Miracles," out of proportion, I am sure, to its actual merits. Again this is mostly due to Joey, I think. The guitars on this album, by the way, are not recorded in a very satisfying way. Anyway this song is the greatest, even if it isn't. Lyrically it's like one of those embarrassing celebrity memoirs where the protagonist exults over their salvation from drugs, only to publicly fall from grace again..."I used to be on an endless run/Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one" writes Dee Dee, 12 years before dying from a heroin overdose. But Joey sings it, not Dee Dee, so it is easy to downplay the autobiographical aspect of it...

Zero Zero UFO is perplexing, not bad but not great, I generally don't skip it. "Don't Bust My Chops" isn't terrible but I often skip it. Unlike "I Believe in Miracles," it's probably better than the enjoyment I get out of it (almost none) would indicate.

"Punishment Fits the Crime" is a fascinating artifact. It is sung by Dee Dee but is nothing like any of his other efforts. It might be one of the worst songs ever recorded, I'm not really sure, but it's still kind of engaging and I don't always skip it. I don't know what it means, and the closest genre I can ascribe to it is probably glam metal...Here's the chorus: "Let the punishment fit the crime/The footprint on the sand of time/The philosophy of the poet's rhyme/Make a man humble in his prime." Laughably bad stuff but I almost enjoy it sometimes.

"All Screwed Up" almost hits the target but not quite. I do not generally skip it. There's a kernel here worth keeping but I am not convinced they pull it off. "Palisades Park" is a good idea but for some reason the cover doesn't work, I don't know if it's too fast or what exactly happened. After that is "Pet Sematary," already reviewed above. "Learn To Listen" I skip, there's nothing very enjoyable there, it's kind of a hardcore mess.

"Can't Get You Outta My Mind" is brilliant, maybe even a classic, I like it more and more and I'm no longer convinced the Pleasant Dreams outtake version is better, this one is probably a bit heavier and the Mama's and Papa's harmonies on the first being pared down a bit may not be a bad thing.

"Ignorance is Bliss" is so-so but I don't always skip it. "Come Back Baby" and "Merry Christmas" are both very nice Joey numbers, never to be skipped.

So: five really good ones. I am going to upgrade the stars on this below, because this is a much more engaging album than I thought.