I showed the movie Rock & Roll High School to my daughters for the first time just last week, so the May issue of MOJO magazine couldn’t be more timely in our household. The cover shows Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky from the exact era when the R&RHS was made. In one of the three feature articles inside the mag, David Fricke hones in on 1979, the year when Rock & Roll was released, the Phil Spector-produced album End of the Century was recorded, and the Ramones made their most valiant stab at mainstream success.
As this month’s free MOJO CD compilation suggests, The Ramones’ influences were more commercial than they were avant-garde or revolutionary. The disc includes sublime hits by Bobby Freeman, The Shangri-Las, T. Rex and The Trashmen, and omits even more popular acts which the band frequently cited as inspirations, such as Slade, Alice Cooper and 1910 Fruitgum Company.
The Ramones of course were not fated to be a chart-topping band. They became what Artaud was to theater or Nathanael West to 20th century literature—artists who perhaps came off as more confrontational than intended, showing audiences a future they realized they should be bracing themselves for. In any case, despite concerted efforts from producers, managers, promoters and audiences, the leap to mainstream consciousness (for better or worse) eluded the Ramones.
I saw the Boston premiere of Rock & Roll High School, which The Ramones were there to introduce, had seen them play a couple of times before that, and went on to see them perform several dozen more times. I may have been the first on my suburban Massachusetts block to know who they were, but I knew I was an embarrassingly late-comer to the party even then.
What I would have given to be Tom Hearn. A ‘70s suburbanite like me, albeit in Connecticut and a couple years older, Tom happened to go to high school with the guys who later founded Punk Magazine, and had pretty prescient musical tastes himself. Revered as the leader of the rascally roots-rock Big Fat Combo, Tom Hearn is also a fine photographer who, especially in the late ‘70s, often found himself in the right place at the right time to shoot iconic photos of some punk and new wave legends back when they were just bands standing on street corners outside small clubs. The Ramones loom large in Tom’s photographic portfolio.
An exhibit of headbanging Hearn images, The Flowering of Punk Rock, will be held April 14 through May 27 at Fairfield University’s Thomas Walsh Art Gallery. There’s an opening reception Saturday the 16th from 6:30-7:30 p.m. with Tom’s old school chum Legs McNeil reading from his oral history of the punk movement Please Kill Me, plus music from Billy Hough.