The greatest punk rock band Bono ever saw: “The best”
It’s hard to really think of someone like Bono having anything to do with traditional punk rock.
The whole ethos of U2 was about trying to make some of the best rock and roll songs ever created, and while they did have a spiritual angle to a lot of their music, no one was listening to tunes like ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ thinking they were going to hear one of the greatest punk tunes of all time. But when you look at their reasoning behind making their music, Bono did have a soft spot for any band that was speaking their mind, as his heroes did back in the day.
Before he even discovered that he could sing, Bono was always relating to the kind of singers who had something genuine to say. Bob Dylan was shaking people up every single time he played one of his songs, and even though every member of The Beatles brought something great to the table, no one could have quite imagined that John Lennon would be able to lay himself bare the way he did on Plastic Ono Band. This was someone willing to bleed their art, and Bono was ready to do the same thing.
So when punk came out, the entire genre was like a gift from heaven for the frontman. He was never going to have any fun trying to be a prog rock fan by any stretch, and even if The Edge liked the idea of stealing some licks from bands like Yes, Bono was going to make sure that he was as far away from that genre as possible whenever they made their own songs. His faith was in people like Joe Strummer, but Joey Ramone was practically a musical prophet when he first heard him.
Ramones weren’t meant to be the forebearers of punk rock by any stretch, but when you look at what they put into their tunes, there was no one else that could touch what they could do. The late 1960s already had bands that had suggested what punk rock could be like the MC5, but when Bono heard tunes like ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and ‘Glad to See You Go’ for the first time, he had a better idea of what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Those songs hit like sledgehammers whenever they came on, and Bono felt that no one had done punk rock better than Ramones ever since, saying, “This was the best punk rock band ever, because they actually invented something. There were great bands like the Stooges and the MC5, but I think that they were still blues bands. The Ramones were actually the beginning of something new. They stood for the idea of making your limitations work for you. In film jargon, they would be ‘a pure situation.’”
And you can really feel that purity whenever they play together. Because if you think about it, the band wasn’t exactly a punk rock band if you look at their songs. They were willing to make more than their fair share of switch-ups during their career, and aside from the first three records of punk rock 101, there are more than a few times where they could make a pure pop song like ‘Something to Believe In’ or even dip their toes into heavier territory when making an album like Bop Til You Drop.
It’s not that easy to hear that influence in any of U2’s albums, but it was all in the spirit that the band members had every time they played. They knew that anything was possible if someone like Joey Ramone could be a star, and if they believed in their vision, the massive anthems that they wrote on The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby never seemed too far out of their grasp whenever they entered the studio.
The band might have eventually called Joey a miracle in one of their songs, but it was about something more than spirituality that brought Ramones together. They were a beautiful contradiction in lots of ways, and even if Joey didn’t always get along with his bandmates, there was no one else who could bring that kind of awkward croon to every one of their greatest tunes.
