First ever welcome spam
It’s the last thing I would have ever expected to be true, but I actually got something good in my spam folder today: no doubt thanks to my having mentioned mlife’s desire to have their customers pile in the back seat and generate steam heat, someone put me on their Ramones spam list, and let me know that King Biscuit (of Flower Hour fame) is releasing a 27 song CD: The Ramones – Live NYC 1978, recorded at the Palladium in New York a week after the London concert that produced It’s Alive. I’ll have to figure some way to get some moral distance from the spammer, which certainly means not buying from King Biscuit directly, since their affiliate program’s partly at fault, but I’ll have to have it anyway, somehow.
It’s hard to say what the Ramones would sound like to someone coming to them with fresh ears now, but back then, the year that brought us It’s Alive and the US release of The Clash also brought us (courtesy of VH1’s potential nightmare-to-be, I Love The 70s, because my memory for tripe isn’t that great) the Bee Gees, Peaches and Herb (oh, God, I can hear it now, make it stop), Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy? (no, and I’ve hated that song for twenty four years now, you bastard), or, for “hard” rock, such delights as Foreigner’s Head Games, and with that I can’t even go on any more. When we scratch our long white beards and talk about punk being like a breath of fresh air, we don’t mean like stepping outside the office for a breath, we mean like being trapped in an airtight basement with three hundred rotting skunk carcasses, and then having someone slap a mask hooked to a tank of pure oxygen on your face. Come August 19th, I’ll be sucking down another lungful.
And before you remind me about things like Springsteen’s Darkness, or Zepplin, or any of the other things that I still love that happen to have been released in the late 70s, yeah, I know, but they weren’t so much of the 70s as just in the 70s.
Looks like you can get it through the official Ramones site instead. You’ll have to pay an extra 2 cents though.
Boy, that’s one of the best metaphors I’ve ever seen for describing what it was like when punk first hit.
Before punk, I hated rock of the mid 70s so much that I was listening to country music, outlaws like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, and older stuff like George Jones, Lefty Frizell and Hank Williams. Punk rescued rock from a fate worse than death, and made the music listenable again.
they weren’t so much of the 70s as just in the 70s
What the heck does this mean? Springsteen’s first record came out in 1973 and was very, very different from the music he was making with Steel Mill in 1969/70.
There’s stuff I still like and listen to (Panama Red is the first thing that comes to mind) that sounds like the 70s, and there’s stuff like Springsteen’s, that doesn’t. Play Darkness or Born To Run (I’m not so sure about Asbury Park) for a hypothetical someone who’s never heard them, and they aren’t going to say ”oh, that must be from the 70s”.
So 70s = druggy country rock, disco, punk, and corpo. rock? LMAO!!!
Jeez, Zep and Springsteen were the sort of lame 70s crap that drove me to alternatives like The Ramones. They are both about as ’70s as you can get, right up there with REO Speedwagon, Boston, and Eddie Money. Most of us grew up and shed the pseudomystical noodling of Zep and the faux-blue collar facism of Springsteen for something less pretentious.