The punk band Dave Grohl said were “the epitome of cool”
Nothing about Dave Grohl was supposed to be fashionable when he first joined a band.
The entire underground punk scene was the furthest thing from en vogue when the Sunset Strip was still the dominant force, and even when Nirvana became the biggest band in the world, it was hard to really gauge whether or not they were exactly one of the coolest bands on MTV, and while people like Grohl didn’t care about looking cool, there were some acts that made the whole thing look effortless whenever they performed onstage.
Grohl was more prone to being himself whenever he strapped on a guitar with Foo Fighters, but when looking at the way that someone like David Bowie carried himself, there was no way that he could have been that. Bowie was descended from another planet, but even he was putting on a persona from what the real Davey Jones looked like underneath the layers of makeup every single time he performed.
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of approach, but the flashiness wasn’t what suited punk rock. Every single member of the first wave of punk was about going against the status quo, and while the giants of rock still reigned supreme, it was easier for Sex Pistols and The Clash to take the piss out of that style of rock and roll every now and again. But are we really going to pretend that punk rock started in the UK?
Many people would gladly debate over where the real punk rock began, but even if John Lydon helped pour kerosene on that fire, the Ramones were a step ahead of everyone else. From first looking at the cover of their debut, those four non-brothers had taken everything great about street culture in New York and compacted it into bite-sized rock and roll juggernauts that erupted like machine-gun fire whenever they were played.
Rock and roll had been seen as almost sophisticated for a while, but Grohl felt that the Ramones were everything that someone needed to be cool, saying, “The first Ramones LP – this collection of explosive three-minute power pop songs changed the face of music. What I loved about them was the way they counted off songs by yelling, ‘1,2,3,4’ then pausing for 2 seconds before launching into the track. By pausing after the countdown, they had time to get it together. [And] the way they looked, black leather and sunglasses was the epitome of cool for high school kid not to mention future punk rock drummers.”
Even though the band looked pretty tough in their leather threads and Chuck Taylors, the scrappiness of their music was also half of the charm. Their music made it sound like you could play any of their songs without any problem, and so began the surge in every single kid wanting to make their guitar roar the same way that Johnny Ramone’s did when they played ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ for the first time.
And if I’m being completely honest, a lot of Ramones songs were a lot more realistic compared to what the other side of the pond had been doing. There were a lot of kids who simply couldn’t relate to the political angle of The Clash when they were still figuring themselves out, but it was easy to grasp onto a song like ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ even if you’ve barely reached high school.
So while the Ramones aren’t exactly the hardest band in the world to master the riffs of, their attitude is something that’s borderline impossible to reach. Most people wouldn’t even try to make something that aggressive, but every member was ready to leave everything onstage, even if it meant not making every single tune sound so aggressive.
