Holy Hell! Me, accidentally landing at CBGB’s to see the Ramones. Forty two years ago! I couldn’t possibly recall that it was on the 27th of October, or that it was even in 1977, all I could recall with precision was that it it was a Friday night, and along with the punk attire, people were already costumed up for Halloween. I had to look it up. But my scant memory was enough to triangulate an exact date. The event itself is permanently scorched in mind, and under the distant layer of scar tissue, the damage to my hearing and synapses will never be forgiven.
I was visiting my brother Robert in NYC, and he suggested we go see a band everyone was talking about. Go see a band at a club everyone was talking about. We arrived early, had a few beers and scuffed around in the saw dust covered floor. What a dive. What a dump. Along with a guy who had costumed himself up as a flasher with a humongous prosthetic penis, there were a handful of pinguid, purple haired, leather clad punks milling about.
I went to take a piss. God did that bathroom reek. One of those, if you consider flushing the commode at all, you do it with your foot kind of places. The walls were covered with so many layers of graffiti that the bathroom had probably lost several cubic feet of space from the paint buildup caking the walls. Along with Tags and Band names, the general sentiment was a tangle of profane and sacred one line screeds, mostly left by the visiting bands, their roadies, and all the shit-for-brains fans. Some of the artwork was quite elaborate and some quite freshly done, I should add. At the time I recall wondering, “Who the hell thinks to pack four or five spray paint cans for an outing to a club…?” This was well before graffiti went mainstream, before it leaked beyond the borders of NYC.
I had no idea where I was. And even though it was three years past their debut, I had no idea who the fuck the Ramones were. I knew that Punk had burst on the scene a few years earlier- I had come across it with The Tube’s White Punks on Dope in Boston when they opened for Patti Smith... A song dubbed White Dopes on Punk by some wags less than impressed by the new generia. I was however, a fan of Patti Smith, but I had not yet glommed her punk roots… and I still believe it a quirk of fashion that Patti- a master a cappella singer- was later dubbed the Godmother of Punk (but that’s pop culture for you).
My brother, Robert, and I had a few more beers, lost time in distracted conversation mostly about Jasper Johns, Yvonne Rainer and how the Whitney Museum sucked and so on… I took another piss, and came back intending to tell my brother that I knew Jean Luc Godard was a bit of a dolt, but for some reason I couldn’t resist his half baked humor. I mean at least he knew he was stupid and really had no good ideas, yet there he was making films. Hey, I had no ideas, and knew I didn’t know anything, why shouldn’t I put that on film like Jean Luc did, but… Suddenly the place was packed. My brother and I had installed ourselves by the stage (stage right, our backs to the wall, right in front of the left channel’s stack of loudspeakers). Before we knew it we were stuck, the crowd was so think there was no way to mount a sensible retreat…
Abruptly four unwashed lack-wanks took the stage with the attitude that left no doubt they were really pissed off. It didn’t take long to realize what they were pissed off about was that they didn’t have anything to be pissed off about. I mean by this point in time they’re quite successful, flush with cash, and doing over 100 concerts a year. I wrote them off as posers, pissed posers, with piss poor taste. But holy shit, these guys were really angry, and they’ve got electric guitars and a stack of amplifiers and they’re about to show the ceiling, the floor, the four walls and everything in between what it means to go full tilt throttle with a million watts…
“One, two, three, four…” Mother of God, every song began with the same insipid count in, with the tempo ever accelerating from there. They were real dicks, not doubt about. And my brother and I were standing way too close. I needed a little distance to be able to give them a fair hearing. This was a Friday night, my ears didn’t stop ringing until Monday. I needed a lot of distance to be able to give them a fair hearing. This was back in 1977, it wasn’t until 2008 that I was able to give them a fair hearing. That was the kind of distance I needed- but I also needed to control the volume. Once I could finally listen, I actually found the Ramones interesting, pretty funny, and musical even, if not a bit overwrought. But I finally got it. I even got the volume thing.
First off, it helps to have already heard the album before you go listen to live music at that volume. Some familiarity with the songs helps. I’d learned that from a friend, who, before we went to see The Who at SPAC in 1971, insisted we prime the pump by listening to Who’s Next over and over in the days leading up to the concert. Then you need to get, not just high, but so fucked up that you can barely stand. That’s why it is necessary for the fans to be so tightly packed in, this is so you can’t fall down. Then, as you stand there twitching zomboid to the music, under the out rushing, synapse destroying force of air, the mass of bodies– the audience is actually levitated by the sheer volume of sound…
The punk and grunge obsessed nanny, Nina Brown knows this first hand… Read about her in Dressing Stone
“The parents were not amused while their children whirr…” -Scott Feero
Fantastic post! This makes me want to listen to the Ramones, because sadly I never have before.