The bands Joey Ramone thought completely sold out: “It’s just like a big business”
The Ramones were never ones to hold back. As pioneers of punk – or at least the first to ignite the scene in New York – they embodied a movement that was never known for keeping quiet, especially when it came to criticism.
Throughout their career, the Ramones forever prided themselves on their authenticity. It went two ways.
It meant that if the band liked you, if you got on their good side and appeared to them as nice, cool, talented musicians or people, you were in. They’d back you hard and back you loyally, just as they did with Iggy Pop, who shared the same manager and the same wild behaviour.
But if you got on their wrong side, it was ugly. Sex Pistols saw that as the Ramones thought the British band had “robbed” them. Johnny Ramone was especially pissed, marching into the studio with a copy of the band’s debut and reportedly slamming it onto the desk and saying, “These guys ripped us off and I want to sound better than this”.
It made them tough to work with at points too, as there are rumours that the band’s attitude while making a record with Phil Spector, and hating every second of his suffocating production style, led to Spector holding Dee Dee Ramone at gunpoint simply to get him to shut up and play a riff.
So if you’re looking for an honest opinion coming from someone utterly unafraid of whatever comeback it might have reaped, the Ramones were always a good place to start.
That’s especially the case if the question had anything to do with the DIY ethics and energy of punk, and the bands they believed were sellouts. Of their own era, they tossed the likes of Billy Idol and Sex Pistols into that pile.
But even a few decades on, as punk morphed into grunge in the 1990s, Joey Ramone was still dishing out the critique as he declared, “There’s a whole slew of bands that have just really bought into the system, the whole business of it, the formula.”
“Like Weezer and Sponge and all these bands that sound like Pearl Jam,” he continued, tossing those two under the bus. Pearl Jam got a minor pass as the originators, but it was clear that while sometimes Weezer and Sponge were granted the ‘punk’ label, mostly because they existed around more punk-adjacent bands, Ramone never once thought they deserved it as they didn’t abide by the true nature of the sound.
Instead, to him, these were cookie-cutter sellouts who made music for the mainstream to get the sales in. While the Ramones had rebelled hard against any attempt to commercialise, leading them directly into that violent altercation with Spector, Joey Ramone looked to these newer bands and definitely didn’t see the same backbone.
But in general, he seemed to think that about the entire 1990s. “I see music today as more of a business than ever before,” he said, begrudging where the music world had gone. “When I was a kid growing up in the ‘60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it’s just like a big business.”
