The one band that blew Joey Ramone’s mind: “The best thing I’d ever seen”
Joey Ramone is the archetypal figure of New York punk. With his long, bedraggled hair, leather jacket and dark sunglasses, he helped to formulate the uniform of the CBGB punk scene. Although the sticky floors of CBGB are often deemed the ground zero for punk and alternative rock, the lineage of the genre reaches much farther back.
The Ramones were never a band to shy away from paying homage to their influences, often performing covers of 1960s classics such as The Trashmen’s ‘Surfin’ Bird’ or The Ronettes’ ‘Baby I Love You’. In direct opposition to the ‘rip it up and start again’ attitude that permeated through much of the early punk scene, The Ramones were not afraid to go against the grain by showing appreciation for the music that made them.
One of the groups that was invaluable to the development of punk rock was The Who. Icons of the swinging sixties, the London mod-rockers pioneered a sense of raucous youth rebellion that would later characterise the punk movement. Gaining a reputation for their wild onstage antics, usually culminating in the destruction of their instruments and equipment, with drummer Keith Moon regularly blowing up his own drum kit, the group were unlike anything that audiences had seen before.
According to Joey Ramone, the group were particularly influential to him as a youth. Asked to pick six Desert Island albums in a 1990 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the punk frontman revealed his deep appreciation for Townshend’s group. “When I was 16, I saw The Who,” Joey recalls, “It was the first time they played America. It was a Murray the K show at the RKO theatre on 59th street [in New York City] — like 30 bands and The Who and Cream for the first time in America.”
The New York gig occurred a number of years after the first wave of British invasion hit the US. Starting on March 25th, 1967, and set to run for nine nights, the show was headlined by Mitch Ryder, with the likes of Wilson Pickett, Phil Ochs and Simon and Garfunkel, among many others. For Ramone, however, it was the intense sounds of The Who that stuck in his mind, “Cream were great,” the singer said, “but The Who blew my mind. The character and the visuals, Townshend, Keith Moon. It was the best thing I’d ever seen.”
The Who’s debut in New York gave way to a long and successful career for the band in the States, built upon by their iconic Woodstock performance in 1969. Although the group soon moved into a more mature sound, culminating in rock operas and complex concept albums, the spirit of anarchic performance and distorted guitars lived on through the music of The Ramones and their contemporaries.
Selecting The Who’s debut record My Generation as one of the six he would take away with him to a desert island, that 1967 concert clearly stuck in Joey Ramone’s mind. It must take a lot to phase the frontman of one of New York’s most prominent punk outfits, but the wild performance of Moon, Townshend, Daltrey and Entwistle seemingly never left his side.
