Beat on the Band

EVERYONE WHO NEEDS to will discover the Ramones eventually. And nearly everyone who does has a story about the first time they heard them.

Things usually took a while to work their way to the Midwest, but I was lucky enough to babysit a neighbor kid whose uncle was a freak. It was 1976 when he popped in a cassette of Ramones, and I must confess, my life wasn't changed at that moment. I mostly thought they were funny. But I also recognized that they were doing something very different from the crap I was hearing (and hating) on the radio. I was young at the time, though, and their importance wouldn't become clear for another three or four years. After that, I picked up every album as soon as it was released, and caught their live show whenever I could.

In the mid 80s, sometime between Too Tough to Die and Animal Boy, a friend of mine said, "Y'know, if the Ramones had died in a plane crash after their fourth album, they'd be gods now."

There was more than a little truth in that, despite the fact that Animal Boy went on to become one of my favorite Ramones albums. Fact was, they weren't gods. They were there first, they'd influenced thousands, but 10 years after releasing that first album, they'd become old men edging dangerously close to self-parody. They'd become the cartoon characters on the cover of Road to Ruin. They were a classic- rock act-worse, a classic-rock act who never sold that many records.

In a way, that's at least part of the message at the heart of Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields' new documentary, End of the Century, which opens August 20 at the Angelika.

Over the past 30 years, the Ramones have become perhaps one of the best-documented American bands in recent memory. Their story has been told in countless magazine articles, a double-handful of books and at least two previous documentaries (1997's We're Outta Here! and last year's Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?). For that, I'm not sure if there's really anything new End of the Century can offer, except to follow the band through their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the unveiling of Joey Ramone Place, and the news of Dee Dee's overdose.

Combining archive footage and several new interviews, the documentary lays out the story neat and clean, from their days as troublemaking Stooges fans in Forest Hills, through the CBGB days, their success in England and South America (and lack of success in the U.S.), to their eventual demise after years of near-constant touring. And the final picture is not a pretty one.

The Ramones clearly knew before long that they were on to something. By stripping 60s pop down to three chords, playing them really fast and adding some twisted lyrics, they had, perhaps unwittingly, created something completely new. There was no denying they were great. But for everything-getting Danny Fields to manage them, signing with Sire records, fostering a deep sense of awe and respect in their contemporaries, having an album produced by Joey's hero Phil Spector, playing at least one stadium gig before a crowd of 30,000-they just never seemed to have that much fun doing it, and never got along with each other.

The documentary focuses on those personal frictions, and nobody-with the possible exception of Tommy, the first drummer-comes out looking too good.

Johnny comes off as a bitter, humorless, ultraconservative control freak who saw the band as a business and, luckily, had good money sense. Joey was a front man unlike any other, but he was also an introverted obsessive compulsive who, once he started speaking his mind, turned out to be kind of a jerk. Dee Dee was a hopeless junkie, a little unbalanced, a perpetual adolescent who wanted to play the roles of both rock star and tough guy-but for it all, wrote some incredible songs. Again, only Tommy (and Marky after him) come off as being close to stable and sane, which is something you rarely expect from drummers.

This is perfectly encapsulated in the footage of the acceptance speeches at the 2002 Hall of Fame induction. Johnny ends by saying "God bless President Bush and God bless America"; Dee Dee thanks himself; Tommy, looking like their grandfather, talks about how proud Joey would've been to be receiving such an award.

While the other musicians interviewed here (Joe Strummer, Blondie, members of the Chili Peppers and Rancid) wax poetic about the impact the Ramones music had on them, on what an explosive revelation it was to see them for the first time, the other civilian interviewees-Joey's mom and brother, Legs McNeil, Danny Fields, Sire Records president Seymour Stein, other friends and hangers-on-concentrate on how frustrating it was to work with them. And beyond that, how frustrating it was to release singles and albums they knew were amazing, only to have them ignored. Coming home after playing to a huge, enthusiastic response in London, Fields relates, they still couldn't get gigs in New Haven or Philadelphia. At the same time, they had to watch old CBGB comrades like Blondie achieving huge commercial success.

But it's an old story, I guess.

As far as Ramones-specific stories go, End of the Century touches on a number of the myths surrounding the band, but the truth usually remains pretty foggy. Phil Spector did indeed make Johnny play one chord over 50 times during their recording session, but nobody says anything about him holding the band at gunpoint. "The KKK Took My Baby Away" is about Johnny stealing (and later marrying) Joey's girlfriend. Whether "53rd and 3rd" is a true story or not is something nobody's willing to talk about. (The video clip from Dee Dee's brief, ill-conceived stab at rap stardom was probably humiliation enough.)

There are other things that, for one reason or another, never come up. Johnny's bout with cancer is never mentioned, nor is the fact that they all left the band very wealthy men. Their involvement in Rock n' Roll High School is only barely mentioned, which seems odd, given that it was as close as they came (apart from all the car commercials they're in now) to reaching a mainstream audience. And the final years of the band, those last five or six albums, are all but ignored. They weren't great albums, granted, but that might be worth mentioning, too.

Mostly the Ramones just snipe at each other, admitting (like an elderly married couple) that they only stayed together all those years for the sake of the band, and because they didn't really know how to do anything else. Understandable, but still kind of sad. Especially with band members dying off one after another that way.

As far as the film itself is concerned, Fields and Gramaglia do an admirable, if not always remarkable, job in what was clearly a labor of love.

The sound and video quality can be scattershot, which normally would be easy to attribute to the fact that it's a blend of footage shot over a roughly 30-year period. The weird thing is, though, that the older footage here tends to be of a much higher quality than the most recent interviews.

All in all, really, it's just another documentary about a slowly imploding rock and roll band. It's simple, it's basic, it's straightforward, it tells the story it sets out to tell. There's nothing fancy-no dramatic voiceovers, no artsy camera angles. I guess, you could say it's a lot like the Ramones music that way.

Watching it, I found myself asking who, apart from hardcore fans, End of the Century would appeal to. It's a tough question. Shortcomings aside, I enjoyed it considerably, myself. But I love the Ramones. I don't think it'll create any converts, though it just might help explain, to a certain degree, why the music created by these four scruffy, leather-jacketed ruffians from Queens meant so much at the time. o