Like no other band from those halcyon days of nouveau punkdom, the Ramones were essential, much needed spirits. Phantasms who took the stage with a smirk, a shrug of the shoulders, and a perfect mastery of the rhythms of the moment, their rockin’ wraiths somehow always managed to reflect back to appreciative audiences all the growing pangs of changing tastes and attitudes. And it was that cachinnating spirit which made them the rock’n’roll paladins to an adolescent punk vespiary as it slowly moiled its way into the consciousness of the latter 70s.
Along the way, the Ramones tenaciously kept alive one of their most important aspects of the “new” punk sound--with their churning stun-chords firmly locked into the days of psychedelia (the root of all punk music, no matter how it mutates and meanders), they reaffirmed every step of their blitzkrieg boppin’ way that, in spite of any and all labels tagged onto sounds at certain moments in history, it’s always fundamentally nothing more than a permutation of pop music. (Of course, whenever you say something’s pop music, loads of people cringe in disgust; they have no room for such sentimental saccharinity in their dark and gloomy lives--or so they’d like you to believe. So few wanted to recognize that the Ramones were nothing more, and nothing less, than a loud pop band, and no different in essence than, say, Abba, Leif Garrett, or the Beatles.)
With End Of The Century, the band finally decided it was time to get down to brass tacks and actually be the pop band everyone hadn’t mistaken them for previously, especially since the transition had taken place between the hardcore punk gyrations and what the business wanted to call new wave. The land was rife with pop bands bitching about the spoony inevitability of lost and found romance, the inability to get laid and the haze of existential loneliness. It was a time when nova-burn velocity was being replaced with slug-like conceptuality and “new” rock intellectualism. A time when the best left the streets and wafted into the closets of dough-faced collegiate punk plebes who wanted desperately to get their chicken-fingered claws on all the collectibles and punkophrenalia that surrounded all this hoo-hah. A time of irksome exploitation.
And though the Ramones didn’t fare well on End Of The Century, and many were beginning to write them off as desiccated funsters who’d gotten far too serious for their own good, the group, undaunted, took a fleeting glance back at their mistakes and gave forth one of the first pleasant dreams of the 80s.
In an age when there supposedly could be no more masterpieces, Pleasant Dreams is a masterpiece; a pop pogrom that leaves little doubt as to not only the Ramones’ rockin’ resiliency, but also their refreshing understanding of just how punk music should’ve progressed in content, form and general remarkableness. The biggest difference between End Of The Century and Pleasant Dreams is probably the understanding that producer Graham Gouldman brings to these songs. On Century, the Ramones fell innocent victim to the doldrums of Phil Spector’s Hadean production values, well suited for the Crystals or Ronettes but not the Ramones. Let’s face it--suburban surf music has little to do with the inbred funk of the inner city. Gouldman’s production is an exercise in understatement, and reflects the grasp of one of the basic tenets of pop music--i.e., never clutter up that which is important to the lyric, for it is the lead voice and the harmony that creates the textures of pop. And so the vocals are right up front, the rhythms of the guitars are woven in and out at just the proper instances, and the words are understandable short stories exploring the Ramones’ eyeview of the world.
While all the songs here attain a certain individual respectability, the jams are really kicked out on “She’s A Sensation,” a song the likes of which Greg Kihn and Bram Tchaikovsky have been struggling to write since they began popadelicizing, and “7-11,” an ode to all those pert young nubiles who cruise the video games for techni-lust and all its accompanying inebriation.
So next time you’re hangin’ ten at the local video emporium--the latest and greatest teen phenomenon since the malt shop--ogling the scenery, sniffing the bike seats, or just crackin’ your wrists in the fury of Space Invader angst, just think about the Ramones and this album, and think what their next one will be like. Perhaps it’ll be a concept album about suburbia, perhaps a concept album about video games, perhaps it’ll be another excursion into Ramoneamania. Perhaps another Pleasant Dream about rock’n’roll’s future.
Get your own Free Home Page