| November 22nd, 2004 06:17 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Ramones' film captures strife beneath the leather and bass
End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
� Cast: The Ramones, Arturo Vega, Danny Fields, Legs McNeil, Joe Strummer, Mickey Leigh, Eddie Vedder, Rodney Bingenheimer.
� Location: Key Cinemas.
� Running time: 108 minutes.
� Rating: No MPAA rating.
By Stephen Holden
New York Times
To lead the rock 'n' roll life may be to drink deeply from the fountain of youth, but the rigors and temptations of that life often point to an early death. Take the Ramones, the seminal punk rock band whose history is traced in exhaustive detail in Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields' absorbing documentary, "End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones."
The band's geeky, rubber-lipped lead singer, Joey Ramone, aka Jeffrey Hyman, and its skinny, heavily tattooed bassist, Dee Dee Ramone, aka Douglas Colvin, died a year apart. Joey died of lymphatic cancer at 49 in 2001 and Dee Dee of a heroin overdose at 50 in 2002. In between those deaths, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the ceremony, Dee Dee cheekily thanked himself and nobody else.
As "End of the Century" reveals even more starkly than the recent Metallica documentary, "Some Kind of Monster," harmony among band members becomes harder to sustain as the years gather, youthful enthusiasm wanes, and personalities define themselves. The Ramones' defiant, often funny bubblegum punk and the group's uniform image of leather-clad high school hoods and its adoption of a common last name, Ramone, camouflaged its members' serious personality disorders and conflicts.
The movie traces the Ramones' history back to Forest Hills, Queens, where the group formed in 1974, united by a common love of Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls. In those days, the band's loud, no-frills, machine-gun style bucked the trend for instrumental virtuosity and musical ornamentation.
It was at the seedy East Village bar CBGB that the band gained a foothold after a shaky start. When Danny Fields, a rock publicist who had worked with the Doors, Iggy and the Stooges, and MC5, offered to manage the Ramones, they accepted on condition that he pay for a new drum set, and the band was quickly signed to Sire Records.
Throughout their career, the Ramones endured the frustration of being more admired overseas than at home. After galvanizing the English punk rock scene in the summer of 1976, the band returned to the United States to find itself still begging for gigs and airplay. It seemed a cruel joke of fate when the Sex Pistols, the Clash and other British bands reaped the publicity and much of the credit for creating a style that the Ramones, as much as anyone, had pioneered.
The movie delves deeply into the band's internal strife. Its practical, business-minded drummer and producer, Tommy Ramone (Tom Erdelyi), and its conservative guitarist, Johnny Ramone (John Cummings), were the diametrical opposites of the bohemian, left-wing, drug-taking Dee Dee, the band member truest to the Ramones' punk image.
In 1980, still hopeful for a commercial breakout, the band recorded its album "End of the Century" in Los Angeles with the legendary producer Phil Spector. During the grueling sessions, Spector wielded a gun and kept the band imprisoned in his home while he worked with an obsessive meticulousness. The album's failure was the final blow to the group's dreams of superstardom. Later, a permanent rift developed when Joey's girlfriend left him for Johnny, and the two continued to perform together but never spoke.
Even after Dee Dee and the group's second drummer, Marky Ramone (Marc Bell), left the band, the Ramones soldiered on with replacements for eight more years. Hopes that the nascent grunge movement might give the band a second wind never materialized.
But the music has lasted. As Fields points out, behind the band's accelerated, stripped-down punk, the creators of "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," "Blitzkrieg Bop," "I Wanna Be Sedated" and dozens of other minimalist blasts were gifted songwriters. The hyperbolic claim of the punk-rock historian Legs McNeil that the Ramones "saved rock 'n' roll" may finally not be far off the mark.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| November 22nd, 2004 10:11 AM |
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| Madafaka |
I have seen this documentary in April in my country. Really nice! |
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