End of the Century

When I was 18 I stumbled onto It's Alive, then an imported double LP for which I paid about $30--steep for 1987. It's always been my favourite Ramones album, and I've heard people say it's one of the best live albums ever. The performance, recorded in London in 1977, is superb. Even "Now I wanna sniff some glue" just roars (and it's among the worst of the early Ramones songs in my book). This is also the record that shaped my musical tastes--I still have an instinctive love of loud, fast, poppy songs.

So I was carrying a lot of baggage when I went to see End of the Century, the new documentary about the Ramones. But, man, it didn't disapppoint. It's utterly fantastic. (My friend and former band-mate Kelly, who isn't a Ramones fan, agreed that the film was really good and the music sounded great. There's a less biased opinion.)

The film deals with the Ramones' influence on other bands--Clash, Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys--fairly extensively. As the story goes, when the Ramones would tour during the 70s, new bands would spring up in every city they played. Legs McNeil, I think, called them the "punk rock pied pipers."

As much as I enjoyed the movie, it left me feeling oddly deflated in one way. As we were driving home from the theatre, I turned to Kelly and said "why even bother playing guitar?" I'll never catch sadness, alienation and hope on a monster hook--the essence of every song I love from the Beach Boys to Weezer to the Weakerthans--the way they did. And music won't ever see a destructive act of creation as perfect as the one led by the Ramones.

I mean, maybe it will. But I walked out of the theatre thinking "wow... music has been over for 25 years." And that, I think, says a lot about the band and the movie.

(End of the Century will be released on DVD in March. The presskit has a couple of good stories about how hard it was to make the film, especially getting participation from the band members.)