#Ramones documentary movie#

Those already familiar with many of these anecdotes - perhaps from Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's 1997 Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk - won't learn much.

#Ramones documentary movie#

The movie will be a revelation for some viewers, but that's probably a small group: punk fans who know the music, but not Fields' role in it. He remains so in Danny Says, a candid yet unrevealing documentary named for a song the Ramones wrote about Fields. Whether boosting or buffeting the careers of the Beatles, the Doors and the Stooges, Danny Fields was the man behind the curtain. After all, the Ramones were never about success: they were about survival.įollow Far Out Magazine across our social channels, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.Pristine Condition and Danny Fields in the documentary Danny Says. The Ramones now had to move on to their next era, even if major stardom eluded them. At the same time, the band couldn’t really play at CBGB anymore: new, more intense bands like the Bad Brains and Reagan Youth invaded the space. Blondie and Talking Heads jumped ship, Television and The Heartbreakers had broken up (as Johnny predicted), but the Ramones were one of the few bands to continue on. Ultimately, when the original wave of punk rock burned out, the Ramones were one of the rare bands to stick by the genre. You know, we were very stand-offish and very snobby, so we irritated the hell out of everyone.” “With the Mumps, Mink DeVille, and the Marbles, all these jerk off bands thought they were big stars and they weren’t. It was getting to be a nightmare,” Dee Dee recalls. But things got very territorial very quickly. Joey offered that there was “a decent kind of camaraderie to some degree,” explaining that the venue’s bands were often the majority crowd for the other groups and that they would all hang out outside of the club’s walls after the shows. This is what I’ve been waiting for.’ And I thought, ‘This guy’s nuts.’ First fan.” “The first person that came up to us was Alan Vega of Suicide,” remembers Johnny. But Johnny offered a different assessment, rounding up the rest of the acts with a succinct analysis: “Talking Heads were doing something completely different Television I didn’t see as no competition The Heartbreakers were all a bunch of junkies, so I knew their careers were going to be short.”Īlan Vega of Suicide was at the first Ramones gig at CBGBs, and he approached Johnny afterwards to offer his opinion. Tom Verlaine playing the Venus de Milo song, you know, it was great”. That was CBGB’s to me: some lonely night with ten people there and Television playing. Dee Dee was a major fan, claiming: “I loved Television. Joey concedes that the Ramones originally played at CBGB’s because they heard Television played there. First and foremost is Television, one of the original CBGB bands: one of the best parts of the documentary comes from the different assessments of Television. Some of those great lines come when the members size up their contemporaries in the New York punk scene, specifically some of the other bands that also played at the legendary Bowery club CBGBs. The viewer also gets plenty of great quotes, whether they come from the surprisingly erudite and insightful Dee Dee, the genial and good-natured Joey, the calm and collected Tommy, or terse and direct Johnny. With all the layers of sappy exaggeration stripped away, what’s left is a raw and uncut look at a band that almost single-handedly shaped an entire genre’s sound, look, and ethos. When Dee Dee, who is generally the nicest in relation to Tommy’s influence within the group, states that Tommy was simply “in the right place at the right time”, you can feel just how unsentimental and fucked up the group’s dynamics were.īut the documentary is nonetheless a fascinating and necessary document for any punk rock true believer, music nerd, or fan of true life drama. When asked if Tommy, the band’s founder, foundational member, producer, and songwriter, was important to the sound and style of the group, they both dismiss the notion and his contributions to the band.

However, perhaps the harshest reality comes from both Johnny and Dee Dee. The Ramones song that was a parody of a Beatles hit