Road to Ruin

I have been listening near-obsessively, or anyway pretty much exclusively, to the Ramones lately. Looking at the blog history, I was surprised--I thought this latest Ramones phase had lasted a couple of months, but I was listening to Too Tough to Die back in October, and I know by the time I bought Mondo Bizarro I was listening to nothing but Ramones. I would have guessed this was in April, but the blog tells me it was February. So almost half a year of nothing (voluntarily) but Ramones! Anyway I should have been able to review all the albums by now, but I'm running out of stamina--recently I've been listening to The Kinks, Cheap Trick and Big Star, so the Ramones phase is winding down a bit and that means I may not even listen to them at all for a while--I usually have tunnel vision when it comes to music, I may like a variety of things but I am generally passionately in love with one band, artist, or at least style at a time, and at these times I'm unable to enjoy large doses of much of anything else.

So I will wrap it up (maybe) with a few comments. First, Road to Ruin. This is the hardest album for me to figure out. First of all, there is no question in my mind that this is a five out of five, in terms of stars. Not the slightest doubt, it is a masterpiece. But within that range, when put up against the other three five star Ramones albums, I vacillate about its status. Sometimes I am sure that it is their best album--on paper it would have the best claim to that title apart from the first, which has simplicity, brilliance and epoch-making significance to recommend it. I mean, all of their albums have simplicity and brilliance, of course...the first one has the most simplicity, and also earns a lot of cachet by coming first.





Road to Ruin is their most adventurous album. Some of the basic formulaic songs on it, on the other hand, seem a little less necessary than the earlier material. If this was their first album and the first three didn't exist this wouldn't even occur to me to say. But there is something about the lapidary density of the earlier songs that makes them seem like a necessary component of the universe--if "I Don't Want to Walk Around With You" were somehow zapped out of existence, it seems like a galaxy somewhere would explode, or a mountain somewhere in Sri Lanka would collapse, or something. I'm not sure if "I'm Against It," as great as it is, is indispensable in the exact same way.

In that sense, a lot of Road to Ruin is like ordinary great music--not mundane, I mean, but great music like the great music made by other bands. You actually have to try to remember the words to "I'm Against It" or "Gone Mental." But this is kind of balanced by the fact that a lot of the songs are more interesting on Road to Ruin. And there are acoustic guitars.

In any case I think RTR (I'm tired of switching to italics) is so incredibly fantastic, both moving and fun to listen to in an off-the-charts kind of way, that it's not really a question of quality, it's more of a matter of determining what the really quintessential and classic Ramones period was--the first three albums or the first four? It might seem a needless scholastic question, but hey, it seems interesting to me. I think any Ramones fan knows what I'm talking about and anyone else probably isn't still reading this post anyway (if anyone actually does read this stuff--you motherfuckers don't comment!).

I think that the first three, for all their differences, are kind of a unitary statement of Ramones-ness, whereas this one sort of innovates and messes with the formula a bit. So in that sense, the opening troika lays down the blueprint, and this is the most successful variation on it.

On the other hand, in terms of quality--in terms of how much it kicks ass, to adopt the parlance of our times for a moment--the first four albums are the classic Ramones period, and End of the Century (still brilliant) begins the "everything else" phase.