Johnny Ramone never understood the grunge movement: “In New York, it wasn’t like that”
The music industry has always had a competitive edge. Ideally, the goal is to make music that appeals to people and have some fun along the way, but there’s always a need to look over your shoulder to ensure no one else is doing your job better. Johnny Ramone understood this dog-eat-dog mentality better than most, but he was thrown for a loop when he first encountered the rise of grunge acts.
Compared to the punk movement that had begun in New York two decades previously, the Seattle scene felt more like a group of friends putting shows on only for themselves. Despite becoming some of the biggest musicians in the world, every band seemed to treat different outfits like former college friends rather than anything concrete.
Just look at the way that Pearl Jam formed. The group already had the former members of Mother Love Bone, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, who had been in the supergroup Green River with Mark Arm of Mudhoney. Once they decided to form a new band following Wood’s untimely death, Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron of Soundgarden didn’t think twice about helping them out when making the tribute record Temple of the Dog.
That bled over into when Foo Fighters started out as well. There was still that punk rock sensibility of “anything goes,” so when Dave Grohl’s little band opened for Mike Watt, it wasn’t out of the question for Grohl to join Watt onstage along with Eddie Vedder, who was also opening in the group Hovercraft.
When discussing that mindset with Ramone, Cornell remembered the guitar legend being confused as to why they would help each other, recalling in Pearl Jam’s Twenty, “He said, ‘Yeah, in New York it wasn’t like that. We would mess each other up. At every chance that you could, you would mess the other band up.’ The way that I’ve always seen it is that you learn from each other, and you’re inspired by each other.”
It’s not hard to hear that cross-influence in the Seattle scene, either. For all the times that Soundgarden played in lower tunings or played in odd time signatures on their records, you can hear the same thing bleeding into later Pearl Jam records as well, like the wonky timing in ‘Low Light’ or the guttural growl in ‘You Are’.
Then again, Ramone may not have understood it because of how much Ramones got the short end of the stick. Compared to every other punk outfit that sold millions of records, the punk legends seemed to be given the worst strokes of luck any band had ever been given, including the hellish recording sessions for End of the Century and never getting many of their albums to sell like the rest of the punk icons they grew up with.
It also didn’t help that once they decided to call it a day, they had to see every other pop-punk act that came after them, like Green Day and Blink-182, rake in millions by more or less riding their coattails. Although it’s understandable why Ramone would be upset by acts like grunge that became famous by being themselves, he seemed to at least be proud of the ground he covered as one of the progenitors of punk rock.
