If punk is dead, at least now it’s got a worthy mausoleum.
The Queens Museum’s latest exhibition, “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk,” is ostensibly about the prodigal sons of New York’s punk-rock scene. And it’s a mesmerizing tribute to one of America’s most important musical contributions to the 20th century.
But it also serves as a tribute of sorts to the city, and especially the neighborhood, that incubated the Ramones, and to the sheer amount of artistic creativity coming from New York City’s countercultures of the 1970s.
Brooklynites like to point to their borough as the latest hub of a bohemian creative class. But the Ramones’ digs beat them to it — and did it better. The Bowery and Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s were home to a cohesive but comprehensive artistic movement featuring Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and Patti Smith.
It was the Ramones, though, who best personified the era.
Despite their Manhattanite lives, Queens is an appropriate place for this tribute. They hailed from Forest Hills, and — according to a personal note from Joey Ramone on display at the museum — “kids who grew up there either became musicians, degenerates or dentists. The Ramones are a little of each, their sound is not unlike a fast drill on a rear molar.”
In the words of the man behind the exhibit, Marc H. Miller, “people were scared of them.” And if you don’t think the Ramones tried to scare you, consider the fact that the group’s first pieces of merchandise were baseball bats and letter openers that looked like switchblades. The group also made a self-conscious effort to never smile for photographs, preferring a scowl or straight-up frown that today has been inherited by angst-ridden teenagers.
Yet if you never actually saw the Ramones, you’d only hear sugary three-chord melodies on mostly unserious topics. Their first single, “Blitzkrieg Bop,” is virtually uninterpretable and is instead two minutes of pure energy with Joey Ramone yelling “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!” — where exactly we’re going isn’t important.
As overproduced disco and boring hard rock took over the radio waves, the Ramones, and punk rock generally, offered an alternative that was not only fun, but revolutionary. Listening to the music itself constituted an act of rebellion of sorts.
The Ramones’ stage presence and trendsetting style were just as important as their music, if not more so. With the help of New York-based artist Arturo Vega, the Ramones used cartoonish pop art on various pieces of merchandise, their most famous being the parody of the Presidential Seal of the United States that was adopted as their de facto logo.
The influence on pop art didn’t just stop with the Ramones’ merchandise, however. According to Miller, the Ramones also helped bring graphic T-shirts to the mainstream. You know how bearded hipsters proudly don ironic Jiffy-Lube T-shirts that they picked up from the local Salvation Army? They can thank the Ramones.
In fact, Miller muses that the Ramones were one of the first bands to wear sneakers on stage, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to argue that their style is one of the origins of the contemporary sneaker culture found in the hip-hop community.
As the Ramones entered the mainstream, their crowds got bigger and practically every rock band in the ’70s and ’80s tried to emulate them. Musicians still do. Even I was donning the same brand of leather jacket — Schott — the day I visited the museum that the Ramones made famous. Their style is timeless, with even high-end designers like Rick Owens naming shoes, inspired by the group’s iconic black-and-white sneakers that cost upwards of $800 after the Ramones.
The Ramones and the Bowery music scene of the 1970s were not only uniquely American phenomena, but distinctly New York phenomena that displayed a fusion of fashion, art, fame, writing — and great music. It was a melting pot of creators who always welcomed more ideas, both transgressive and mainstream. One minute you could find a group of men dressed in drag singing rockabilly at the CBGB, a la the New York Dolls, and the next you could find a band with a lead singer wailing about a killing spree, as the Misfits did.
This is the milieu that produced the Ramones. And you could find it only in New York.