Why the Ramones felt sorry for the Grateful Dead: “I think they did too much LSD”
Many artists like to ‘live the gimmick’. If their band is based around a certain character, they might play up that character even away from concerts and interviews just to keep up appearances. The Beastie Boys infamously put the kibosh on the “frat boy dickheads” part of their character after their non-stop partying on tour saw them threaten to become those frat boy dickheads in real life. Some bands don’t have a choice in the matter. The Ramones’ gimmick was that they weren’t the brightest band around, and bless their cotton socks, they had been living it their entire life.
To be clear, that is not a reason to judge them harshly. Their simplicity was what made them brilliant. Not to be the kind of patronising Jack White was whenever he called Meg White’s drumming “primal” or “child-like”, but their inability to be anything other than themselves was refreshing and reliable. God knows when they did try to branch out; you got things like Dee Dee Ramone’s hip-hop album. They became the punk rock AC/DC, you knew exactly what you were going to get with anything their logo was stamped on, and it would always kick ass.
Besides, if you do want to judge a Ramone harshly, Johnny Ramone has a lifetime of being a colossal piece of shit to basically everyone to choose from. It’s deeply frustrating for the man behind arguably the best guitar sound in the history of punk rock, but the Ramones giveth and the Ramones taketh away, I guess.
A violent bully with a foul temper and a conservatism that even Jacob Rees-Mogg would describe as “a little cold”, there’s a small but telling look into the man’s temperament in this frankly bizarre interview with Jim Sullivan from 1979.
Since the interview takes place at the height of the disco, Sullivan begins by asking Johnny and Dee Dee about their thoughts on the genre. Johnny responds with typical thoughtfulness and rationality, describing it as “disgusting” before adding: “It’s some kind of Communist plot to make our brains smooth, to take the crevices out of it. Each artist sounds the same. Everything sounds the same. It’s all fabricated. It’s moronic.”
Off to a great start, but the interview reaches a truly baffling crescendo when Sullivan, clearly scrambling for some answers that aren’t monosyllabic, asks the band’s thoughts on the Grateful Dead. Both Johnny and Dee Dee turn their noses up, the latter saying his band “feels sorry for them” and the former sniffing “I think they did too much LSD”. A wild sentiment considering Dee Dee was spending most of his time back then shooting heroin with Sid Vicious.
The cherry on top is Dee Dee ending their thoughts on The Dead by saying, “I like nice, clean-looking rock stars”. That is a member of the Ramones, a band for whom a gas station break during a long tour bus ride was once mistaken for a care in the community project, saying that he likes “nice, clean-looking rock stars.”
If this man isn’t secretly a comedic genius… then I’m sure you see what I mean about living the gimmick. Joey Ramone was a sweetheart, though.
