Delving into the most depressing song in the Ramones back catalogue
The timeless appeal of the Ramones was best summed up by the British punk poet, John Cooper Clarke, who wrote in the fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, the following pithy piece of punk proclaiming prose: “In late 1975, I read an article on the Ramones, a four-man gang from Queens. Much was made of their snotty asocial stage manner and the speed and brevity of their songs. […] I bought the LP. The Ramones were and are an enthusiasm of mine. They understood that it was better to have clever lyrics about moronic subjects than the other way round.”
Their irreverence, however, had a point. They were a band in the gutter of a crumbling New York, and they were determined to fiddle while their Rome burned. Thus, the band would eventually offer up some sweet salvation. However, one song in the snarling back catalogue touches upon the darkness before the dawn in a most depressing fashion once yet get beyond the leather-clad swagger and see the vulnerability that it masked.
Everything about their debut record is now iconic even if it only shifted around 5,000 copies in its first year of release; the cover image, taken by punk’s foremost photographer Roberta Bayley for only $125; the trashy sound recorded in seven days on a meagre budget of $6,400; even the snarling quickfire songwriting. Everything about the record seems quintessentially punk too.
However, hidden amongst this punk rock paradigm, shrouded in poppy melody and upbeat stylings, is surely one of the saddest songs in popular music history, at least from a backstory point of view. We’re talking about the quartet’s crushing song ’53rd and 3rd’. There aren’t many sadder musical stories this side of Oedipus.
When the lyrics of ’53rd and 3rd’ are dissected, it quickly becomes clear that the song is a tragic dirge dressed in rather more glitzy clothing. The lyrics that reveal this tragedy, and provide a spotlight on Dee Dee’s mishaps are snarled out in trademark style: “Fifty-third and third standing on the street /Fifty-third and third I’m tryin’ to turn a trick / Fifty-third and third you’re the one they never pick / Fifty-third and third don’t it make you feel sick?”
The song details an unfortunate chapter in Dee Dee’s life when he worked as a sex worker and was always picked last on his particular corner. It is a tragic detail that summons sad connotations of being picked last for football only far, far, worse. This was sharpened further still when you consider that the reason, he turned towards sex work was to fund a burgeoning heroin addiction.
The New York streets were dangerous enough for anybody at the time let alone someone trying to sell themselves. Between 1969 to 1974 the city lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs. Subsequently, a million homes depended on welfare, rapes and burglaries tripled, drugs ran rampant, and murders hit a high of 1690 a year.
However, a lot of art comes from chaos and defiance—New York was a creative cocktail of both. In a strange way, despite being amongst it, and continually threatened with violence on a daily basis, Dee Dee somehow strangely defined the catharsis of art and the chances that such salvation presents.
As music biographer, Legs McNeil once wrote, “Dee Dee was the archetypical fuck-up whose life was a living disaster. He was a male prostitute, a would-be mugger, a heroin user and dealer, [and] an accomplice to armed robbery.” In the ever-present duality of music, he also happened to be a tremendous street-poet like some crazed kaleidoscopic version of Baudelaire, a brilliant bassist and a prototypical rock mutant personified.
All of these characteristics, including the divisive duality, are detectable in ’53rd and 3rd’ a song about just that, fuck-ups and depravity and music’s exultant power to drag someone out of that mire both literally and spiritually, even if it is touched by a tortured past.
